To SSD or Not SSD. That is the question.
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001 -
How much does it cost? If it costs less than a week's pay... probably go for it. Otherwise, wait until somebody else buys it and the price drops! :-D
Cheers, Vikram. (Got my troika of CCCs!)
If it costs less than a weeks pay you can just buy something? Nice.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane
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Yeah, I got an X25-M and a few days later heard about the X25-M generation 2. And the firmware update to support TRIM is only available for the gen 2s :( But yeah I'd say it's worth having one if you're waiting for the HD to read data a lot. Even if it's just a small SSD that you don't have your main OS on but just junction certain folders across to it that you know will benefit from it. I think there's a fair amount of manual tweaking / optimization to do to get the best out of one. I have a game called City Life. It took about 3 minutes to load on a HD, about 10 minutes on an SSD and about 15 seconds when parts of the game were manually junctioned to the SSD and the rest on a HD. I think the fact that the game creates its own several-gigabyte temp file in its own directory when running (dunno why it doesn't use the temp dir or the normal swapfile) was slowing it down enormously when the whole game was put on the SSD.
is there a resource which talks about how to do this optimization, or do you just guess-n-test ?
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I'd say stick with an HDD until the price is worth it. Right now, they are like 10x more expensive than HDD's. If you simply must have the performance, I'd say go for one that is around 50GB, as you can use that to build VS solutions faster and startup times will be decreased, with a little breathing room to move files around. You can store your large data files (e.g., movies) on slower hard drives, as increasing the performance of those will have no beneficial effects (e.g., you'll still watch movies at the same rate on an SSD or an HDD).
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How much does it cost? If it costs less than a week's pay... probably go for it. Otherwise, wait until somebody else buys it and the price drops! :-D
Cheers, Vikram. (Got my troika of CCCs!)
$279 from NewEgg (includes a 3.5-inch bay adapter kit)
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001 -
I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001Adding an SSD to my 920@3.85ghz was a more apparent speedup than my two prior, much more expensive upgrades: Socket 462 1.4ghz single core AMD to s393 2ghz dual core, and s939 2.4ghz to I7 @ 3.85 ghz. SSD prices have been actually trended up over the last 9 months. The combination of better support in win7 and the non-sucking indilynx barefoot controller created a large demand spike that the flash makers haven't been able to catch up with yet. I wouldn't worry too much about it depreciating any faster than a normal hardware purchase. That said the intel 80/160GB drives advantage (IIRC 5-10x) in random write performance will likely benefit more than the indilynx controllers 2.3x (175MB/sec vs 75MB/sec) performance advantage in most useage scenarios because it's the random IO that makes disk access seem to glacial.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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is there a resource which talks about how to do this optimization, or do you just guess-n-test ?
If you install Windows 7 on it, it automatically does what needs to be done. If you restore from a backup, you'll have to manually make the tweaks.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001 -
Adding an SSD to my 920@3.85ghz was a more apparent speedup than my two prior, much more expensive upgrades: Socket 462 1.4ghz single core AMD to s393 2ghz dual core, and s939 2.4ghz to I7 @ 3.85 ghz. SSD prices have been actually trended up over the last 9 months. The combination of better support in win7 and the non-sucking indilynx barefoot controller created a large demand spike that the flash makers haven't been able to catch up with yet. I wouldn't worry too much about it depreciating any faster than a normal hardware purchase. That said the intel 80/160GB drives advantage (IIRC 5-10x) in random write performance will likely benefit more than the indilynx controllers 2.3x (175MB/sec vs 75MB/sec) performance advantage in most useage scenarios because it's the random IO that makes disk access seem to glacial.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
If I remember correct, read is 220MB/sec, writes are 180 (or something in that range).
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001 -
I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001There will always be something better around the corner. How long do you want to wait?
"When did ignorance become a point of view" - Dilbert
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001You've no doubt seen this already.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Man who follows car will be exhausted." - Confucius
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$279 from NewEgg (includes a 3.5-inch bay adapter kit)
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I haven't looked at this one, but some other SSDs have gotten very bad user reviews (on Newegg and Amazon); failing after a few months, TRIM not working, frequent (or no) firmware updates, etc. That's the major reason I went with Intel - there were very few negative reviews, and I'm pretty sure Intel will be around for 5 years. So I hope you read the user reviews. I'm not sure about this, but from the reviews I read, it seems like constantly writing to the SSD reduced its reliability and/or lifespan. I'm just going to use it as essentially read-only memory for some of the slow startup pigs: VS, Office, and Firefox. I know some people use it as the boot drive, but this would benefit me only once or twice a day, although with a laptop it might be a different story.
Best wishes, Hans
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How much does it cost? If it costs less than a week's pay... probably go for it. Otherwise, wait until somebody else buys it and the price drops! :-D
Cheers, Vikram. (Got my troika of CCCs!)
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I think you should buy one for your wife. Then, when the price drops, you can give her back the one you borrowed from her and buy the latest and greatest and tell her how much money you saved by waiting for the price to drop.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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I haven't looked at this one, but some other SSDs have gotten very bad user reviews (on Newegg and Amazon); failing after a few months, TRIM not working, frequent (or no) firmware updates, etc. That's the major reason I went with Intel - there were very few negative reviews, and I'm pretty sure Intel will be around for 5 years. So I hope you read the user reviews. I'm not sure about this, but from the reviews I read, it seems like constantly writing to the SSD reduced its reliability and/or lifespan. I'm just going to use it as essentially read-only memory for some of the slow startup pigs: VS, Office, and Firefox. I know some people use it as the boot drive, but this would benefit me only once or twice a day, although with a laptop it might be a different story.
Best wishes, Hans
Hans Dietrich wrote:
TRIM not working
The easiest way to break this is to use non-MS drivers for your HD controller. Intel/AMD haven't had these available to go with the win7 launch. IIRC they're still MIA. Also, except for intel's G2 almost all the drives on the market predate trim capable firmwares. Levels of foot draging with indilynx updates probably does vary a bit though. OCZ is one of the two companies doing extra testing in trade for early access to firmware (I'm blanking on the second).
Hans Dietrich wrote:
I'm not sure about this, but from the reviews I read, it seems like constantly writing to the SSD reduced its reliability and/or lifespan.
They're rated for 10k writes of the capacity. At normal use levels it will takes days to weeks to write the entire drive once (firmware moves stuff around so that all cells wear at about the same rate even if most of your data is static). Unless you're running a write happy server, or deliberately trying to brick the drive, it's a non-issue.
Hans Dietrich wrote:
I'm just going to use it as essentially read-only memory for some of the slow startup pigs: VS, Office, and Firefox.
IMO the biggest gain was from lack of delays when random apps do their normal small writes. If you've got one big enough to do so I'd put everything except your media files on it.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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is there a resource which talks about how to do this optimization, or do you just guess-n-test ?
You can probably find stuff online, though I find sysinternals filemon pretty useful and I tend to try to move stuff that is written to a lot over to the HD.
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If you install Windows 7 on it, it automatically does what needs to be done. If you restore from a backup, you'll have to manually make the tweaks.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I'm not sure how well this works in practice. As far as I can make out it doesn't seem to detect mine as an SSD as it's still listed in the disk defragmenter. It never actually did do a defrag though so I'm not sure.
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001That's why I end up using boxes until they actually die on me. I'm always several years behind the latest & greatest technology -- play a newly released game? Forget it. But it doesn't work. No matter how long you wait before buying, there's always something later and greater, just around the corner. They should set "kick yourself" as a synonym for "computer" in dictionaries. It fits on so many levels.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I have an Intel Postville 80GB SSD and it really rocks!! I would say 'Yes, go buy one now!' You will not be disappointed! and the price drops.. well yeah.. to bad.. you never know when it will happen Remember: once you have a SSD, you'll be the slowest component of your pc..
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I bought a g.Skill Falcon 128GB almost a year ago. I've been using it with Windows 7 Dell laptop and it is a beautiful thing. I paid $320 IIRC so prices haven't dropped much (if at all). I save time not only on bootup but every time I open Visual Studio (Of course I still have to wait on TFS, but when I'm working on projects not tied to TFS everything loads nicely). Also is nice when I encounter paging issues because I'm running a VM and have lots of windows open, paging isn't as much of a pain. I just built a desktop and laptop for my dad, each with a 64GB drive for the OS. For the laptop I got a Kensington for a good deal. I had him get the Dell Studio 17 with 2 drives so he'd still be able to have easy storage space. I just swapped one out for the OS drive. But it's only been about a month so it's too easy to tell if that one will last as long as mine has.
Code responsibly: OWASP.org Mark's blog: www.developMENTALmadness.com Bill Cosby - "A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice."
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I'm considering getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for my primary desktop machine. I just know that the day after I buy it, the price will drop by 25% or more, or that they'll come up with a "better SSD", and I'll be stuck with an over-priced technological dinosaur. Comments?
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I just bought the Kingston 128 SDD and am using it as the system drive on a new Win 7 machine. So far, I love it. When you compare the price with a 10,000 rmp drive like the velociraptor 300 GB, the price difference isn't that big--less than $100. For me, the saved time in just boot ups is easily worth it.