Solid State Disks

[Vreki]

Lately I have been hearing more and more about how Solid State Disks can offer amazing improvements in performance.

The most annoying issue with my system isn't gaming performance, but that it takes f.o.r.e.v.e.r. before it is ready. And thats why a diagram like this looks very interesting:


I could get a Vertex 30GB for around $210, much less than I would have to spend if i wanted to make other significant hardware upgrades.

I figure the 30GB should be enough for the OS and my most used applications (games).

Does any of you have experience using SSD?

The diagram is from this article: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531 , which has lots of interesting information.

[=98=]

Re: Solid State Disks

If it's taking ages before it's ready, try and reinstall of Windows first before purchasing a SSD.

[Vreki]

Re: Solid State Disks

If it's taking ages before it's ready, try and reinstall of Windows first before purchasing a SSD.

It would also take ages to reinstall all the applications that I need and/or use
My plan is to keep this installation alive until windows 7 becomes available.

[Dan2k3k4]

Re: Solid State Disks

lol, why did "Solid State disks" look like "Solid State d...s" for me...

anyway, have you defragged? and you could try patching? or w.e it is called when you basically click "fix OS" on the CD and it doesn't do a full reinstall - the programs stay and the OS just gets the files "reinstalled" for it to run/work properlly? Maybe that might help...

[jesus]

Re: Solid State Disks

I have a 7200RPM drive and it doesn't take forever to get ready. How many programs do you have on start up?

I only have four: antivirus, firewall, video driver and sound driver

[Vreki]

Re: Solid State Disks

I have a 7200RPM drive and it doesn't take forever to get ready. How many programs do you have on start up?

I only have four: antivirus, firewall, video driver and sound driver

+ Offsite and local backup, various logitech drivers and utils for my mx518 and G15, Bluetooth driver, printer driver and Messenger.

And I have done defrag, CCleaner, StartupDelayer and other stuff that I no longer remember.

Its probably the AV scan that slows it down, but that too would benefit from faster I/O.

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Solid State Disks

only experience i have is with P2 video cameras and in comparison to the DVD, hard drive and especially tape cameras i have used they are a million times better but i cant fully comment on the PC side of it.

As soon as a 100ish GB one comes into my price range im straight onto the bandwagon though. Any less than that and i think i will feel quite resticted with what i can install which is something i dont have time or patience to work around.

My opinion would be to do everything you can to speed up your current setup and wait it out for 6-12 months for prices to drop.

[n00bhaus3r]

Re: Solid State Disks

Yeah. I'd advise defragging or getting a better defragging utility than Windows provides (e.g. Diskeeper, which has a defrag while idle function). SSDs definitely have an advantage, even if they have slower sequential writes (WD Raptor still has the lead here, at least in the consumer market), but Windows doesn't write sequentially. Most writing is random, so the statistic you want to look at is the random write times. SSDs (well, for what I'm trying to say here, SLCs) usually are faster by about an order of magnitude. Of course, you also pay many times more for one.

In any event, you could always get a small SSD for fast loading/booting your OS, and run games off regular harddrives (or some kind of RAID/Raptors).

[Flt. Sgt. Powderhound]

Re: Solid State Disks

Bear in mind that SSDs have much poorer write performance than mechanical ones.

[Vreki]

Re: Solid State Disks

Bear in mind that SSDs have much poorer write performance than mechanical ones.

Apparently that is no longer true:


I did a comparison with my main XP partition and a "clean" one I only have used to play games.

On the clean install it took 1:45 from I selected it in the bootmanager to IE was ready.
On my main partition it takes almost 3 minutes. During much of that time I am just staring at the desktop, waiting for it to get ready.

So while it might be possible to tune it a bit more, I don't see coming close to the numbers posted in the test.

[n00bhaus3r]

Re: Solid State Disks

Bear in mind that SSDs have much poorer write performance than mechanical ones.

Did you read a word of my post? Haha.

[Flt. Sgt. Powderhound]

Re: Solid State Disks

Did you read a word of my post? Haha.

I'll be brutally honest, and say no.

[signa]

Re: Solid State Disks

the better ssd's are expensive. for the most bang for you buck, upgrade to 4gb of ram, and buy another hdd and run in raid 0. Of course with raid0, you'll want to have some sort of backup drive or plan in place.

[Flt. Sgt. Powderhound]

Re: Solid State Disks

the better ssd's are expensive. for the most bang for you buck, upgrade to 4gb of ram, and buy another hdd and run in raid 0. Of course with raid0, you'll want to have some sort of backup drive or plan in place.

The fact of having Raid0 shouldn't make any difference; you should have a backup anyway.

[=98=]

Re: Solid State Disks

Well, RAID0 is theoretically doubly likely to fail, so protection is a better idea. But, agreed, backups should always be made.