Solid state drive performance
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesIt will be way faster than 7200/10000 RPM disks. My Core-i7 desktop with 12 GB Ram has a slow 7200 RPM disk. My Centrino 2 laptop with 4 GB Ram has an SSD. Both are 64 bit. The laptop boots faster than the desktop. Noticeably faster! :sigh:
Regards, Nish
Blog: blog.voidnish.com Most recent article: An MVVM friendly approach to adding system menu entries in a WPF application
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesYou have heard of Google, right? However, fortune smiles upon you: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/19049[^] http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/18757[^] (Summary: Corsair Nova series is nice, the Crucial RealSSD C300 kicks butt.)
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You have heard of Google, right? However, fortune smiles upon you: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/19049[^] http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/18757[^] (Summary: Corsair Nova series is nice, the Crucial RealSSD C300 kicks butt.)
Joe Woodbury wrote:
You have heard of Google, right?
:omg: They have search engines now? What amazing times we live in! Actually, I'd prefer to get the opinions of people I trust rather than random bits of information. And thanks for the links! :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesI bought a Patriot 256GB SSD [^] for my new ASUS G73JH laptop [^] last month. It is c: and only has OS and apps. Boot time and app load has definitely moved into the HolyCrap range. After reading up on using SSD's I also went through most of the suggested tweaks to minimize writes to the drive - including moving my user folder to d:. I think they are still too pricey to get for my desktop.
...cmk The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying. - John Carmack
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesSSD is nice, but does it qualify in terms of quantity (size) when dealing with streaming video files ?
Watched code never compiles.
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SSD is nice, but does it qualify in terms of quantity (size) when dealing with streaming video files ?
Watched code never compiles.
That's a point to consider as they get pricey in a hurry. Currently, a 60 gig drive would probably make a decent working space but video adds up fast.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?"
pretty fast. but remember there are two types of SDD, one is designed for speed, the other price. Not that the cheap one is all that cheap.... still, watch your speed specs. I put two 80gig SDD's on a box for my project leader on an i7. He's tickled pink and loves it. The OS is on one of the SDDs so he has a lightning fast startup. Of course price was not a consideration so my boss bought a dozen of the fastest 80gig SDDs and then found a use for them... :laugh:
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
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It will be way faster than 7200/10000 RPM disks. My Core-i7 desktop with 12 GB Ram has a slow 7200 RPM disk. My Centrino 2 laptop with 4 GB Ram has an SSD. Both are 64 bit. The laptop boots faster than the desktop. Noticeably faster! :sigh:
Regards, Nish
Blog: blog.voidnish.com Most recent article: An MVVM friendly approach to adding system menu entries in a WPF application
I found boot times at least up to XP were largely a question of (in that order) - hardware components and their drivers - defragging disk, including pagefile / registry - reinstalling after a year But yeah, you will boot faster. For me the question are: how much would I pay for 13 instead of 30 seconds, and what else gets faster? Anyway, for a lappy, I'd go SSD. It's the only serious way to beat the performance-weight-uptime trap, wiht a bit of robustness thrown in.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
That's a point to consider as they get pricey in a hurry. Currently, a 60 gig drive would probably make a decent working space but video adds up fast.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
That's a point to consider as they get pricey in a hurry. Currently, a 60 gig drive would probably make a decent working space but video adds up fast.
Our normal Modus Operandi is usually a VERY high speed but small RAID for storing/capturing one and only one video. Depending on the system that may be 1 to 6 drives in a RAID 0. Then you have storage, big and reasonably fast, but big. We've done this with SATA, SDD, SCSI, etc. for over a decade. Not necessarily the best resume, but we've been capturing video for a while. :)
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
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Joe Woodbury wrote:
You have heard of Google, right?
:omg: They have search engines now? What amazing times we live in! Actually, I'd prefer to get the opinions of people I trust rather than random bits of information. And thanks for the links! :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
They have search engines now?
Have you ever pondered the words "Search Engines" are they really engines that generate searches? should they be answer engines? of course that would be hard because they don't really return answers, only results... so should they be search result engines? :-D
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Actually, I'd prefer to get the opinions of people I trust rather than random bits of information.
yeah, me too. I always kick myself when I can't find the links that lead me to a solution when I search for it for someone else. :) I like to know what people think. I can search, but search will get you half the story, and even then is it is source you trust? :)
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
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I bought a Patriot 256GB SSD [^] for my new ASUS G73JH laptop [^] last month. It is c: and only has OS and apps. Boot time and app load has definitely moved into the HolyCrap range. After reading up on using SSD's I also went through most of the suggested tweaks to minimize writes to the drive - including moving my user folder to d:. I think they are still too pricey to get for my desktop.
...cmk The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying. - John Carmack
Unless you're doing server level disk IO, having your user folder on the SSD is a non-issue; and synchronous IO to user files is a big part of system latency. Just keep really big lumps of data (eg movies, pictures, music) on the magnetic drive.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesTo be conservative with reliability I'd stick with either an Intel drive or one using the Indilinx Barefoot controller. Some of the new ones (eg Sandforce) look to be better in performance but don't have the long record of use to prove reliability yet. Between Intel and the various barefoot drives you're basically choosing between faster random IO (Intel) and faster sequential writes (barefoot). Both effectively max the sata bus in sequential reads. The tradeoffs between the two modes are such that the general recommendation is to decide what your minimum needed capacity/what you can afford is and select between them on that criteria.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesThey have > 100x the performance in 4K reads and writes and IOPs. And since most reads and writes are small they provide a level of performance that is impossible with any combination of mechanical hard drives.
John
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesMy latest laptop has a solidstate drive, and I can confirm that the read speed on a large contiguous file is on par with a 10k SCSI drive (That's SCSI, !SATA). It's when you read many random files at the same time that it goes HolyCrap!x. Try to copy three large files at the same time, the solid state keeps the same total speed as with one, the classic drives goes down to almost nothing. The unexpected result for me was that the degradation with time hasn't happened yet. It's as fast as it was when it was new. It could be that windows seven is that much better than XP of course, but I doubt it.
"When did ignorance become a point of view" - Dilbert
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesHere is a good review of SSD drives: The State of Solid State Hard Drives[^]
Giorgi Dalakishvili #region signature My Articles Browsing xkcd in a windows 7 way[^] #endregion
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Okay, so now Dan has me thinking about adding SDD to the mix. For those of you who have added these to the mix, a couple of questions. First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?" Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck? C (for the benefit of the apps themselves), the data drive where I store, say, video files, or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesI highly recommend getting an Intel SSD. Others may have higher serial transfer rates but that is not a good measure of performance. Also from my involvement in several forums Intel SSDs seem to be the most reliable. Stay away from any SSD with a JMICRON controller as these have problems that make them quite slow at times.
John
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
They have search engines now?
Have you ever pondered the words "Search Engines" are they really engines that generate searches? should they be answer engines? of course that would be hard because they don't really return answers, only results... so should they be search result engines? :-D
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Actually, I'd prefer to get the opinions of people I trust rather than random bits of information.
yeah, me too. I always kick myself when I can't find the links that lead me to a solution when I search for it for someone else. :) I like to know what people think. I can search, but search will get you half the story, and even then is it is source you trust? :)
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
I think jet engines are more fun. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Christopher Duncan wrote:
That's a point to consider as they get pricey in a hurry. Currently, a 60 gig drive would probably make a decent working space but video adds up fast.
Our normal Modus Operandi is usually a VERY high speed but small RAID for storing/capturing one and only one video. Depending on the system that may be 1 to 6 drives in a RAID 0. Then you have storage, big and reasonably fast, but big. We've done this with SATA, SDD, SCSI, etc. for over a decade. Not necessarily the best resume, but we've been capturing video for a while. :)
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
Yeah, I'm thinking along those lines myself. Keep an optimized working area, and move stuff back and forth. Prices are too high for any serious quantity of storage.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Christopher Duncan wrote:
First, how much faster is I/O on one of these things versus a decent 10k SATA? 1x? 10x? HolyCrap!x? I know there are a variety of specs, but I'm talking overall perceived value here, as in "how long before this progress bar goes away?"
pretty fast. but remember there are two types of SDD, one is designed for speed, the other price. Not that the cheap one is all that cheap.... still, watch your speed specs. I put two 80gig SDD's on a box for my project leader on an i7. He's tickled pink and loves it. The OS is on one of the SDDs so he has a lightning fast startup. Of course price was not a consideration so my boss bought a dozen of the fastest 80gig SDDs and then found a use for them... :laugh:
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
Tell him I need to borrow his checkbook for just a moment. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
To be conservative with reliability I'd stick with either an Intel drive or one using the Indilinx Barefoot controller. Some of the new ones (eg Sandforce) look to be better in performance but don't have the long record of use to prove reliability yet. Between Intel and the various barefoot drives you're basically choosing between faster random IO (Intel) and faster sequential writes (barefoot). Both effectively max the sata bus in sequential reads. The tradeoffs between the two modes are such that the general recommendation is to decide what your minimum needed capacity/what you can afford is and select between them on that criteria.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
Yeah, Intel keeps coming up on everyone's list. Doesn't matter how fast they are if they're unreliable.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services