SSD Hard Drive.

[FlashDrive]

Replaced my WD 600GB Velociraptor 10,000rpm ( c: drive ) with a 120GB SSD ( read 285MB/s ... write 275MB/s ) and what a difference it makes.
Installation of programs just " screams " through in no time at all.
This is not the fastest SSD around ... ( somewhere in the middle ) but what a difference.
Opening of programs is super quick ... boot time and shutdown are " snappy "
The Velociraptor is now a secondary drive ... and I thought it was fast.
And the SSD doesn't need defragging like normal drives .... :thumbsup:

Flash ... :D

[originaltrilogy]

Yes my computer is feeling faster than a new one with a 60GB SSD now for booting.
I like to use it now more than the work one which is twice as fast processor and RAM. My old one feels faster to use with SSD. It is the best upgrade I have bought.

[Nortilus]

im thinking of putting a ssd in my laptop as they use far less power too...which would equate to longer battery life.

[FlashDrive]

Josh ... Do it .. you won't regret doing it.

Flash . :D

[Jules76]

I've got two 60GB SSD's in RAID 0. Now that screams!

Windows boots in no time, games and applications load without much delay. The way it's suppose to be. :thumbsup:

No way I'm going back to mechanical drives for anything but storage.

[FlashDrive]

Nothing like it ...eh...! Jules .. way to go :thumbsup:

[bartman]

Thanks Colin ( and return posters) for posting this.
The more people that are aware of the fantastic little device the better....ie prices will drop, capacities will increase, work flow will be faster and stress levels will reduce.
Colin, maybe a quick tutorial on how you migrated the old to the new?
I'm this [-----] close to buying one myself, but unsure of the whole windows verification thingy....
Once again
Cheers
Bartman

[Tiotion]

Yep, i love my SSD. I bought a 128GB Crucial M4 as it, and Intel have the best reputation for reliability. I was initially going to get just 64 GB but windoze takes up close to 20GB, which doesn't leave much for anything else...i've already used up 46GB (you want to leave 10-15% of the drive free...don't fill it to the brim). There are faster SSD's out there, cheaper too, but once you're down from 5hrs to 20 seconds off-to-completely-ready-to-use, i really can't see the advantage of even faster drives, at the sake of reliability (ok, Solitaire will load in 0.33 seconds, rather than 0.5 seconds).

Installation is pretty easy, although i installed mine before windows. i.e. the laptop was brand new, out of the box. Just a matter of undoing all the screws to get to the HDD bays, pulling the HDD out of its caddy, popping the SSD in its place, and fitting the HDD to the secondary bay.
If you don't have a second HDD bay, either get as big an SSD you can afford, and use a portable/external HDD drive, or you can find caddies that fit in the optical drive bay, and put a secondary HDD in there (it may be tricky to find one that perfectly fits your laptop).

But before i installed the drive, i downloaded and burnt to an ISO, firmware update for my M4. Updated the firmware for the SSD first, then installed windoze.

In regards to migration, i used Acronis True Image to make an image of my old laptop HDD onto a USB3 HDD, and then copied what ever i needed. You could also find a sata to usb cable, and drag over whatever you need from your old HDD that is connected to the laptop with a usb.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean about Windows verification bart. After putting in the CD key and installing, select register over the phone (or words to that effect) chose Australia, and call the number. You punch in the numbers you're given on screen into the phone and punch in those that you're given back into the laptop. Fully automated, no personal details or anything.
Or...avoid installing one of the updates (wish i remembered which), that gives you the 'Genuine Advantage' lol....or get linux....

[SkyViking]

I love my SSD drive too! I installed it about a year ago as my system drive and it's been rock solid and lightning fast all the time, I'm definitely never looking back :D
Win7 boots in 15-20s, from power on to showing the desktop. And it's not getting slower over time, which was otherwise a notorious 'feature' of any other Win installation I've had. Word/Excel etc starts in literally a flash, it simply instantly pops up. it's just fantastic.

[supernova1965]

If you use software like ghost you can take an image of the entire existing HDD and simply ghost it to the new SSD and windows can't tell the difference and you don't need to worry about reactivation problems.:thumbsup:

[Tiotion]

But would you have driver problems? I first installed Win7 with BIOS set to IDE. Wouldn't boot after changing it to AHCI, so I had to reinstall...

The other thing I don't like about ghost is that it brings all the crap you don't want/need/is broken...So i would prefer a fresh installation.

[RickS]

Interesting article on SSD reliability: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

Cheers,
Rick.

[supernova1965]

I could be wrong but I think Win7 will handle the transfer from Sata or IDE to SSD and I always keep all the crap off my machines if virus and malware security is good there shouldn't be any thing broken, and make sure when I make an image it is clean before hand. And it also brings all your programs with it so you don't have to spend time and effort getting your programs reinstalled and set up the way you like

[g__day]

In a perfect world I would have a low cost, RAID 5 / 6 solid state NAS on a 10 GB network and simply have diskless, remote IPL machines.

But we are far from a perfect world. You can go for combo PCI express / NAND devices that give you transfer rates around 700 MB/sec (e.g. http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/info/AIT-MMOCSSD1RVDX220/1774/) - so that's crazy performance! My issue is that I don't want to install Win7 + all the software again, and haven't played with Ghost when you are trying to clone a mostly empty 2T HDD onto a 256GB SSD

[supernova1965]

I think that would work as when ghost restores the image it leaves the rest of the drive as free space and the drive doesn't have to be a specific size. I am almost positive it would work as long as the used space isn't more than the capacity of the new drive.

[FlashDrive]

Thanks for all the great comments and tip's.

BTW ...my Windows Experience Index went from 5.9 to 7.2 just because I installed the new SSD ... that's how good SSD's are.

My system is fairly average :

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66Ghz ( default ... not overclocked )
Patriot DDR2 4Gb 1066Mhz Ram
Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 1Gb DDR5
MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit SP1
OCZ Vertex 2 Sata II 3.5'' 120Gb SSD ( c drive )
WD Velociraptor 600Gb 10,000rpm ( secondary drive ).

Recently added a PCI USB3 Card to give me 4 x USB3 Ports.

:P Plays Crysis 2 very nicely ... :P

Love my FPS Games.

Flash .. :D

[AdrianF]

Was only looking at SSD's today and wishing I could afford one. 60gb $120 is a bit small for what I would need. I would want one for my laptop to replace the 750gb drive. I reckon in about a year or so the drives will come down in price. Somewhere in a packed box I have an advert for a 10 megabyte hard drive for around $10000 to fit an XT PC.

Adrian

[supernova1965]

Hi Adrian,

Would you please scan that add and post if :prey::cool:

[HCR32]

Get another one and raid 0 to see how fast is really fast!!!!!

[AdrianF]

I am packing to move and is sealed inone of 7 boxes
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/127
Have a look at the ad


Adrian

[supernova1965]

I am a patient man Adrian I can wait:P:rofl:

[dynobolt]

Makes the $1,500 I paid for the 10 megabyte hard drive for my Sperry PC back in 1985 seem quite reasonable.

[FlashDrive]

Whaaaaaaat.....OMG :eyepop: :jawdrop:

Flash :D

[Jules76]

Can't remember what my HDD score was before I upgraded but I get 7.8. :D Apparently topping out at 7.9 on the HDD rating is pretty hard to do but not impossible.

My CPU/RAM (Intel i7 870 / 8GB 1600Mhz) is holding my overall rating back at 7.5 and I get a top score of 7.9 on the 3D/desktop graphics thanks to my ATi HD6950.

I take the Windows Experience Index with a grain of salt though. It's more a quick general information on how well your computer performs more than anything.

[g__day]

My brother and I bought our first PC back in 1982 - as Uni students so it was discounted from $6,000 to $4,500 - for a NEC APC (8088 or 8086 CPU) with 256KB of RAM, DOS 1 and CPM one and two 8" floppy disks. Absolutely no software or documentation was provided we had to wait 6 months for the C compiler and write all our own software - the first being a decent WYSIWYG editor (we only had edlin - which makes notepad look like the bees knees)!

We looked into hard drives - you could buy a 5MB Winchester for another $5,000 - only catch was you had to write your own controller for the drive! Heaviest PC I ever owned - by a very long shot. The drives when they read sounded exactly like metal lathes, but we found out Diskcopy on DOS 1 would copy absolutely any copy protected disk :)

[ZeroID]

Mine was an old 286 with 640k ram and a 20 meg disk running drive space compression to give me :eyepop: 30 megs nearly !! Green Screen ...
Dungeons and Dragons text game ....
Star Word processor.

And before that even, a Xerox 820 running CPM OS. ( I can't even remember what CPM stood for now !! ). And I used to fix them !!

Ah, them's were the days ... :D Not !

[tlgerdes]

If you can, do what I did, get a HDD caddy for your DVD drive bay.

I have a 250G SSD and 500Gb Hybrid HDD (4G SSD Cache +500G 7200rpm HDD).

I never used the DVD drive. Still have it there for posterity.

[AdrianF]

My first PC was a TI99 with 4k ram bought around '83 for I think about $150 on special. Only lasted a couple of days and it died took it back for refund and bought a C64 (wow) with dataset. Had a TRS80 1,2and 3 before getting a 286 with 1 Meg of ram for uni. Worked as a grape packer to buy more ram, VGA graphic and a sound blaster sound card.

Adrian

[wasyoungonce]

One of my daughters just got a Macbook Air with a 256Mb SSD.

Man that thing flies moving files and in general. I'm looking around for one for my netbook and main processing computer. Maybe one as a boot drive and one as a swap drive?

[FlashDrive]

[QUOTE=wasyoungonce;771374]One of my daughters just got a Macbook Air with a 256Mb SSD.

256Mb SSD ..... gee they must be real small files ... :P

I'm sure you meant 256GB SSD :hi:

Flash :D

[wasyoungonce]

Mb's Gb's...meh it's easy to fall behind in terminology....but yeah Gb's:lol:

[g__day]

How easy it is to spend endless $$$ on PCs over the many years. I think I've given about 7 away, rebuilt 10 or so multiple times and still have enough hardware to build another half dozen if I chose! Its a shame there isn't somewhere worthy to donate all the old motherboards, RAM, CPU, videocards, DVD drives, Power supplies, soundcards, cabling and monitors too. I couldn't even donate a 21" Sony monitor - that used to be my pride and joy - to the local charity - they won't take monitors.

For a long, long while I'd spend around $3-4K per year on upgrading PCs. I only tend to upgrade video cards now every year or too. I totalled the amount of RAM in PCs around the house = 50GBs, over 12GBs of Video RAM, terabytes of Hard drive space, 10 UPS, 3 * gigabit switches, 2 routers (one demoted to be an access point), two networked laser printers (one colour, one pure black and white), two faxes, one scanner ... - okay its an addiction, plain and simple.

If I start playing with SSDs it will never end. Seriously with a 3 year old quad core CPU I don't feel any urgent need to go to an I7 - that would involve another $7K to upgrade most of the house. Then I'd be tempted to move from 24" to 30" monitors, then bigger (or dual) graphics cards. If you let this hobby get away from you and you kit out for a family you can easily spend $30K - $50K over a decade or two. I'd rather spend that on holidays or astronomy gear! :)

[GTB_an_Owl]

you would probably find that your local Tafe IT teacher would love you Mathew

i still remember the old - donated - machines i worked on at ourimbah university
some of them worked - some didn't
we had to combine them to get a working unit

geoff

[steve000]

I can say my 32GB in my little old EEEPC made it so fast i use it for almost anything now days.

we are talking 15-18 seconds from power button to opening Firefox to Google.. that's on battery, its unreal

I look forward to doing a raid 0 on sata 6gbs bus with an i7 driving it.. 1 day when i stop spending cash on telescopes :P

My work still insists that a single mechanical HDD is fast enough and the cpu needs to be upgraded instead. *rollseyes*

[graham.hobart]

Just a question for all you tech heads out there..
I have a Windows Vista Sony Viao about 3 years old that has a very full HD, is it worth buying an external SSD and transferring everything on to that then just using the native HD for day to day programmes like PHD/Astrophotographers Tool etc
I ask this because I would have no idea how to change the HDD inside the machine
Do external SSD's really help spped up the machine or is it slowed down by a USB 2 connection?
Graham:shrug:

[supernova1965]

The only way it will speed your computer is to clone the old drive then put the SSD in your machine and restore the cloned image to the SSD. Using software like Ghost. They can only speed it up if they are the drive installed in the machine

[naskies]

My two cents for the tech heads... I upgraded my MacBook Pro to an Intel X-25MG2 160 GB SSD and replaced the DVD drive with a Toshiba 1 TB 5200 RPM HDD. I use the HDD for storing large files (SLR RAWs, videos, app images, etc) and everything else on the SSD.

Here are a couple of screen shots of my Activity Monitor taken when I was defragging my virtual machine disk image to recover some disk space. Sequential reads: over 200 MB/sec. Input/output operations per second (IOPS): often in the thousands, exceeds 10000 when installing apps. My previous 7200 RPM laptop HDD was lucky to hit 60 MB/sec and 120 IOPS for random reads/writes... my SSD is often 30 to 100 times faster!

The best part of all is the scalability. Loading Photoshop CS5 on its own takes about 3 or 4 seconds. Loading Photoshop, Lightroom, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint simultaneously takes a bit over 5 seconds. Amazing... especially in a laptop!

The current generation drives are literally twice as fast (or more) than mine :eyepop: (Word of warning if you're planning on buying one... be sure to do your research, as the cheapest/slowest SSDs are virtually no faster than HDDs!)

My SSD was literally the single most impressive upgrade I've experienced in my 20 odd years of using computers at home.

[naskies]

The crazy thing is that the current top-of-the-line SSDs peak at about 80% saturation of a SATA 6 Gbps bus... RAID 0 would easily saturate it (unless you had two separate SATA controllers).



Well... if they upgraded to an SSD then the CPU would probably "need" to be upgraded ;-)

The funny thing is that since getting an SSD, my computer actually runs HOTTER than ever before - because the CPU and GPU are no longer sitting idle during batch processing.

Seriously though, you could demonstrate to your work that the HDD is the bottleneck (and not the CPU) by profiling a typical task using Activity Monitor (Mac) or Task Manager / Performance Monitor (Win). Then again, I've had people argue to my face that their CPU is "too slow" even when I showed them the utilisation graph that stays below 10% :)

[g__day]

So if my motherboards only support SATA2 and there is only one PCI Express connector - so I can't add in PCIe SATA 3 converters - is there much point considering SSD or should I wait until I upgrade motherboards?

[kustard]

Recently one of my mates bought himself a very nice gaming rig and for the storage system he uses a 60GB SSD in conjunction with a 1TB HDD set up in a RAID type cache mode.

Simply put, the SSD drive is used as a cache for the most accessed blocks of data and the more he uses the computer the faster the load times get as the system puts more and more of the most used data onto the SSD.

He's said that initially the PC would boot with a normal speed but now it really flies at boot-up and with program start up times.

The system is called Intel Smart Response Technology and you need a specific mobo and chip-set for it but I reckon if you are going to invest in a new PC soon it's definitely something to look into.

[g__day]

Well a quick search seems to reveal that with decent SATA 2 drives expect about 250MB/sec performance and double that for SATA 3 drives.

My main HD - an old 1 TB drive transfers data routinely between 90 - 100 MB/sec - so at best I'd see a 150% improvement - not something to sneeze about.

I'd guess my rig is mainly CPU bound - quad core Conroe2 CPU mostly flogged when doing astro image processing.

[naskies]

Large sequential read/write speeds (the 250 MB/s vs 100 MB/s) can be a bit misleading because it's the best-case performance for HDDs, least-impressive aspect of SSD performance (their strength is in near-instaneous seek times), and you'd rarely see either figure in practice - unless you format the drive or copy HUGE files constantly (video editing).

Hard drives are considered slow because of their random seek times - typically 10 ms, give or take. Most SSDs have random read/write latencies of about 0.1 ms - best case scenario, that's 10000% the throughput! (Even more under server workloads.)

Here's an example of the difference (c.f. the Western Digital VelociRaptor - a fast HDD):

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2944/10

I'd recommend doing some simple benchmarking/profiling to see whether your workflow would benefit (much) from an SSD. Check the CPU utilisation first - if it's close to 100% most of the time, an SSD probably won't make much difference. Next, check RAM usage and page file swapping levels - if the available RAM is low and swapping occurs a lot then you need more RAM (but an SSD would also noticeably help). Finally, check the disk IO (reads/writes per second) - if either the MB/sec or IO operations/sec flatlines at some arbitrary point then you can expect a HUGE improvement.

There are also hybrid laptop hard drives (e.g. a standard 500 GB HDD, with an embedded 4 GB SSD cache) that provide impressive performance for a small price premium.

[g__day]

Well I just got the urge and spent $200 on an OCZ 120GB SSD. Seems to work fine.

Rather than Ghosting an existing drive I've taken the long road of installing Win7 64 bit Ultimate, MS Office 2007, all Astronomy Programs and all printers and perhiperals.

I presume I turn indexing off and pagefile off for a SSD (my main rig has 8GB of RAM - rarely use above 6GB at max).

What's a decent freeware utility to measure HD performance?

Now I'm off to recover all mail files and e-mail addresses - ho hum!

[AndyK]

Hmmm ... I think I'll bide my time a bit longer.
We bought some top-of-the-line OCZ's at work and while their performance was blistering, 5 out of 7 drives failed in the first couple of months.

[tlgerdes]

Yeah, but Andy, you live in town not known for its reliability.:lol:

[AndyK]

... Could be worse. Officially our locality is "Darawank" ... :lol:

[g__day]

So I just swapped the SSD from one of the two RAID controller SATA ports on my motherboard to one of the four Southbridge one.

Froze once and lost the SSD 20 minutes later (likely a BIOS chipset driver issue), solid since then. Avg speed now 220 MB/sec = nice!

Fingers crossed it keeps steady else its back to the RAID controller!

[Poita]

Yeah, grabbing a 2nd hand macbook with firewire for $300 and adding a 60GB SSD makes an awesome AP rig, you get to run windows, osx and linux, built in firewire for cameras and a nice light unit.

[naskies]

Yep, that's a good idea if you want to minimise the read/write cycles.

I'm personally not too bothered by it - I thrash it (page file, indexing, encryption, scratch disk, etc) and make use of the performance. I regularly back up, so if it dies within warranty then it's just a bit of inconvenience. If it dies outside warranty, the performance alone would have been worth it for me.

[danielsun]

Well I just bought a new 17" laptop with the works and fitted a 240gb SSD as the primary c drive and 750gb for storage and I must say that it absolutely flies!! BUT... i'm not sure if it is because of the windows updates but since then it seems to seize every now and then usually a minute or so after start up, but when its running well opens up programs at the blink of an eye. Cant wait to take a heap of data and see how quick it calibrates and stacks in IP.

[cjmarsh81]

If your SSD is freezing up check the manufacturers website for a firmware update if one is available.
Sanforce Controllers in particular have been having a lot of issues with lockups. I heard this has been fixed in the latest firmware update.