SSD's significant performance boost?

[shbris]

-quieter etc but i hate shbris and tore apart his point

:less power:

intel x25-e: idle- 0.06W peak- 2.4W
velociraptor: seak-6.08W idle-4.53W standby-0.42W

so they do use less power, and with no moving parts will be cooler as less power to dissipate

(references for power usage)
intel:
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/na...reme/index.htm
WD:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=494

intel MTBF - 2million hours (^^ above reference)
WD velociraptor - 1.4 million hours
( http://www.elitezoom.com/western-dig...0-rpm-hdd.html )

i admit there may be differences in the way they measure the drives and loading, but at least admit they're similar

RAID: two similar drives reliability wise ^^ (as shown above) so raid 0 will cause more errors than a single intel ssd

RAID controllers: ok well software based RAID, fine, but system overhead will mean the performance will be no where near linear, probably only 25% above single drive performance (speculation obviously but no linky )


and WD warranty. ok they're good drives, but pleeease don't compare them to substandard ssd drives like corsair or whatever crap ones, that's like comparing intel x25-e to a seagate 120gb 20 quid drive because they have 'similar capacity' or some rubbish

oh and cost, maybe couple of raptors in software raid will be bit cheaper, but not in 6 months time!! have faith

[PwnDirect]

tread needs more vote

& personally am waiting till there more mainstream

[aidanjt]

intel x25-e: idle- 0.06W peak- 2.4W
velociraptor: seak-6.08W idle-4.53W standby-0.42W

Apples and oranges. velociraptors don't fit in laptops, they're too high. Laptop hard drives use less energy than a velociraptor. See: http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro...sp?driveid=506. Even if you count the velociraptors power usage, it's hardly tearing up the deck plates in terms of power consumption.

so they do use less power, and with no moving parts will be cooler as less power to dissipate

Whether they have moving parts or not is irrelevant. You cant take out more energy than you put in. And since mechanical drives emit 'waste energy' in the form of slight noise/vibration, less of it is 'wasted' in terms of heat energy. As such, laptop hard drives and SSDs have roughly the same thermal profile.

intel MTBF - 2million hours (^^ above reference)
WD velociraptor - 1.4 million hours
( http://www.elitezoom.com/western-dig...0-rpm-hdd.html )

i admit there may be differences in the way they measure the drives and loading, but at least admit they're similar

The difference is, when you put the velociraptor under heavy load, they aren't killing themselves.

RAID: two similar drives reliability wise ^^ (as shown above) so raid 0 will cause more errors than a single intel ssd

False. This is a common misconception of stripping. f^n where 'n' is the number of disks and 'f' is a failure factor, is a gross oversimplification to risk factors, to the point of being a logical fallacy. There's many variables to consider, and the formulas involved aren't quite so linear.

RAID controllers: ok well software based RAID, fine, but system overhead will mean the performance will be no where near linear, probably only 25% above single drive performance (speculation obviously but no linky )

Desktop CPUs are already ridiculously powerful. The overhead involved even with stripping with parity on a BIOS RAID controller with a handful of disks is negligible. The main use for fully accelerated hardware RAID cards is with big, powerful servers where the disks attached to the storage subsystem are very fast, and very plentiful. In this scenario the overhead becomes non-negligible, increases latency, and takes away CPU time from CPU hungry network services.

and WD warranty. ok they're good drives, but pleeease don't compare them to substandard ssd drives like corsair or whatever crap ones, that's like comparing intel x25-e to a seagate 120gb 20 quid drive because they have 'similar capacity' or some rubbish

Regardless, Intel SSDs also have nothing in the way of manufacturer confidence that they'll last 5 years.

oh and cost, maybe couple of raptors in software raid will be bit cheaper, but not in 6 months time!! have faith

6 months, 5 years, it makes no difference. It'll still be significantly cheaper. Since you don't have to keep replacing dead SSDs and deal with the accompanied downtime. Oh, and you'll actually have the capacity to keep doing work no matter how big your software and datasets get.

Don't get me wrong. SSDs are a neat technological development, and I have no doubt that eventually solid state storage will take over from magnetic storage. But currently they're new, unproven, limited, expensive, and unreliable. That's how new technologies start out, and they improve with age as their designs are refined and economies of scale kick in.

Personally. For me, the main applicable use for SSDs would be a) unimportant and large applications where the loss of the drive would be non-critical, e.g. games. b) placing the swap/page file on. c) a temporary datastore for extracting information and such. d) medium datasets where speed and low latency is critical and the information is pushed back to magnetic storage after it's finished being used. and e) where cost and maintenance isn't a problem.

I would *not* consider it reliable and viable for situations like, a) OS/critical app installation, and b) where reliability and uptime is critical.

[shbris]

i already said that right now ssd's aren't great, i was just saying that improvements will come very fast

i can't fault most of ur arguments, although i stand by that one 'insane' drive is better than two in any kind of RAID setup, and that ssd's ARE more power efficient, quieter and cooler, the figures tell u that
anyone with money for TWO velociraptors or any intel ssd's would probably better spend their money on an Acard ANS (if s/he could find one) and a bunch of RAM, insane read AND write speeds with no noise or heat (to speak of)

EDIT: oh and price, 2x velociraptor @ 155 quid each (from scan) = 310 quid.
one intel 80GB x25-m (use m because e's are insanely priced) @ 338 quid (from kikatek http://www.kikatek.com/product_info....ducts_id=84729 )
so price isn't THAT much difference, you make it sound like double or something, only 10% more for ssd. so choice is between large storage + slightly cheaper vs. silence power blah blah but small storage and claimed 'reliability' issues

btw do you use two (veloci)raptors in raid on ur comp? if u had any benchmarks would be cool to see them

peace out

[Ciber]

Interesting thread. I'm thinking it's worth getting one of these to put my program files and swapfile on even though it's not big enough to be my main drive. http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s...tml?SAM-SSD64M For £100 I think it's worth a punt. I really would like games to load faster. I have limited time for games and loading screens are not fun.

Is this partition alignment stuff needed/applicable to non - jmicron controller based drives? http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=48309 and these tweaks??? http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=47244

[Ciber]

Well I got one anyway lol. Now I've got to decide how to use it! I've got 1 x 64gb ssd and 2 x 320gb normal drives. Could take one hard drive out and just use it in the hard drive dock I just got for backups. Then the SSD would be for system and games. Swapfile on a small partition at the start of the spindle hard drive and 'my documents', photos, music and everything else on another large partition. That a good idea?

[shbris]

sounds good, tell us how it goes

[Ciber]

It's gone well so far, windows xp install seemed very fast about 20mins in all. Everything seems very snappy and responsive. I did upgrade to i7 as well though so some will be down to that.

[Ciber]

Well for £100 a 64gb SSD is a great upgrade IMO. From pressing the power button to an open webpage takes 39 sec and starting Team Fortess 2 takes 32s (before joining a server). What I want from my PC: zero to gaming in fast! Windows and games on one of these: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s...tml?SAM-SSD64M defrag disabled and the tweaks from the OCZ forums applied, pagefile, temporary internet files, my documents and everything else I've put on a mechanical drive. Seems to work well. You do need a pagefile for games btw. Dawn of War 2 refused to start without a 1.5gb pagefile!

[Singh400]

It's gone well so far, windows xp install seemed very fast about 20mins in all. Everything seems very snappy and responsive. I did upgrade to i7 as well though so some will be down to that.

Takes me 22mins to install XP on my bog standard mechnical drive. 17mins for Vista and 15mins for 7. Yes, I'm that sad to time them.

Worth mentioning that I run unattended setups.

[Ciber]

Some of the 20min it was waiting for my input! I guess unattended is a good way to do it.

[IgorHW]

With each memory cell being good for 100,000 writes, and wear leveling built into the memory controller, even using it as a time shift buffer isn't really an issue.
...
A mechanical drive is going to die will before the SSD in this case.

Ah, but does wear leveling built into the memory controller work when you fill up your drive with data? For example you have 32GB SSD and you install vista and your favorite apps on it, that leaves you with only few gigs for controller to manage write cycles on memory cells.
My Win Server 2008 (i use it as workstation) makes average ~3000writes/s on my system drive while i'm writing this and i have only two user applications running: Firefox and Skype. Some would say that windows is not optimized :>

If you want to keep swap on the SSD for faster swap performance, there goes $RAM*2.5 (at least) of system disk capacity.

What kind of advanced applications would you have to use to need that much swap? "Average" users that have 8GB of RAM can easily turn off swap, in case of some application problems then leave 1 or 2GB swap file but definitely not 20GB.

[Ciber]

What kind of advanced applications would you have to use to need that much swap? "Average" users that have 8GB of RAM can easily turn off swap, in case of some application problems then leave 1 or 2GB swap file but definitely not 20GB.

If I had 8gb ram and an SSD I would think about creating a ramdrive and putting the swapfile on that, as per the 2nd post here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=47244 or at the bottom of this thread for vista http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=47212

[IgorHW]

Swap file on ramdrive is a very good idea even if you don't have an SSD drive. I might try that one myself.

[Singh400]

I'm just using my SSD as temp drive for all things stored temparily. My pagefile, winrar temp files and photoshop scratch disk is all on there.

[Mighty God]

I see that SSD's have already started to fall in price, who knows where we'll be at in say 6 months time, my guess would be at reasonable prices for the capacity and performance received from the drives, but it could all be turned on its head what with the state of the economy and everything else!

I think that generally it is worth waiting a little while longer before purchasing these though.