Can Bargain SSDs Give Windows A Quantum Performance Leap?

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I knew the end before I read the first letter of this article,
even $120 SSD PCIe drives have shown as fast as 15 seconds boot time of WinXP with 24 apps loaded on the desktop (real boot, not coming out of hybernation or sleep).

As far as the amount of space is 'needed' is kind of a bit bullshit.
WinXP, MS Office, a set of programs most users use every day like anti virus and compression managers, and a few personal files don't even reach 6GB with me.
Many people would do just fine with a 32GB SSD,and save all the files for an external HD. Even if you want to continue to have 3D mark Vantage and WOW saved totally on your SSD drive,32GB will be more than enough, even if you have Win7 installed (you'd still have more than 25% free space)!

Anything non installed, like zip, rar, 7z, iso, dat, etc can go on an external storage device like a 16GB SD card, USB thumbdrive, or external HD/backup module.

It's usually the people that are not organized that need large harddrives, because they hold several copies and variants of copies saved on their disks. On top of that they hold many documents and files they no longer need.
Once you know how to organize, things are pretty simple.
Try running your programs on an EeePc 701 for a couple of months, and though I can say that the 4GB SSD doesn't really cut it, I can do almost anything on it, and with it (save gaming which requires a better CPU and GPU).
I have an extra SD card of 4GB with it, and save most of my larger files to an external 1TB HD.
 
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Area51

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Since the Intel SSD's are priced $/GB it is better to buy 2 80GB Intel x-25M's for about the same price of a 160GB drive and run the system with ICH10 in RAID 0. You will get twice the read and Write performance of a 160GB drive for the same price, and at the same time if things go extremely bad and you burn out a drive, not all your investment is lost. You still have another 80GB that you can still use.
 
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schouwla

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I disagree with your conclusion that you need a $500+ SSD 160G drive,
I build a system this spring with a 74G WD Raptor as by boot drive.
Installed Widnows 7 64bit Ultimate and all my apps on a second drive and still have 20G space left on my boot drive.
So it would be enough to go for a smaller SSD
 
randomizer

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[citation][nom]DungeonMaster[/nom]do ssds fragment?[/citation]
Yes, but it's not at all like HDD fragmentation. There is still slow-down caused by fragmentation on SSDs, and TRIM does not prevent this unless you are always deleting data.
 
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sailfish

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Your cost savings analysis only holds water if one could honestly say that the few minutes saved from booting up an application would have been used in a productive manner. I suppose if someone could invent a time capture device where one could accumulate those lost minutes over, say, a month and then use them all at once, a good case can be made for this proposal. As it is, it seems more like rationalization than reality to justify the expenditure.

Also, splitting one's applications over multiple drives is so 1990s and the partition craze back then. Ultimately, it itself became a productivity time sink just maintaining the fractured setup.

Thanks but I'm more than happy waiting for others to muck up their systems buying these high-priced, low-capacity SSDs so that the prices and capacities fall to earth.

Remember when one could get a 1GB drive for $1000 in the mid-1990s? Now one can get 1TB drives for less than $200 and that in inflated 2010 dollars. In the meantime, I can find a multitude of more gratifying things to spend my cash on.
 
dethmarine21

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Why did you choose that obsolete Kingston drive with the JMicron controller when the Kingston SSDNow V-Series 40GB is the same price (or lower) and has an Intel controller?
 
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Wow. ALMOST a good article. Just missing the stock laptop hard drive for comparison. These drives are 2.5" for a reason...
 
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twanto

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Did you run these tests off of a new, clean drive, or did you write to them fully first? Because it makes a difference....
 
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obarthelemy

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A 128Gigs SSD costs 300 euros, which is the price of a basic netbook or even desktop PC.

That's not worth it to me. I reboot once a week, keep my Apps open pretty much all the time... so except for WoW instance loads, I would not be gaining enough to justify the expense. I'm sure it's nice though. Just not as nice as the second LCD I bought for my main computer, for half that money.
 
vvhocare5

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I thought it was a good article. I have swapped everything over to Intel SSD's. When I threw one into my Dell E3200 2.2G it boots up in 15 sec or so with all of the overhead that comes with a corporate domain. Wow!

I find the types of comments interesting.

"I cannot justify the cost". Because you cannot afford it doesnt mean you should put it down. I cannot afford a Lamborghini but I sure as heck can appreciate the engineering involved in building it.

"What about Netbooks". Seriously?? Who gives a rats a** about netbook anything?? Isnt this a performance site?

"Not enough data". This usually comes from someone with an older drive or who doesnt have the money to upgrade in the near future anyhow. I do want to see only the latest products because those are the ones Im interested in (so I can buy them).

"What about Linux". The reason we are on this site is we enjoy building hardware - does it matter if our first choice is Windows or Linux. Start a Linux site and run these tests for your team.

"Tests are not valid because the voltage might have changed". You will never make these people happy. The premise of this article was normal windows startup times. I dont do a clean format before every test - this is close to real world. I appreciate the attention to detail and the inherent loss of precision in the tests but lets move on....

Are SSD's cost effective? No way!! But Ive got several in my system, my laptop and several lying around (the 80G Intel G1 for example).

Sign me up for more!!!
 
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Why does everyone vote down my somewhat sarcastic saying of Linux, Unix and Mac not being included? I wasn't trying to be an ass and I've seen a few articles dedicated to Linux but I wouldn't mind having a few different OSs tested on things like this.
 
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ossie

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As already pointed out, Intel's drivers do not support TRIM, and, as twanto already tried to suggest, it makes a difference when the drive was already fully written, and garbage collection/wear leveling kicks in. The amount of overhead (write amplification) is drastically affected by TRIM support (drive, drivers, and OS), and the usage history.
Also not the slightest word about the life expectancy of (especially) a MLC drive... about 10.000 block erase cycles. Heavy read/modify/write activity will burn out such a drive quite fast (heavy downloaders beware).
(MLC) SSDs shine at read operations, the write ones are a completely different story, a fully written drive's performance can easily be bogged down to the level of a (rotating media) HDD, and even below.

[citation][nom]WvW[/nom]Apparently, not all SSD’s a[sic.] “immune” to seek times.[/citation]
Seek times are null for SSDs, access time is a different story... being mostly a constant overhead in read operations, imposed by the controller in translating ATA layer commands/responses to the flash translation layer ones. In write operations, an additional overhead is imposed by R/M/W cycles, and block erase cycles.
Seek times are an intrinsic "feature" of not fully directly addressable storage media, when a component needs to "move", to access the data. In a HDD, that means the head moving to the right track, and waiting for the right sector to get under it.

[citation][nom]shuffman37[/nom]Why does everyone vote down my somewhat sarcastic saying of Linux, Unix and Mac not being included?[/citation]
'cause it's a gamer o$ site... and the universe of wintarded micro$uxx fankiddies ends there.
 
hundredislandsboy

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Nope. I'm still not getting on the SSD bandwagon for the simple reason that they're too expensive. I'd rather put the cash into an i7 or high end GPU than an SSD. Sure if my budget was unlimited or if I was making 100K I'd of course have the best of each component. But most gamers and PC enthusiasts are on a modest budget and would have to be a hardcore benchmarks oriented user to justify that kind of expense. I'd rather "suffer" waiting for a few milliseconds of data access and have smooth framerates with an HD 5850 than vice-versa.
 
banthracis

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Depends on your budget hundredislandsboy. If you're going for something like the $1,300 SBM kinda build, then you would probably see a bigger difference in user experience going with just 1 5850 and a SSD + storage drive, than with xfire 5850's.

This considering that at 1920 x 1200 gaming the 5850 can run basically anything cept Crysis at 35+ FPS at max settings with 4xAA.

Obviously the xfire system will have better FPS, but the difference will not be noticeable to most people, while the SSD's lower boot, response and load times will be noticeable.
 
hundredislandsboy

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You hit the nail on the head that it's all about the budget when you start thinking of luxury components like SSD versus the standard HDs. It's a luxury item like a fox fur coat. You don't really need it, other coats can keep you just as warm but your enthusiast ego has to be satisfied, knowing you've got the best but not knowing if it's something you can truly afford.

But as for practical reasons of day to day use, unless you wotk as a pro user meaning you can make more money by not waiting for the extra milliseconds, ie 3D graphics industry or server house, then there is no practical reason to splurge on an SSD. It sounds like I'm on a personal campaign for consumers to boycott these things (which would be nice because that way the prices would fall and I could finally buy one) but really I'm just not convinced that the premium is worth it and I'd rather spend the premium on a videocard or a Core i7!

Just to make the SSD fans and those already using SSDs happy, I'l say this. I'm so jealous.
 
waffle911

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[citation][nom]HundredIslandsBoy[/nom]I'd rather "suffer" waiting for a few milliseconds of data access and have smooth framerates with an HD 5850 than vice-versa.[/citation]
[citation][nom]HundredIslandsBoy[/nom]You hit the nail on the head that it's all about the budget when you start thinking of luxury components like SSD versus the standard HDs. It's a luxury item... your enthusiast ego has to be satisfied, knowing you've got the best but not knowing if it's something you can truly afford. But as for practical reasons of day to day use, unless you work as a pro user meaning you can make more money by not waiting for the extra milliseconds, ie 3D graphics industry or server house, then there is no practical reason to splurge on an SSD. [/citation]
You're completely missing the point.
[citation][nom]banthracis[/nom]Obviously the xfire system will have better FPS, but the difference will not be noticeable to most people, while the SSD's lower boot, response and load times will be noticeable.[/citation]
This is the point, though perhaps he didn't word it as clearly as he could've.
If you're gaming-oriented, then yeah, fine, go for more powerful hardware instead of an SSD. But for most users who consider gaming to be a secondary or tertiary function of a PC, then an SSD will noticeably improve day-to-day performance of normal, everyday tasks, and that's exactly what this article is out to prove. An SSD will have a much more dramatic impact on performance for these tasks than a more powerful processor or graphics card (especially if used in a laptop where such components are frequently not user serviceable). And if you noticed at the beginning where the author mentioned that booting up on his home system usually took upwards of 5 minutes, and saw that a good SSD could do it in less than 30 seconds (granted, the system in this test had a more powerful processor and more RAM), that is not an immeasurable difference of "a few milliseconds". Did you actually look at the benchmarks? He used a stopwatch for the real-world tests and timed them manually, which in and of itself introduces a margin for error of as much as one whole second. These are tests with differences measuring in many seconds for tasks that the average user would repeat many times per day, and (especially in Vista) these "mere" seconds not only add up, but become very noticeable in the effect that it makes the computer seem to perform overall more quickly. If my parents had a recent enough computer that it had SATA I ports on the motherboard (it just might, I'm not sure), and I swapped in a large enough SSD (not hard considering they use only 40GB total of a 230GB 7200RPM IDE drive), they would think I sprinkled some sort of magic fairy dust over the whole computer to make it seem to run almost as quickly as my modern, up-to-date laptop (relatively speaking; their PC is about 6 years old and has 1GB of DDR1 RAM, running a 3.8GHz Pentium 4; my laptop has a 2.66GHz C2D and 4GB of DDR3 RAM).

Overall, this is an upgrade that (in addition to more RAM) the average consumer could reasonably appreciate for the price if they would rather not go and get a whole new PC; and it doesn't have to be the $500 160GB Intel drive either, it can be a $250 80GB drive, or a more competitively priced drive like the Kingston which, while not all that much better than the WD Velociraptor inn some respects as shown in this test, would beat the pants off of most other drives that people use today. $100 for a computer that is very noticeably faster? And maybe another $50 for more RAM (OK, maybe another $50 or something for those guys at Geek Squad to install everything for the technologically inclined, but only if you don;t have a friend tat can do it for free)? I think that sounds like a good deal to reinvigorate an aging mid-range consumer PC, or even add some kick to a year-old low-end budget PC.
 
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mau1wurf1977

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Great review!

Also really shows how real world tests differ from benchmarks...

The basic line is, the more stuff you have installed, the better off you are with a SSD.

If you are a minimalist, then a standard harddrive will still give you decent performance...

I also agree with the comment someone else made, why test it with a raptor? Most of use don't have one. We have a standard 7200rpm sata drive, like a WD blue...

That would make these comparisons more realistic...
 
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mau1wurf1977

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Also the storage system has always been THE weakest link...

No wonder why upgrading to SSDs has such an impact.

IMO getting an SSD is the single best upgrade you can do to your machine..
 
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