Best SSD for boot drive plus programs

[FullmetalCowboy]

Hey guys. Requesting your awesome help yet again. I am looking for an SSD to use as a boot drive and storage for all my main programs and games( Photoshop, lightroom,Dreamweaver, tons of stuff etc). So close to 120 gb? mb more?

I'm not going to limit it with a budget, just as long as i get great value.

I really couldn't care in the slightest what my write speeds are, but i'm looking for a very premium read speed. I have a motherboard capable of SATA III. So the newest ones are fair game.

Thanks in advance guys! These forums never let me down.

 

[metawin]

0_o what is a scratch disk?

A drive other than your SSD to keep files that get written to allot, such as a your internet temp folder, swap file etc.

Read a couple of SSD optimization guides and they should explain more in depth.

 

[gjtbackwards]

Right now I would steer clear of any SandForce controlled SSD, with all the problems both OCZ and Corsair users are reporting. Both manufacturers have started forum threads on their respective sites to deal with all the complaints and offer [possible] explanations.

I had a Force 3 120GB working for a day before it crashed and burned (BIOS could not detect it). Many other F3 users are having the same problem.

I'm now leaning towards the M4 myself, and don't expect to see any real-world performance difference between it and the Force 3 (when it was working).

I can't comment on the OCZ products, but since they use SandForce it could be risky for you to go with their offerings.

 

[metawin]

Right now I would steer clear of any SandForce controlled SSD, with all the problems both OCZ and Corsair users are reporting. Both manufacturers have started forum threads on their respective sites to deal with all the complaints and offer [possible] explanations.

I had a Force 3 120GB working for a day before it crashed and burned (BIOS could not detect it). Many other F3 users are having the same problem.

I'm now leaning towards the M4 myself, and don't expect to see any real-world performance difference between it and the Force 3 (when it was working).

I can't comment on the OCZ products, but since they use SandForce it could be risky for you to go with their offerings.

Don't be so quick to blame the Sandforce.

It seems Corsair is recalling the force 3 and it was due to a problem with the PCB and firmware.

I don't know if they are offering a refund or just offering to fix the one you have though.

If you can get your money back look around when you do and you might find some good deals right now.
I just bought a Vertex 3 for the same price as the M4 with promo codes, so whatever you decide on be sure to look around for deals as they are all trying to out do each other right now and there are deals to be found out there!

LOL forgot to link :lol:

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/10844/

 

[metawin]

0_o what is a scratch disk?

Not to overwhelm you with information right now, but something you may look into later.

How much RAM do you have?

If you have enough, you can make what is essentially a drive out of some of your RAM for temporary files and it will be much faster than any HDD.

I have 16GB and no one could possibly use that unless you are doing some really hardcore work, so I made a RAM disk that I use for the swap and temp internet files, I call a scratch disk, I don't photoshop allot but I assume you could do the same and point it at that for your photoshop scratch, but it will lose everything in it when you power down, so only use it for temp files.

Like I said I don't use photshop enough to worry about it, so I don't know for sure, but it may work and will be faster than any HDD will ever be, and speed is why you bought a SSD right?

Look into it first, I have never done it for photoshop but here is a good site to start.

http://photos4clix.com/?p=1601


You need to read up on SSD optimization because you are really going to want to either move or disable windows page file on an SSD, depending on your RAM availability, but if you disable it that may cause problems with some things that look for it in windows.

That is a favorite topic for augment is seems so be ready for a million opinions if you ask about it.

 

[metawin]

Depending on what you do, Photoshop uses very large amounts of scratch disk (even if you have a lot of RAM) in addition to large amounts of RAM to run and edit images. So first you wouldn't be able to supply enough RAMDISK for a scratch space and second, by using RAM for the scratch disk, you are taking away from memory that photoshop is also a hog of. And when photoshop writes to scratch, it doesn't ever shrink (like when, say, closing an image), but continues to grow.

But like I said, I tested RAMdisk for some limited PS operations that wrote hundreds of megabytes to the scratch disk and it really didn't help - I think there is something else at play like compressing the data before writing it or something.

Ugh on Corsair and Force 3 SSD hardware changes. It is only on their CSSD-F120GB3-BK Force 3 120GB drive and they are doing a total recall and have stopped shipments. There are sandforce issues as well.

Your problems may be with the way you partitioned your RAM disk?

Here is a link that has a walk through and some benchmarks on a RAMdisk using photoshop and its seems like it would defiantly make a difference in terms of speed if done correctly.

He also talks about the way he partitioned it to make it work better.

http://photos4clix.com/?p=1601

Also as far as RAM usage goes, I should have mentioned, that it matters how much GDDR your GPU has, I have 2GB, soon to be 4GB with a crossfire setup and that would put much less strain on your system RAM and probably allow you to make the scratch smaller.

Also I should have mentioned to the OP that you only need one RAMdisk for everything you use it for not separate RAMdisks for each program, so you could benefit from having a large RAMdisk in areas other than photoshop.

How much is your RAM usage in photoshop at peak usages? I don't use photoshop enough to know, but is it really more than say 6GB at peak with some kind of monstrously large files? If you have 16GB and your windows page file on your RAMdisk then you should be able make a fairly large scratch and still have plenty of RAM for your system and PS.

I hardly use PS though, so maybe not?

I guess it all depends on your system configuration, usage, OpenGL settings, capabilities of your GPU blah blah blah, but if you use it allot and have a system capable of doing it, I would consider giving it a second look.

 

[metawin]

I already explained it. With 8GB of RAM I have allocated 5 GB to Photoshop and routinely hit that 5GB while editing. I also explained that setting the scratch to RAMdisk exclusively for photoshop) doesn't speed up performing the operations that cost the most time and write lots to scratch disk. It is something else in Photoshop. It has nothing to do with Opengl or my GPU capabilities p- in fact the op[erations do nothing graphically. Got it?

I guess since you think you know more than Anand about SSDs it should not surprise me that you think you know more about photoshop than the people at photo4clix either.

I was trying to help you, but by all means just keep doing what your doing, I don't really care. Got it?

 

[metawin]

This is not even a problem I am trying to solve now. I didn't ask for help. But if I were, I wouldn't ask for your help because I know what kind of value it would be.

And for Anand - at least I can reason and think for myself.

 

[timothy2180]

You can safely RAID these drives, from what I understand, and there guides out there. If you want to be super safe, when you partition it leave %10 or %15 unallocated and you can fill it all the way up and still be guaranteed room left for garbage collection or just wait on getting your second one until TRIM is supported in RAID, which should not be all that much longer I think.

Not trying to hijack the thread but what is meant by this?
If you leave 15% of a drive unallocated, you can fill up the other 85% worry free?
What do you mean by garbage collection? Like deleted files, or just a generic term for extra help?
Is the extra 15% a page file?

Tks

 

[metawin]

Not trying to hijack the thread but what is meant by this?
If you leave 15% of a drive unallocated, you can fill up the other 85% worry free?
What do you mean by garbage collection? Like deleted files, or just a generic term for extra help?
Is the extra 15% a page file?

Tks

Hey timothy, without being technical about it, garbage collection is an internal function of SSDs that basically tells them what files should be deleted and when your drive is idle it deletes the files that have been flagged. That is called background garbage collection and all SSDs have some form of it. Some also have programs that you can manually run and perform other maintenance tasks on the drive with. Remember this is flash memory, so you can't simply write over it, the cell must be erased first, but your controller has no way of knowing what should be erased on its own and that is where garbage collection comes in.

In order to do this though the drive needs some extra empty space available to work in. Most drives already do this by what is called "over provisioning". Generally speaking the more space you have free the better garbage collection can do its job, less so on the new controllers which have gotten allot better than the last gen at this function.

Over provisioning is why when you buy an SSD drive not all of it is available to you to use, because some is kept solely for the purpose of garbage collection. That is the reason I said "super safe" because since you already have some over provisioning, then leaving another 10 or 15 percent unallocated will pretty much guarantee that you will never overwhelm your drive. Like I said the new gen are much better than the last gen at doing this though.

The other part will most definitely NOT be used for a pagefile, which you should never have on an SSD, or any other file that preforms allot of write operations for that matter. The drive simply claims any unallocated space on a drive for use with garbage collection.

TRIM is a whole other story and you should read up on it before you buy an SSD, especially if you want to use them in an RAID0, which currently is not supported with TRIM. Remember though the new gen of controllers are definitely able to function fine without TRIM and just rely on their own garbage collection to do the job, provided you set them up correctly.

Hope it helped.

 

[timothy2180]

Hey timothy, without being technical about it, garbage collection is an internal function of SSDs that basically tells them what files should be deleted and when your drive is idle it deletes the files that have been flagged. That is called background garbage collection and all SSDs have some form of it. Some also have programs that you can manually run and perform other maintenance tasks on the drive with. Remember this is flash memory, so you can't simply write over it, the cell must be erased first, but your controller has no way of knowing what should be erased on its own and that is where garbage collection comes in.

In order to do this though the drive needs some extra empty space available to work in. Most drives already do this by what is called "over provisioning". Generally speaking the more space you have free the better garbage collection can do its job, less so on the new controllers which have gotten allot better than the last gen at this function.

Over provisioning is why when you buy an SSD drive not all of it is available to you to use, because some is kept solely for the purpose of garbage collection. That is the reason I said "super safe" because since you already have some over provisioning, then leaving another 10 or 15 percent unallocated will pretty much guarantee that you will never overwhelm your drive. Like I said the new gen are much better than the last gen at doing this though.

The other part will most definitely NOT be used for a pagefile, which you should never have on an SSD, or any other file that preforms allot of write operations for that matter. The drive simply claims any unallocated space on a drive for use with garbage collection.

TRIM is a whole other story and you should read up on it before you buy an SSD, especially if you want to use them in an RAID0, which currently is not supported with TRIM. Remember though the new gen of controllers are definitely able to function fine without TRIM and just rely on their own garbage collection to do the job, provided you set them up correctly.

Hope it helped.

Very helpful. Thank you.

 

[Kralnor]

If you want to know the reliability track record of the various vendors, just do a little research. OCZ has the worst track record right now. For instance:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html

Not to hijack the thread, but that was definitely insightful, thanks for the link. Now I feel a bit uneasy about having a Hitachi 7K2 2TB as my main desktop HDD...

 

[metawin]

Not to hijack the thread, but that was definitely insightful, thanks for the link. Now I feel a bit uneasy about having a Hitachi 7K2 2TB as my main desktop HDD...

Meh, OCZ is fine I believe, but you will defiantly want to steer clear of the Corsair Force 3 series for awhile.

They have just recalled ALL of their 120GB Force 3 drives to replace parts of the PCB and change the firmware.

The only good thing is they admitted that they let them out without testing them enough and did not try and blame the users.

But at the end of the day all of the new gen of SSDs have not been out long enough for every single problem to appear and as the old saying goes, buyer beware.

 

[sdep777]

I would like to add a link to an article I read and I too am looking to make the best new purchase decision on an SSD. Since reading this Article I am on a quest to find what drives would fit the catagory below:


Link to the full article: http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/buyers-guide/the-ssd-manufacturers-bluff/



SOLID STATE DRIVE ….FACTS....


Top 5 Most Frequent Drive Accesses by Type and Percentage:
.
-8K Read (7.60%)
-8K Write (56.35%)
-1K Write (6.10%)
-16 Write (5.79%)
-64K Read (2.49%)

Top 5 account for: 78.33% of total drive access over test period
Largest access size in top 50: 256K Read (0.44% of total)


In the end, it confirms something we always thought but just didn’t really understand.  Large sequential read and write access is utilized by the average user less than 1% of the time yet the most used method of access is smaller random write access as shown by the 8k write at over 50%.
Manufacturers showcase the disk access method that is actually used the least (0.44% total) in order to get you to buy their SSDs.

In other words, the 4-8 kb random write access is the single most crucial access that results in better visible ssd performance. simply find the ssd with the best transfer results at the 4-8 kb random access level.


Now I believe the answer to the above advice in bold will lead to the best SSD . hope someone has this answer.

 

[metawin]

OCZ and Sandforce controller = Best SSD drives out right now.

 

[metawin]

I would like to add a link to an article I read and I too am looking to make the best new purchase decision on an SSD. Since reading this Article I am on a quest to find what drives would fit the catagory below:

Top 5 Most Frequent Drive Accesses by Type and Percentage:
.
-8K Read (7.60%)
-8K Write (56.35%)
-1K Write (6.10%)
-16 Write (5.79%)

In other words, the 4-8 kb random write access is the single most crucial access that results in better visible ssd performance. simply find the ssd with the best transfer results at the 4-8 kb random access level.


Now I believe the answer to the above advice in bold will lead to the best SSD . hope someone has this answer.

I would really encourage you to reconsider your position.

First, go back and read the source of his "data".
It consists of some random dude he knows doing what he considers his typical usage, without listing what that is, other than using the internet and running applications (what applications?). How do we know he was not using write heavy software or doing other things that should not be done on an SSD? We don't and it is no accident that the article was not more specific. It also never mentions if the test was even done on an SSD, he uses the term drive instead.

Secondly, it makes absolutely no mention of how he has his drive set up.
Is his pagefile, internet temp, PS scratch and windows temp etc. kept on the SSD?
I am willing to bet that it is, which is something that no sane person would do unless there was a specific reason for doing so, in this case making it appear to support his claim.

The article is also from May 2010 and was only updated in March 2011, not written.

I could go on and point out other obvious ways in which the author tried to purposely mislead the readers, such as the laughable list of drives he used to show speeds and how he tried to compare very large drives in raid against smaller single drives and pass that off as in some way comparable or the way he..... but I digress.

What you have had the misfortune of stumbling upon is a "writer" making a ridiculous statement in order to get attention for his article, which he did apparently, without any regard at all for those who would take his post as serious.
I urge you to purge that bit of marketing fluff from your brain before you start looking for an SSD, as it has no basis in reality.

Not to say write speed is not worth note, it is but it is not the determining factor of a good SSD.

This sums up how I feel about it.
"Real world performance is a complicated mix of random and sequential read and write speeds at different files sizes and queue depths. Latency and controller specific behavior will also influence the end result. Try and look for real world benchmarks." - notebookreview.com

If you are writing to your SSD 60% of the time you are using it, then you are doing it wrong. Way wrong.

Here is a better site with some good in-depth reviews of the most popular SSDs.

http://www.anandtech.com/tag/storage

Hope it helps.