Can Bargain SSDs Give Windows A Quantum Performance Leap?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
What you need to do next is go get that $80 32 GB SSD from newegg, and install Flashfire. Also do it for the Kingston SSD. Then run the tests and see what you get. Just for s#$% and grins, also try installing XP onto a 8GB Compactflash card and run that with flashfire. And compare this to a 7200rpm hard drive.
 
Good article, but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that will opt for the 30GB OCZ drives for boot drives, and place their apps on the second drive. Ocz appears to be able to keep them in stock.

The 64 GB ssd now drives are inferior to the 40gb intel based drives, but either way Kingston can not keep them in stock. Do the 64GB SSD now drives have trim support?

For $100 you can get a 30GB OCZ boot drive and $55 for 500GB F3 samsung and you are set. Don't know why most people wouldn't choose this option, considering price/performance.
 
2 kingstons in raid 0 would cost about the same as the velociraptor. That would be a pretty awesome comparo...or even 4 of them in raid 0 vs. the intel (also about the same price). Not that anyone in their right mind would have 4 cheapo SSDs in their box. =)
 
Hi,

SSDs behave differently (more poorly) after they have been used enough to fill them once. TRIM removes this different.

(1) How did you condition the SSDs before each test?

(2) When you switched to the intel matrix drivers you lost TRIM .. "I kept getting inexplicable drop-offs in two specific PCMark Vantage tests that resulted from running Microsoft’s default storage driver rather than Intel’s Matrix Storage driver (version 8.9)" Depending on drive conditioning this may/may not have been an issue.

(3) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE include similar boot time tests and game load time tests in your comparison of systems like the System Builder Marathon articles.
 
would an 80gb velociraptor have put out any better numbers? as far as comparing apples to apples, it would have been a bit closer to the ssdnow... you mention a few times "half the price" but the 80gb velociraptor comes in around $80 on ebay.

But wow... really nice article and benchmarks to see just how far behind the raptors have fallen. I'm still running a year old 150gb raptor x... don't really want to upgrade it since I spent $150 a year ago for it.
 
Try using Disk Cleanup on the boot drive and get rid of all the system snapshots. This allowed me to put Win7 64 bit on a 32GB x25-e. Also, since it's an -e, no need to leave any free space as the drive does this by design.
 
Aside: At one point Readyboost was supposed to cache boot time programs on cheap, FAST flash cards giving some of the advantages of having a complete flash boot drive by caching select startup apps on the flash card. Win 7 apparently increased the size/number of readyboost devices. Anyone try that ? (p.s. I know under vista conventional wisdom is that readyboost buys nothing if you have enough ram. With Win 7 there are a lot of reports of improved boot time and program load time).
 
Fun /w small drives
Install windows 7 and restart in safe mode. Move program files to a different drive (mechanical would be best). Create a soft link through storage manager. Tada, quick boot and mechanical storage density. All dual drives allow both to work at the same time during boot up.

Warning: Works on Windows XP; Assuming it works on 7.
 
I'd go for two 30GB OCZ Vertex in raid0, doesn't cost much more than a single Intel G2 and the performance would be on totally different level.
 
[citation][nom]zebow2002[/nom]Linux, Unix and Mac have a combined market share of 30%, wich makes them less important. Great article, can't wait for my Intel G2.[/citation]

No, they only have 10 percent of the consumer market.
 
[citation][nom]LORD_ORION[/nom]Many of us have already learned to deal with the "Big drive / fast small drive" allocation decisions when the 74GB raptor came out.[/citation]
Are you serious?

I run 2 machines at home with what I consider, decent storage.
My Media Center/File Server:
- 2 x 64GB Samsung SSDs in a RAID0 for the Boot Drive (They were free)
- 4 x 1.5TB WD Green drives in a RAID5 for Storage (Broken into 2 x 2TB Partitions due to limitations of my ancient 965 Mobo)

Desktop/gaming machine:
- 1 x 300GB VelociRaptor - OS/Apps/Games
- 2 x 2TB WD Green drives - Data Storage (each drive standalone, no RAID)


The first 2TB partition on each machine is for a combination of Installers, HomeDirs for my wife and I and Backups of various Desktop/Laptop machines in the house (Ghost + BartPE FTW)
The second 2TB partition on each machine is for digital media.
This includes all of our Home Movies, Digital Pics, Rips of our CD Collection (not anywhere near done) and Rips of some of our DVD collection (mainly the kids movies so I don't spend time cleaning sticky fingerprints off Pooh's Heffalump movie :) )

Then I use SyncToy v2 from MS to keep the Data/Media drives synchronized between the 2 machines.
This also allows me to take an entire copy of my data with me when I go to LAN Parties (which happens less often with kids).

I also just signed up for Google PicasaWeb's special offer of 200GB of Picture Storage for $50 a year. Sign up now and they throw in a free EyeFi card so you can stop worrying about your wife leaving 4GB of pictures on the SDCard and then losing her camera. Trust me, this is coming from personal experience. You can upload Movies as well, but they will be converted to a YouTube type format so don't expect to pull them down and edit them later, just a safety net for those memories you don't want to lose in a house fire.


Anyway, just saying that now a days HDDs are cheap and digital media is becoming more and more prevalent. Might as well build out a decent File Server and get good backups of your desktop/laptop machines. $1000 on HDDs to CYA is alot cheaper than several thousand on drive recovery when something critical in your house dies.
 
[citation][nom]Casper42[/nom]Are you serious?[/citation]Nice, Tom's didnt get my quote right. I was trying to cite jcknouse who said "Dang, and I thought I had a lot of disk space. lol "
 
I got one just big enough for win 7, the new Kingston Vnow 40(Intel Controller). 105.00. All it does is boot Windows Instantly with my browser and shuts down instantly. Was it worth it ? YES, I used to dread rebooting my rig (sounds stupid, but we know its true).
I was a early adopter with the 10,000 rpm WDC WD360GD-00FNA0, 37 gig. That was over 300 in 2004 and I bought it for the same reasons. To make my already o/c rig feel faster. This is a better deal, its faster and cheaper than that experience.
 
p.s. When I worked on a Landsat project in grad school,
one of the major unsolved problems was the sheer amount
of data it downloaded via telemetry:

I don't think we have that problem any longer :)


"Constant change is here to stay." -- Anonymous Bumper Sticker


MRFS
 
Good article!
I have to agree with most other users. SSD just doesn't make sense for the capacity and the price right now.

If I had the money, sure it would be nice to put a Raid 0 in my system spec on enthusiast site. However, the practical side of me says to just keep my conventional Raid 0 mechanical setup.
 
Regarding your finding 200GB of your C: drive used, my experience is that Vista (and probably (W7) reserves an enormous amount of disk space for preloading programs that you use, same reason they require so much memory. This disk space reserve goes up and down by tens of GBs depending om who knows what. I am still on XP Pro, thank God, so have not done much research into these two resource hogs. But check it out, amigos.
 
For those of you who may be interested in WD's RE3 line of HDDs,
here's a comparable measurement using Performancetest to do
a 1GB "raw read" from a RAID 0 with 2 x WD7502ABYS 750GB RE3 HDDs
wired to Intel's ICH10R on the ASUS P5Q Premium motherboard,
Intel Q9550 quad-core CPU (almost brand new system):

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/wd/PerformanceTest.Raw.Read.WD7502ABYS.750GB.RE3.jpg

Average is 195.9 MB/second, and the graph shows the data rate
peaking at ~ 215 MB/second (estimated visually).


With XP/Pro SP3 installed on this RAID 0 partition,
we are quite satisfied with average performance, overall.

And, with 50GB allocated to C:, we still have a data partition
of 1.31 TB formatted space on the remainder of that RAID 0 array.


MRFS
 
p.s. We REALLY like the performance of our 8GB ramdisk
using RamDisk Plus from www.superspeed.com
to access the memory above 4GB on our prototype 16GB workstation:

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/superspeed/raw.read.Corsair.16GB.PC2-6400.Paul15.jpg


Here's the RAM installed in that memory subsystem:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145243&Tpk=N82E16820145243


We wrote a review of RamDisk Plus here:

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/superspeed/RamDiskPlus.Review.htm
http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/superspeed/RamDiskPlus.Review.doc

.htm = HTML
.doc = MS WORD 2003


MRFS
 
@200gb apps guy:

"~15GB for Win 7 install. 8GB swap, ..."

That's your problem right there. Turn off memory paging and instantly get 8gb more space. If you have 4-8gb of ram, do you really need virtual memory? I mean, after you turn it off if you actually get out of memory errors fine, but I doubt you'll ever see one.
 
> Turn off memory paging and instantly get 8gb more space.

... -OR- use the CONTIG freeware software to create a
perfectly contiguous pagefile.sys on a freshly formatted
short-stroke HDD partition, with the Indexing Service disabled:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx


Remember to change the attributes of pagefile.sys
before you move the swap file from C:
e.g. in DOS window aka Command Prompt:

attrib pagefile.sys +A +S +H

(easy to remember "ASH")


This file should show up green in color
using the Windows DEFRAG program.


MRFS

 
[citation][nom]shuffman37[/nom]I love how they neglect to include Linux, Unix and Mac. I guess that makes us just less important. By the way I'm pretty sure a SSD would make Ubuntu pretty snappy as well.[/citation]

Do we need to call the Whaambulence?

As soon as Linux or Mac takes up 25% or more of the market share, then you can complain again.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom