So, now that I'm holding off on buying my new PC until the Penryn chips come out I've been doing a bit more research. I'm particularly interested in the idea of SSD (Solid State Drives) for the boot drive of the new system. From everything I've seen the performance and sound of SSD drives are much better than of conventional drives. The only downside seems to be the price, but in a couple of months time you should be able to buy a 32GB Mtron Pro 7000 SSD for hopefully about £250-£300. So, I was wondering if anyone here has already jumped on the bandwagon and bought an SSD drive? If so, how much quicker is it in real operation compared to conventional drives?
SSD Hard Drives
according to anandtech those are currently ~1200$ so good luck with that
We'll see about the price, only time will tell. I'd rather find out what they're really like though... 
no idea but anand has an article about real world performance of these in the works
#5
- Dennisjr13
ATM, a SSD beats any HD in random access times so they are better if used as a boot drive for example. A pair of Raptors in RAID 0 however will blow a SSD away in continuous read/write performance.
Maybe in a year or two's time, a SSD would be worth having as a boot disk, but RAID is much more economical at the moment verses the small boot time increase you would receive with a SSD.
Maybe in a year or two's time, a SSD would be worth having as a boot disk, but RAID is much more economical at the moment verses the small boot time increase you would receive with a SSD.
An ~8GB SSD disk would be nice as a cache for your hard disk. You would just be writing the data to the ROM, and then the hard drive would save the data as fast as it could. This could be implemented using software. If there is power failure, then no data would be lost since it would just be retained in the ROM.
No idea what the difference between that model and this one is but the price is right:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135169
I'd be tempted to get a 4 or 8GB model for my Windows partition, though they'd have to be under £40. Currently £60 for a 4GB:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products ... o.asp?WebProductID=643259
well for one the mtron does 110mb/s read (much faster than a raptor) and ~70 write (on par with a raptor) so its more than twice as fast than that samsung which i guess explains most of the difference in price
my guess though would be that as a system drive the samsung would still leave most platter drives for dead as most operations on the sys drive tend to be radom access which can slow down regular hdds to 10mb/s and less
I know I'm giving this thread a massive bump but it seemed the most appropriate place to ask my question....
OK so I'm building a new rig for a friend, Core i7 performance PC. What I want to know is if anyone has a Solid State Hard Drive working in their PC right now, and if they've had any issues, and how it's performing for them.
I'm planning on using an SSD drive for the operating system and installed programs, and a few conventional 1TB drives for storage. So yeah, if anyone has any experience using these drives I'd like to hear from you!
OK so I'm building a new rig for a friend, Core i7 performance PC. What I want to know is if anyone has a Solid State Hard Drive working in their PC right now, and if they've had any issues, and how it's performing for them.
I'm planning on using an SSD drive for the operating system and installed programs, and a few conventional 1TB drives for storage. So yeah, if anyone has any experience using these drives I'd like to hear from you!
i have 2 30gb OCZ vertex's running in raid 0 in my i [email protected]/6gb ram/gtx 295 I'm swapping them for (faster drives) 2x120gb ssd's soon and will sell my current 2x30gb's. Bigger drives generally = faster speeds. Plus, ssd's are getting quicker and quicker, raiding them can result in some immense speeds
load times for anything are virtually non existent, all programs in taskbar are instantly ready to use as soon as i log into windows 7, and i'm in servers on my own before anyone else in every game - so they do what i wanted them to
I have a samsung f1 1tb for my storage and games that aren't as important
So glad i went ssd, will never go back to hdd as main drives
There's a few things to disable in win7 like prefetching/indexing/defrag and other tweaks. Some ssd's require maintenance like wiping and trim, but alot of the drives now have firmware that can achieve this whilst in idle.
load times for anything are virtually non existent, all programs in taskbar are instantly ready to use as soon as i log into windows 7, and i'm in servers on my own before anyone else in every game - so they do what i wanted them to
I have a samsung f1 1tb for my storage and games that aren't as important
So glad i went ssd, will never go back to hdd as main drives
There's a few things to disable in win7 like prefetching/indexing/defrag and other tweaks. Some ssd's require maintenance like wiping and trim, but alot of the drives now have firmware that can achieve this whilst in idle.
I wonder what kind of lifetime SSD drives have...I hear they only last 1-2 years before they die. How long have you had yours for? And has the performance decreased at all over that time?
it's about 1.5 million hours mean time before failure.
I've upgraded my firmware as they release the newer ones, and it now has garbage and trim facilities that help keep the blocks clear.
The speeds dipped a tiny bit over the months but not noticeable in everyday usage tbh
CCleaner helps to keep the speeds up also, as does letting the system idle for quite a few hours every so often - the intel ICH10R onboard raid controller yields some impressive performance
Simply came down to the fact that i wanted ssd with my new system, so i got ssd She wasn't happy when i shelled out an extra 600 quid for the drives and monitor ontop of the system itself, hell she went bezerk for me spending 120 quid on the g19 hahaha
I've upgraded my firmware as they release the newer ones, and it now has garbage and trim facilities that help keep the blocks clear.
The speeds dipped a tiny bit over the months but not noticeable in everyday usage tbh
CCleaner helps to keep the speeds up also, as does letting the system idle for quite a few hours every so often - the intel ICH10R onboard raid controller yields some impressive performance
Simply came down to the fact that i wanted ssd with my new system, so i got ssd
She wasn't happy when i shelled out an extra 600 quid for the drives and monitor ontop of the system itself, hell she went bezerk for me spending 120 quid on the g19 hahaha Bits in modern SSDs last for 5 years or something like that if you constantly write on them without ever stopping. However modern drives also have techniques that prevent the same bits from being used as much as possible. Some drives also have a bit of extra storage so that when some bits brake there are backups for them. Also in real life use you never constantly write data.
In conclusion modern SSD drives last long enough which is probably atleast as long as conventional HDDs.
In my opinion SSDs are a good buy right now. The prices are reasonable. Around 200€ for a fast 60-80GB drive is reasonable. HDD is probably one of the biggest bottlenecks in a modern computer so buying a SSD is a good idea in that aspect.
This review might be of interest.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/611308/ ... -256gb-ssd-drive-review/2
Would seem that whilst technically there is a significant performance advantage for SSD in real world tests the difference isn't so big.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/611308/ ... -256gb-ssd-drive-review/2
Would seem that whilst technically there is a significant performance advantage for SSD in real world tests the difference isn't so big.
Just something that may be of interest:
I ended up buying a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD for my mate's PC. Photoshop takes 3.5 seconds to start up as opposed to the 20 seconds it used to take. This isn't like for like though, obviously it's had a clean install.
I like these drives, and my mate wanted performance at almost any cost, so it suited him. But it's expensive isn't it? A lot of cash for not a lot of storage space, only useful for installing the OS/programs at the minute.
I ended up buying a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD for my mate's PC. Photoshop takes 3.5 seconds to start up as opposed to the 20 seconds it used to take. This isn't like for like though, obviously it's had a clean install.
I like these drives, and my mate wanted performance at almost any cost, so it suited him. But it's expensive isn't it? A lot of cash for not a lot of storage space, only useful for installing the OS/programs at the minute.
...i saved 84% http://www.amazon.com/Imation- ... ive-powered/dp/B0013B88YU
E; holy schmitt OP is 2007???
E; holy schmitt OP is 2007???
You may want to re-time that, on a clean install of 7 x64, CS4 (x64 version ofc) takes 2.04 seconds to fully load on mechanical HDD's...
SSD's are definately the way forward, they just are way to expensive atm. If I could find a cheap SSD big enough for 7 + Office and a few apps (irrespective of speed) i'd buy it in a heartbeat for my NC10, but it's just not worth it atm.
It says there that even though the benchmarks didn't show a huge difference the overall performance was snappier.
That's what SSDs are out to do. HDDs are currently one of the biggest bottlenecks in computer systems. Even though you have free RAM and your CPU would breeze through processing the data the HDD is still keeping things back because the disk has to spin to the right spot before any data can be read. Altough this takes only few seconds in modern hard drives, it adds up and it becomes significant. On SSDs there virtually no seek times at all, the drive will start reading right as the request comes. The thing why benchmarks and programs don't directly show the advantage is that they were designed with the old HDDs in mind so everything is loaded in to memory while starting the program. That startup is made faster though. Infact starting anything is faster with SSDs, that's where the snappy feeling comes.
Problem is without benchmarks that empirically measure this "snappyness" then it's just a subjective statement which doesn't really have any meaning. When I loaded Windows 7 RC as a dual boot on my current machine it felt "snappier" too, but I couldn't in all honesty tell you what that means. Untill it's measureable in a quatifiable way it's not possible to put a value on whether it's worth the extra expense. My guess is not as it stands given the huge premium required for SSD units.
So far the only quantifiable measurement relating to load times is that for booting the OS, and to be honest despite being a significant improvement I was kind of expecting much lower times, i.e. under 15 seconds, (an old 1Ghz Athlon XP box that I used to have booted up the OS in just over 30 seconds with a normal HDD!!), given that we're effectively talking about a purely electrical memory retrieval system here.
Edited to add- My current dual core 2.4Ghz machine takes approx 45 seconds to boot the OS (Bios to Vista desktop), a good 10-15 seconds slower than my old Athlon machine did with XP - Progress huh?
The difference is measurable. Boot times is where it is easiest to see the difference because it's long operation in total. SSD will decrease all load times, but with ordinary apps the difference might be small. With games the difference is bigger because there is more to load. The more you do random access, the more SSD will benefit.
There are HDD benchmarks will show you that seek times on SSDs are nearly non-existant. If you really want some measurements to back it up.
Whatever you think SSDs are worth it at the moment is up to every one to decide. The premium is coming down all the time (and drives are getting better). At the moment I think the prices are reasonable if you are looking to build an high performance computer. For simply storing data (images, videos, music, etc) a regular HDD is still the way to go of course.
SSDs are not the end of all computing technology, but they are simply a step forward to making the mass storage device less of a bottleneck.
There are HDD benchmarks will show you that seek times on SSDs are nearly non-existant. If you really want some measurements to back it up.
Whatever you think SSDs are worth it at the moment is up to every one to decide. The premium is coming down all the time (and drives are getting better). At the moment I think the prices are reasonable if you are looking to build an high performance computer. For simply storing data (images, videos, music, etc) a regular HDD is still the way to go of course.
SSDs are not the end of all computing technology, but they are simply a step forward to making the mass storage device less of a bottleneck.
Don't get me wrong, I agree SSDs are the way forward, (at least until some other better technology comes along), and there is no doubt that they offer better performance. Just think it is going to be quite a long time before they become mainstream, (if ever), given the ridiculously low prices of traditional HDDs, (which are only likely to continue getting bigger/cheaper).
I love my SSD's. I have 2x 120GB OCZ Agility in raid 0. Pretty speedy. My pc spends more time in the bios then loading windows to give you an example of the sheer speed. Only takes a few second to load into the desktop completely.
The main thing that puts me off SSDs is the way they apparently slow down drastically as time goes on.
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SSD Hard Drives
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