To SSD or Not SSD. That is the question.

David Crow

You'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

Hans Dietrich

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 Software]

peterchen

As I understand, it's the inverse rule with SSD. if it costs less than a weeks pay, it's crap.

Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server.

Dr Walt Fair PE

I 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

Dan Neely

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

Dave Parker

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.

Dave Parker

I'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.

Mark_Wallace

That'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!

Filip C

I 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..

Mark J Miller

I 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."

benoli

I 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.

DiscoJimmy

I've actually been obsessing over SSDs for the last couple of weeks and I have a question for you guys. I moved to a new shop where all the devs use laptops and mine is PAINFULLY slow. We use Lenovo Thinkpads, with dual-core centrinos. I've got 3GB of ram, and weven 32-bit, so I'm pretty sure my HD is the bottleneck. We're using VS 2005, and we have a relatively big ASP.NET solution (several hundred code files, hundreds of user controls, over a million lines of code/markup), and so it takes forever to load, and the build times are like 30-60 secs. My question is, I assume a lot of you have read joel spolsky's article on SSDs where he talks about how everything on the system got lightning fast, EXCEPT his compile times, which stayed the same. Now he didn't mention which compiler he was using, but has anyone had any specific experience with SSDs and VS.NET? The start-up/shutdown/open-anything times on my machine are bad, and I'm confident they'll get better, but it's really the compile time that's killing me. I have to build like a hundred times a day and it takes long enough to drive me to distraction. I'm considering an Intel X-25M, but only if it'll help with visual studio. Any thoughts?

Paddington Bear

Are the upcoming changes to HDDs (larger blocks) likely to narrow the performance gap with SSDs again?

stiphy31

I don't know specifically about the Kingston SSD but my OCZ SSD was the best upgrade I've ever done on a system since I put an ABIT IT5H motherboard into my original Pentium 166 rig 13 years ago :) Seriously, it has extended the life of my development laptop by about a year. I would never go back to non-SSD for my system drive. I do keep a second drive for large data storage but only because my SSD is only 128 mb. I blogged about it if you are interested on my site and also there are links there to the fantastic Anadtech article about the early problems with SSD's.

Fabio Franco

You don't have a choice. The next day you buy it, the price will drop at that rate. And it will only happen when you buy it. Beleive me, you can't run from that. Take it as a variant of Murphy's Law. I proved from it myself several times.

Member 3806996

I can't remember which controller the Kingston drive uses, check anandtech.com > storage for much good information. Basically, don't buy an SSD with a jMicron controller - that is the golden rule. As far as controllers go - Indilinx, Intel, Sandforce are good. Samsung is OK but there is better. Is it worth it? Well, frankly, if you earn your living on your computer it is insanity to not make this small investment. For instance -- I do most of my work on a Core2 laptop w/4GB RAM and a SATA I controller that limits my top read speeds. I went from a 120GB mechanical drive to a 120GB OCZ Agility SSD (Indilinx controller). After POST, XP boots to a usable, non-hourglassing desktop in 10s. PS CS2 starts in about 3sec (it appears most of that time is spent accessing the CPU). Visual Web Dev Express starts in 1s (used to be 30 or more). Firefox starts from cold in about 1s. MS Office apps start as if they were already in memory. The performance this drive offers is just stupid. Another thing - I used to get huge delays in visual studio while it accessed the HDD, doing who knows what -- on the order of minutes sometimes. Not anymore. So --- will there be faster & cheaper drives in the future? Of course. Will you buy an SSD today and tomorrow be sorry? Not a chance (unless you buy one with a jMicron controller). The difference between the slowest "good" SSD and the fastest mechanical drives is HUGE. The difference between the slowest "good" SSD and the fastest is minor. We're already pushing the limits of the SATA II interface, until that's fixed there won't be many huge differences in "good" SSD performance. If you're on a laptop the change is a complete no-brainer, there is no other way to even approach this level of performance. If you're working on a desktop, you can RAID some Raptors together to get great speeds, but you still won't get the latency numbers an SSD can provide which make a big difference if you're dealing with a lot of smallish random accessed files. SSD prices peaked up a bit a couple months ago - prices have been trickling back down to "normal" levels though lately and now is not a bad time to be buying. I bought my 120GB OCZ for about $270 - it peaked afterwards for about $450 - it's been bouncing around between $300~$360 lately - if you can get by with 80gb, the Intel @ ~$225 is a much better deal.

Member 3806996

I believe build times are much more tied to the CPU than disk performance -so an SSD probably won't help much. You can verify by watching the HDD light on your computer - if it's going nuts expect an SSD to help, if it's only blinking occasionally, then don't expect an SSD to make a big difference. I do highly recommend getting an SSD, especially for laptops. Expect huge performance increases anytime disk access occurs, expect no performance increase when the CPU is the bottleneck. After switching to my SSD, there were huge performance increases in opening and closing programs. There were also "responsiveness" increases within applications that access the drive or cause memory swapping - huge gains in VS 2008.

DiscoJimmy

Well, i'm not sure if the hard drive is going totally crazy or not, but CPU is less than maxed out throughout the build. Joel mentioned that his compiler is single threaded; do you happen to know if VS 2005/8 is single threaded? I have a dual core centrino, but as I said, the CPU is only under moderate load throughout the 30-60 sec build process.

ormonds

My "new" Win7 machine has a Kingston SSD C: drive. I have no benchmark from a previous HDD, of course, but I guess I am slightly surprised how it doesn't seem to be as fast as I expected. I see it appears as C: in the HDD device list and I can check it and defrag it. I have no idea how to check if TRIM is operational. I have had one BSOD and other oddities - setting a boot check disc will endless repeat, the dirty bit isn't, I assume, unset at the end.

Sciencez

If you read the reviews you will find that after some indepth testing the only brand to buy is a genuine Intel SSD. All of the others have severe performance degredation (as they age). So I'd consider the following; 1) Do you really need an SSD for this computer? If not stick to a standard HDD and wait until this exciting technology matures (won't take long!). 2) If you believe that an SSD is the best solution for your new computer then purchase an Intel SSD and be prepared to find that in the not too distant future the technology will mature thus making your SSD will be an expensive dinosaur. 3) Install a cheaper SSD and consider it as an experiment and be prepared to throw it out after a year or so.