Solid state drive performance
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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
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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
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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
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I think jet engines are more fun. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
I think jet engines are more fun.
only from four sides when you are close up.... The fifth is bad... and the 6th is much, much worse... ;P ;P
_________________________ 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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They 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
I'm wondering then if the best optimization for video would be to put it on the drive that gets used for all the temporary read / write stuff. Faster program load time is nice, but once it's loaded that thrill is gone. In a similar fashion, I don't really care how fast the machine boots. My boxes stay on all the time, so that's not really a factor either. I wonder what the benefit is of putting the pagefile on it since video's pretty memory intensive & presumably there could be a fair amount of swapping going on.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
My 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
When you speak of lack of degradation, do you mean like you don't see the palm trees in Florida after the first six months (i.e. the new wears off)? Or is there some sort of performance degradation inherent in SSDs?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
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I 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
Yeah, Intel seems to be top of everyone's list.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Christopher Duncan wrote:
I think jet engines are more fun.
only from four sides when you are close up.... The fifth is bad... and the 6th is much, much worse... ;P ;P
_________________________ 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 was screwing around the other day in After Effects with just that, a guy getting sucked into a jet engine. Had seen a scene like that on Firefly and thought it would be fun to play with. For me. Not the guy. Just me. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
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When you speak of lack of degradation, do you mean like you don't see the palm trees in Florida after the first six months (i.e. the new wears off)? Or is there some sort of performance degradation inherent in SSDs?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesNo, I meant that usually one needs to reinstall the computer after a year or two, because it gets slow. I haven't noticed that at all this time, and it's eight months old now.
"When did ignorance become a point of view" - Dilbert
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No, I meant that usually one needs to reinstall the computer after a year or two, because it gets slow. I haven't noticed that at all this time, and it's eight months old now.
"When did ignorance become a point of view" - Dilbert
And you guys don't have palm trees, right? :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
And you guys don't have palm trees, right? :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesI wish!
"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 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 keep all of my code and contributed libraries on the SSD drive. (I don't have a need for super-fast boot times at the moment) Visual Studio loads faster (Resharper has to crawl all of your source files when you load a solution), Intellisense is more responsive, and builds are much faster. Great stuff.
Before .NET 4.0, object Universe = NULL;
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My 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
Windows 7 *is* much better regarding degradation. At the very least, the three-month-drop isn't there, and I also didn't notice any slow degradaion (yet?)
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
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 heard from this hybrid disc: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Seagate-Momentus-XT-Solid-State-Hybrid-Preview/?page=10 http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_500gb/12.htm http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/sales/momentus-xt-benchmark-results.pdf It seems to be very promising. Has anyone already used this drive? Thanks for sharing your experiences, Patrik
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I heard from this hybrid disc: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Seagate-Momentus-XT-Solid-State-Hybrid-Preview/?page=10 http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_500gb/12.htm http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/sales/momentus-xt-benchmark-results.pdf It seems to be very promising. Has anyone already used this drive? Thanks for sharing your experiences, Patrik
I haven't jumped on the SSD bandwagon yet, but just read a really in depth comparison / review this morning from /. Today's solid state drives - value perspective[^]
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 ServicesAt my workstation in my office I have WD VelociRaptor 10k drives in Raid 0 (striped) - This gives me a benchmarked Read time of ~140MB/s At home, I have a Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB which routinely benchmarks at ~200MB/s (rated at max 230) - couple that w/ the 0.4ms seek time and it boots Windows 7 from cold to login-able in about 12seconds, launches Photoshop CS5 64-bit in 4 seconds, and can copy 300MB of data from the SSD to an external drive faster than Windows takes to pop up the progress dialog box. So i'll go w/ the "Holycrap!x" speed improvement :) There are a few tweaks that a guy should make to his system upon grabbing an SSD though, you can find them on most any hardware-related forum, or even the Windows 7 forums. Things like disabling prefetch, pagefile, etc. Keep in mind that an SSD will blitz the read times of nearly anything out there, while the write times are what are lagging at this point (unless you splurg for a damn good one) so if you're doing a lot of writing to a drive, it's not the best way to go, but for booting and running programs, it's really freakin' awesome.
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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 ServicesRunning a Sony Vaio from the "Windows Selection" when Windows 7 first came out. My laptop has a RAID 0 setup with 2 256GB SSD's. Side by side with every other developer in my company (3) my code compiles 10x faster. My machine boot up is right at or slightly over 7 seconds. There is absolutely nothing faster I have seen in a laptop, and I've got 3 of the same model Sony's, the other 2 are average at best running 7200 rpm (non Raid) drives. I've run these for about 6 months now, 0 problems, 0 trouble, -1 wait time. V
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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 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've got Weven x64 running from an 128Gb SSD and were talking holy crap this thing is fast. To be able to use an SSD to its full potential, move everything that isn't part of the OS or applications to a seperate drive; magnetic or otherwise. SSD drives are not good when it come to multiple concurrent reads or writes; they are abysmally slow then. If you have enough ram, configure the system without a page file, this will speed things up as well. I have VS2008 and that will load from the mouse click to fully usable interface within 2 seconds. Outlook 2010 loads in less than a second. And Weven itself takes about 5 seconds to boot. In fact, my bios POST sequence takes longer than Weven does.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Second, if I was only going to buy one, where would I get the best bang for the buck?
Personally, I'd get a smallish, high performance SSD drive and only have the OS and apps on it and leave the big data files on a seperate mechanical, well defragmented drive. One other thing, Weven, afaik, is the only Windows OS to support SSD drives. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM[^]
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. Stephen Hawking
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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 ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
or use it as the drive for the swap file, temp files, etc?
IIRC, Windows uses the original EXE and DLL files as the swap files for the executables, so getting them on the SSD will help. Putting the page file on the SSD will definately speed up the rest of your virtual memory. Temp files.. depends on how they're used... and whether they're small enough and consumed fast enough to never go to disk. Keep the video files on spinning media. I've clocked the 5400 RPM 500GB spinning drive in my laptop at ~60 MB/sec sustained (sequential) write. Unless you're running a server, any modern spinning SATA drive will be fast enough.
patbob