SSD's, what's the latest word?
-
It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
Was running a Dell XPS1730 T9300 2.2ghz with 4gb RAM laptop with 2x 250gb HDD in stripe and the performance was poor (about 30 seconds to compile my solution) I purchase 2x Dell Precision T7400 workstations from Ebay for AUD$1800 combined them and now I have a 2x Quad Core 2.5ghz Xeon with 8gb FB DDR RAM, with a Corsair 80gb Force SSD, plus 4x 200gb HDD's in stripe with a 2tb drive for backups. Now I compile in about 6 seconds. Next in my wish list is to get a PCI-e SSD (Revodrive most likely), as the max speed I get out of this SSD is about 170mb-200mb, PCI-e SSDs can get upwards to 500mb/s. I find that VS when compiling uses a massive amount of IO, it can help a little with programming speeds, and also helps alot with debugging speeds. But yeah it all comes down to budget. As also mentioned SSD's have a fixed life span, so they do "expire" after a certain amount of use, however you should get at least 24 months out of one, but not like Spindle drives which can last for several years.
-
I have to say, this post might as well have been in another language entirely. All I can get out of it is a faint sense of sarcasm and that your name is Kevin. :)
There is no failure only feedback
Hi'ya there John, didn't mean bad, if sarcasm at all...yeps you's got me name. I've been forced to use an Apple MacBook Air notebook computer since last year. It's the bigger screen version, Core2 process with 2GBram and 255GB SSD disk. It looked really cool as a carry around device, and my boss got one for me. It's been happily running Windows Server 2008, SQL Server Denali, Sharepoint and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 in a virtual machine, provisioned by the open source VirtualBox from Oracle. They have made me run demonstrations and tutorial explorations, using another virtual machine running on the same (tiny thin) MacBook Air as the server. This virtual machine is provisioned using an evaluation edition of VMware Fusion. Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Office 2010 provide the client experience. Clients using this set up do not identify 'speed of use' until more than 3 concurrent remote sessions are in progress. This computer is seriously unspec for brilliance on paper.... but because it's loaded with a SSD, it's virtual paging needs can be met very easily. 2 GB RAM... and we running Mac OS host, Windows ServerVM and a Visual Studio VM. Without a SSD it wouldn't be very easy to boot, let alone use ..... How you might select which one to deploy in bosses plant; very different question ;) I'm English, south coast... is it an accent thing? Kevin
-
Not finding much info on SSDs with respect to developers, I did quite a few timing tests when I got my drive. I got the SSD (80GB) for high read/write speed and zero seek times rather than size - it's a cache for the things that will make the most difference, with HDD being perfectly fast enough for all the big data files I use (seeking is really what cripples HDDs, sequential access is fast). I split it into 2 partitions: C: for the OS/pagefile and most used apps, and D: for my code. (I've only put data on the SSD that I can reinstall or recover from Source Control if the SSD fails). All the other "non-backed-up" data is on my old HDD, and the entire SSD is backed up onto the HDD once a week. If the SSD fails, I can just dual-boot back onto my HDD and be up and working in about half an hour (just get and rebuild the code). With the SSD, install times are much better. Sure, you don't install often (apart from endless @#!$%* Adobe bug/security updates), but it's so much better when you do. Startup times are also significantly improved. Boot time (cold start to having solutions open and ready to work in 2 instances of visual studio) went from 7 minutes to 18 seconds! Visual Studio 2010 startup time dropped from around 10 seconds to about 2-3s. Shutting down dropped from 40s to 11s. With the disk caching in Win7, warm-boot times for apps are much less of a problem anyway but it's still a few seconds faster with the SSD than a cached HDD. Installs/Startup are nice, but how does it help with the minute-by-minute tasks of developing? * Apps are all slicker - lots of little things just happen noticeably faster, even things that I thought would be server-bound such as populating the TFS Team Explorer window - much more pleasant to use. * The time taken to compile our code dropped by 25% (16 minutes down to 12). Building a single-line change and running our app (to a point where I can start debugging) dropped from 59s to 42s. A small saving but it happens so frequently, and that 17s was "dead time". * The big win is searching the codebase for something (which I do surprisingly often - usually several times a day). This used to take minutes and now takes seconds. These time savings mainly reduce frustration/tedium but they shave around 25% off all the delays in the day - the ones that are so short that you can't switch to another task, so you don't do anything but simply wait. I conservatively calculated break-even point on the cost of the drive at about 2-3 months. Interestingly, there is now very litt
-
It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
Personally dealing with a legacy product with lots and lots of C++. I have simply switched to a laptop with a SSD drive and multicore processors. My setup is a full size keyboard/mouse and HDMI monitors in portrait mode. One monitor driven directly off the laptop and the other with this usb adapter. http://plugable.com/products/uga-2k-a/ Duplicate externals at home and work and simply carry the laptop back and forth to the desired working location. It takes a few seconds to connect: Power (extra adapter at work) Network Prime display via HDMI Secondary display, full size keyboard and mouse via a single USB port. With the laptop display I have three monitors; two of which are almost the size of an open newspaper to work from. Convenient and just bloody fast! The rare times I need to do a image backup or run virtual machines; I plug in a external esata hard disk. When I travel to customers site for an extended stay; I just buy a cheap usb keyboard at the local office store and generally borrow a couple of flat screen monitors which I turn on their sides for portrait orientation.
-
Hi'ya there John, didn't mean bad, if sarcasm at all...yeps you's got me name. I've been forced to use an Apple MacBook Air notebook computer since last year. It's the bigger screen version, Core2 process with 2GBram and 255GB SSD disk. It looked really cool as a carry around device, and my boss got one for me. It's been happily running Windows Server 2008, SQL Server Denali, Sharepoint and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 in a virtual machine, provisioned by the open source VirtualBox from Oracle. They have made me run demonstrations and tutorial explorations, using another virtual machine running on the same (tiny thin) MacBook Air as the server. This virtual machine is provisioned using an evaluation edition of VMware Fusion. Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Office 2010 provide the client experience. Clients using this set up do not identify 'speed of use' until more than 3 concurrent remote sessions are in progress. This computer is seriously unspec for brilliance on paper.... but because it's loaded with a SSD, it's virtual paging needs can be met very easily. 2 GB RAM... and we running Mac OS host, Windows ServerVM and a Visual Studio VM. Without a SSD it wouldn't be very easy to boot, let alone use ..... How you might select which one to deploy in bosses plant; very different question ;) I'm English, south coast... is it an accent thing? Kevin
Ahhh! Much better! :) I don't know, maybe it's just me but your first post was unparseable. Maybe it's the end result of a particularly relaxing weekend I just had. I use vmware workstation for my day to day programming and it's been excellent up until I started doing a big new project with a wpf front end and vs2010, now it's all a bit slow and really slow at times and I have a massive quad core with dual velociraptor sata drives and a boatload of ram so I'm looking for upgrades. Sadly I think the biggest problem is wpf under vmware and probably not the I/O. I really don't want to give up virtual stations for development, it's just so much safer and easier to switch / upgrade hardware.
There is no failure only feedback
-
I was just upgraded to a revodrive at work, and yeah it makes a heck of a difference.
Curvature of the Mind now with 3D
The Hot Crazy Solid State Drive Scale[^] The picture of Barney pointing out "Hot vs Crazy" sums it up perfectly! And the video is hilarious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zADosF3XoQ[^]
-
It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
They're awesome. I'll never use a hard drive as a system drive ever again. Here's my recent experience: I bought one for my home gaming machine and raved about it to my boss. I guess I jump-started his curiosity, since he immediately ordered 4 Crucial 250GB SSDs (Model C300) for our (and both our bosses) laptops. We're running ThinkPad T61s (which people have stated don't even support full-speed SATA-300, due to compatibility concerns with their UltraBay interfaces) and even then, it's blindingly fast. I can boot Windows 7 (x64) on my T61, which only has 3 GB RAM, and I'm at the login prompt in under 15 seconds (after POST). Launching Visual Studio 2010 Professional used to take about 45 seconds on my old Seagate Momentus hybrid SSD/HD. Now, it's up and ready to work in less than 20 seconds on the first launch. It's up in less than 8 seconds on subsequent launches. Any Windows accessories or domain administration tools launch instantly. EVERYTHING is faster, more smooth, and even feels transparent. I no longer even feel the need to monitor the HD activity light, because I no longer wait for anything! Running a virus scan now pegs both cores of my CPU at 100%, since it isn't waiting for the mechanical HD to slowly feed it data. Anything transfer-intensive simply has no more lag. Windows actually has a chance to settle down with volume updates, snapshots, etc. in the background and the drive access light becomes inactive. Now, the bad... The SSD I bought for home use ($180) was an OCZ Vertex 90 GB. It benchmarked out slower than the 250 GB Crucial units that my boss purchased for around $500 each. That irritated me, since I have an add-on eSATA 300 controller. Still, it completely blows away my old 10K RPM SATA hard drive and actually makes Vista x64 run right on par with Windows 7 in boot time and responsiveness. When playing Counter-Strike Source, I'm always one of the first players on a new map, even with my 4-year-old AMD-based PC. From what I have read, the larger capacity SSDs have better parallel data transfer across more flash modules, giving it a naturally faster transfer capability. So, go as big as you can afford. In my case, I loaded the OS and applications (games) on the SSD, and used the old SATA HD for data storage and the Windows swap file. They recommend only using the SSD for data that doesn't change often, since each flash write eventually degrades the unit's ability to store new data. I interpreted that to mean that you should find somewhere else to put the swa
-
SSD's have a very high failure rate. IF you can live with that, then by all means.
Where there's smoke, there's a Blue Screen of death.
Could you cite some sources for that information? I have yet to have a problem with any of my SSDs from different manufacturers, but I'd be interested to know which brands/models/etc. actually have failure problems and what the rate is. Thanks, -Derek
-
They're awesome. I'll never use a hard drive as a system drive ever again. Here's my recent experience: I bought one for my home gaming machine and raved about it to my boss. I guess I jump-started his curiosity, since he immediately ordered 4 Crucial 250GB SSDs (Model C300) for our (and both our bosses) laptops. We're running ThinkPad T61s (which people have stated don't even support full-speed SATA-300, due to compatibility concerns with their UltraBay interfaces) and even then, it's blindingly fast. I can boot Windows 7 (x64) on my T61, which only has 3 GB RAM, and I'm at the login prompt in under 15 seconds (after POST). Launching Visual Studio 2010 Professional used to take about 45 seconds on my old Seagate Momentus hybrid SSD/HD. Now, it's up and ready to work in less than 20 seconds on the first launch. It's up in less than 8 seconds on subsequent launches. Any Windows accessories or domain administration tools launch instantly. EVERYTHING is faster, more smooth, and even feels transparent. I no longer even feel the need to monitor the HD activity light, because I no longer wait for anything! Running a virus scan now pegs both cores of my CPU at 100%, since it isn't waiting for the mechanical HD to slowly feed it data. Anything transfer-intensive simply has no more lag. Windows actually has a chance to settle down with volume updates, snapshots, etc. in the background and the drive access light becomes inactive. Now, the bad... The SSD I bought for home use ($180) was an OCZ Vertex 90 GB. It benchmarked out slower than the 250 GB Crucial units that my boss purchased for around $500 each. That irritated me, since I have an add-on eSATA 300 controller. Still, it completely blows away my old 10K RPM SATA hard drive and actually makes Vista x64 run right on par with Windows 7 in boot time and responsiveness. When playing Counter-Strike Source, I'm always one of the first players on a new map, even with my 4-year-old AMD-based PC. From what I have read, the larger capacity SSDs have better parallel data transfer across more flash modules, giving it a naturally faster transfer capability. So, go as big as you can afford. In my case, I loaded the OS and applications (games) on the SSD, and used the old SATA HD for data storage and the Windows swap file. They recommend only using the SSD for data that doesn't change often, since each flash write eventually degrades the unit's ability to store new data. I interpreted that to mean that you should find somewhere else to put the swa
-
The Hot Crazy Solid State Drive Scale[^] The picture of Barney pointing out "Hot vs Crazy" sums it up perfectly! And the video is hilarious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zADosF3XoQ[^]
-
I bought OCZ Agilent2 180 version. Loved the difference to 5400RPM. Crashed after less than two months. Lost important data that was not in SVN/Dropbox/Mesh. Had to reinstall full system and tools, as the company policy requires full disk encryption. Still going to try with a new one.
-
Could you cite some sources for that information? I have yet to have a problem with any of my SSDs from different manufacturers, but I'd be interested to know which brands/models/etc. actually have failure problems and what the rate is. Thanks, -Derek
It's simple, I'll give you some real numbers. Out of approximatelly close to a 100 harddisks I worked with over the years maybe 2 or 3 had problems. Out of two SSDs one crashed. At least one other person in this thread mentioned the same thing, and I don't think the percentage is better for him too. Maybe the failure rate will improve for SSD but these are the facts now. Cheers
giuchici