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  #41  
Old 09-10-2011, 12:32 AM
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g__day (Matthew)
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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.
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  #42  
Old 09-10-2011, 01:07 PM
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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.
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  #43  
Old 10-10-2011, 02:29 PM
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g__day (Matthew)
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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!
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  #44  
Old 10-10-2011, 02:36 PM
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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.
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  #45  
Old 11-10-2011, 05:55 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AndyK View Post
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.
Yeah, but Andy, you live in town not known for its reliability.
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  #46  
Old 11-10-2011, 07:01 PM
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AndyK (Andy)
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Originally Posted by tlgerdes View Post
Yeah, but Andy, you live in town not known for its reliability.
... Could be worse. Officially our locality is "Darawank" ...
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  #47  
Old 12-10-2011, 12:48 AM
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g__day (Matthew)
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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!
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  #48  
Old 13-10-2011, 11:49 AM
Poita (Peter)
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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.
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  #49  
Old 13-10-2011, 09:05 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by g__day View Post
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).
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.
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  #50  
Old 23-10-2011, 10:57 PM
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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.
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  #51  
Old 31-10-2011, 10:07 PM
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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.
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