Solid State Disks

[[MyIS]Dan]

Re: Solid State Disks

I just put my WD Raptors back into RAID0, not too bad if they fail, only 138GB lost (touch wood) plus I have full partition image backup's rolling every Thursday then on Sunday incremental backup's for the past 5 weeks. :)

Granted, I do know someone who put two 1TB drives in RAID0. :|:

[=98=]

Re: Solid State Disks

Importance of data is qualitative, not quantitative.

[n00bhaus3r]

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.

Even first-gen SSDs are an improvement. Also, you don't need that big of an SSD for loading the OS.

[Vreki]

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.

Thats not "the most bang for the buck" for me. My current MB uses DDR so the RAM will very likely be thrown out in less than a year.
Besides the current memory usage is below 50%, I don't see 2GB more improving my load times.

As for RAID, it would require two new disks since my RAID controller is SATA, and the improvements may not be significant:

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=2101&p=1

Even first-gen SSDs are an improvement. Also, you don't need that big of an SSD for loading the OS.

Yes, I really recommend reading the first article, much have happened recently: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

[n00bhaus3r]

Re: Solid State Disks

Yum. Thanks for the link.

[signa]

Re: Solid State Disks

Thats not "the most bang for the buck" for me. My current MB uses DDR so the RAM will very likely be thrown out in less than a year.
Besides the current memory usage is below 50%, I don't see 2GB more improving my load times.

As for RAID, it would require two new disks since my RAID controller is SATA, and the improvements may not be significant

I didn't realize your system was that old and I was going on the assumption that you would only have to purchase 1 additional drive. I wouldn't put money into something that cant be moved into your next computer, so you got a point there.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=2101&p=1

that article is 5 years old and deals with more than just load times. They are comparing if its worth it for the average user to move to raid0. If I had the time I could link to plenty of articles showing benefits of raid0, its been proven many times over, but its not for everyone. In your case since you'd need 2 new drives it might not be worth the upgrade either.

If you do get a ssd, make sure its a MLC type.

[Vreki]

Re: Solid State Disks

I didn't realize your system was that old

Thats why we have the handy "My System" info
And it is not "old", it is just update-challenged

that article is 5 years old and deals with more than just load times. They are comparing if its worth it for the average user to move to raid0. If I had the time I could link to plenty of articles showing benefits of raid0,.

2 years ago:

If it is not obvious by now, RAID 0 will provide outstanding results in synthetic benchmarks but really does nothing in actual applications. We should probably clarify that statement in detail. Utilizing the best performing drives in RAID 0 is the setup to have if you are looking to publish top benchmark scores with results in PCMark05 improving by 25% as an example. That same setup will provide you with at best minimal performance improvements in most applications, or sometimes no difference at all.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=2969&p=9

And I will also say that at my work they seem to be quite happy running just Raid 1 on the servers. Granted, the SAN does have some disks in RAID 5, but I wasn't looking to spend that kind of cash

Well I wasn't intending to turn this into a RAID war, but I think we can agree that RAID 0 is not the solution to my current problems.

[megawhompertoo]

Re: Solid State Disks

Well I wasn't intending to turn this into a RAID war, but I think we can agree that RAID 0 is not the solution to my current problems.

on the contrary, for extremely long disk read processes (specifically loading the bf2/sf maps) i found raid0 gaming disks with the os on a separate disk almost halved my load times compared to a fresh install w/bf2 on one drive and xp on the other.

those load times, however, on the outside of what most folks find acceptable in video gaming, and no one really ever gave me an adequate explanation of what all that drive thrashing/memory hogging was all about.

if most of your system needs a refresh, my guess is that a ~$200 ~30gb hd isn't going to solve MANY of your time-issues, but might help your bootie-up times somewhat. for what it's worth, i recycle-built a p4 3.0 system with an 865p chispet, a semi-modern sata drive (samsung single-platter 160gb), a gig of memory and an old radeon 9600xt and it boots into windows xp in 28 seconds. it's a bare minimum install, though, w/no start-up apps to speak of. point being (sorry for the diversion) that older systems can boot and run plenty fast.

you might want to check your SMART status via speedfan (or any other hd-checker app) and also make sure your drive hasn't decided to run in PIO mode (in my computer-->devices-->hardware) if it's getting long in the tooth.

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Solid State Disks

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/24-samsung-ssds-get-strung-together-for-supercomputer-fun/

[Vreki]

Re: Solid State Disks

you might want to check your SMART status via speedfan (or any other hd-checker app) and also make sure your drive hasn't decided to run in PIO mode (in my computer-->devices-->hardware) if it's getting long in the tooth.

Thanks, but my hardware appears to be working well. Speedfan is happy about the HD, and it is running DMA mode 6.

And while the CPU is no longer state-of-the art, it should easily be able to handle Win XP