SSD Performance In The Office: Nine Applications Benchmarked

[amk-aka-Phantom]

I am drooling over an SSD. My laptop is an old core2 duo with 4GB ram. I am an office user and my CPU is never maxed out but I am always waiting on my hard drive. The problem is that I run a lot of programs including vmware which I have to run for certain applications. The problem is that I am paging because I don't have enough ram. I am regularly using 6GB of ram(I only have 4). My mobo will not upgrade past 4GB. So, do I blow 2 grand on a new system with boat loads of ram or will I get a performance boost from an SSD enough to hold me over for a couple more years?

Most likely, once you upgrade to an SSD you'll be bottlenecked by the CPU

 

[crisan_tiberiu]

1. Office computers usualy are crap.
2. In a company that respects itself you have a licensed anti-virus, witch usualy its more resourcefull.
3. in 90% of the cases office computers are not configured properly, many programs are autostarting with windows (nobody bothers with them) and then you ahve very long startup times.
4. Usualy, older companies have a hard time upgrading an pure office PC, i am still servicing old Pentium 4s with 512 / 1GB ram with XP on them.
5. Yes, an 90GB SSD + 500 Gb HDD it is the solution on office PCs, i really havent seen any office PC with Raid 0 ...

 

[amk-aka-Phantom]

1. Office computers usualy are crap.
2. In a company that respects itself you have a licensed anti-virus, witch usualy its more resourcefull.
3. in 90% of the cases office computers are not configured properly, many programs are autostarting with windows (nobody bothers with them) and then you ahve very long startup times.
4. Usualy, older companies have a hard time upgrading an pure office PC, i am still servicing old Pentium 4s with 512 / 1GB ram with XP on them.
5. Yes, an 90GB SSD + 500 Gb HDD it is the solution on office PCs, i really havent seen any office PC with Raid 0 ...

Wow, means offices in our town are REALLY good We run mostly G620s/i3-2100s and everything is in thin or diskless client mode - easy to install, configure, use and maintain. For the heavy users, NFS home directory with native installations. Everything is lightning fast; as much as I loathe Linux for a home user, there's just nothing better for a well-maintained office. Everything has its purpose. If you're running Windows in the office, you need sane users... not these click-click-OK-cancel-"close, you STUPID popup window!!!"-"what do you mean, restarting now?!"-"I HATE COMPUTERS!!!!" types that normally work in the offices.

 

[tzhu07]

I have a 128GB Samsung 830 SSD, and it's the only internal drive within my system. I'm never one to use much space on the computer, so I've completely done away with hard drives except for an external one that I sometimes take out for backups.

Once you go SSD, you never go back.

 

[acku]

[citation][nom]the_laughing_man[/nom]Why did you use such an old firmware version 2.06 on your Vertex 3 SSD instead of the current stable firmware 2.15. There were a lot of changes made between those two versions.[/citation]
There is no performance difference. 2.15 only fixes a BSOD issue that some users experienced.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?95475-2.15-is-now-live...use-this-thread-for-questions-and-all-relevant-discussion.&p=688223&viewfull=1#post688223

 

[g-unit1111]

Why not test with Adobe Acrobat? I use Acrobat 9 probably far more than any application I have installed on my workstation. With a regular, mechanical HD and my old build (Core 2 Duo/Intel975/8GB RAM/Radeon 4670) it would take nearly 10 - 15 minutes on a standard mechanical drive to convert a 100MB PDF to a 3 - 4MB PDF for e-mailing purposes.
Since getting my new build (Core i3-2120/IntelZ68/16GB RAM/GTX470) using that paired with a 64GB Crucial HD instead of the Western Digital Caviar Blue I was using (that drive is now secondary storage) the same tasks on Acrobat that used to take hours to do, takes me mere seconds now and gives me more time to check my results in the office football pool. :lol:

 

[livebriand]

But how much are you loading stuff? Also, keep in mind that Windows Vista and 7 cache stuff, which is why things launch fast with spinning HDs most of the time anyway. For instance, powerpoint took me one second to launch, according to a stopwatch. I have a 2 year old WD Caviar Black 640GB btw, about 40% full. Note: I have 8GB DDR3 ram in here, but right now about 4GB is completely free, 2GB used, and 2GB cached.

 

[cadder]

[citation][nom]amk-aka-Phantom[/nom]Wow, means offices in our town are REALLY good[/citation]

Our secretary/bookkeeper and our office manager both run old machines with single core processors. Two of our engineers run fairly good core2duo machines, our 2 guys that run a lot of Autocad/Revit run overclocked i5-750's.

I would build new computers to replace the 2 slowest ones but getting apps installed and configured, and getting the Linux server to allow the machines to connect, is such a huge PITA that I can ignore it as long as they don't complain too much.

 

[cadder]

[citation][nom]Zeh[/nom]Good article, but I think it missed this:A AutoCAD (or some other CAD software) benchmark for loading and saving a file.In this case, it's not just about how many second of work I lose per day. I waste a minute just to open the damn program on this notebook (which runs a HDD), and another half a minute to open a file. Saving also takes from 5 to 15 seconds (autosave is a bitch, but it is needed).[/citation]

I thought I missed the results page of the article, but I went back and looked and realized that there wasn't one. They spent a lot of time running tests with an SSD and timing them, but they didn't time the tests with a conventional hard drive so we have no way of knowing how much it really sped up things. I wonder when Tom's will catch on.

I run AutoCAD every day and it can benefit from the fastest of everything that you can give it, both CPU and hard drive system. I have an E8500 overclocked to 3.8GHZ and a WD Velociraptor. I experience a lot of slowdowns that I attribute to hard drive access. It of course takes a long time to load the program, load files, and save files. But also frequently when you execute different commands it takes 2 or 3 seconds to bring up the appropriate dialog box. And if you are working hard on a project and have a sequence of steps going in your mind, a 3 second delay is devastating. I have a 2.6GHz dual core Dell Latitude laptop that I upgraded to an SSD and it seems very responsive, usually more responsive than the desktop machine. I haven't run any AutoCAD comparisons on that machine yet. I hope to build a new desktop workstation next year and it will definitely have an SSD. I have a small untralight laptop that I use for travel and I want to put an SSD in it also. It has a relatively slow dual core cpu, and a real slow hard drive. I want to see how responsive it can be with an SSD.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

instead of compression, you should look at decompression.
vompression is more CPU dependent and there is some HDD use.
but decompression is basically bottlenecked by the HDD, with data both being read from and written to.

 

[j2j663]

Personally I see the workplace, especially on a well designed network, to be the perfect place to implement SSDs. The majority of the files should and will be stored on the network for back up purposes but obviously the programs are always going to be local. Hence you get the speed up where it is most noticeable, loading programs, but there is no worry about space because users should not be storing there files locally.

 

[abraham_28]

ok

 

[Guest]

The added expense in a work place is not going to justify SSD's. It will not improve productivity and we are only talking about minimal effects on speed. For most offices this whole ideal is negated when you think of a typical office which probably loads a program and keeps it open for the day. So in reality unless your opening and closing apps all the time, where is SSD's going to save anyone time? The reality is that for a business time is money. But I did not read anything in this article that would indicate to me that the money invested was worth the time saved.

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]amk-aka-Phantom[/nom]Was done on purpose, sure of it I decided to hold off from SSD purchase until Intel 520 series come out... to be honest, I don't see what's with everyone b!tching about small data capacity of the SSDs. Keep your movies and music and documents on network/external storage and be happy... that way you also don't need the "cloud" to move your stuff between computers. My OS partition is only 100GB right now; I used to have it at 60GB but had to expand because WinRAR is stupid enough to create temp files ONLY on your OS partition no matter where it's decompressing the files to.[/citation]

Me too. Tough i'll probably look to buy a 80/120 GB 320 series SSD for my boot drive along with a 120 GB 520 one for games... Though i can't decide if how to do it. Want to preserve write-cycles on both most efficiently...and will have to wait and see how reliable the sand force based SSDs turn out to be before i install the OS into them. I can tolerate not playing games while waiting for a replacement (in case it goes bad) but wouldn't want to sit without an OS...if they turn out to be ok, i may consider the 180GB one...only thing is that i'm still on SATA II so...but then, the IOPS....meh...can't make up my mind...luckily still have some months to do so...

 

[Craigmandu]

While an interesting article, this really doesn't say to me "I need to upgrade my users to SSDs instead of HDDs". Why? Because alot of what is in the article doesn't apply firstly: We don't allow torrents of any kind (don't know of anyone in my type of business that does), people aren't permitted to download music, videos, etc.., all websurfing is controlled and monitored. Normal users aren't "encoding, compressing...etc...". Of course we have a small subset of people that need performance based equipment, however that is a really small subset of people.

Most people open outlook and leave it open all day long. They aren't opening and closing 20 different things. They work on a document, briefing, etc.. for hours at a time. I can't justify the expenditure for such a small gain in "performance" not productivity.

I have 1500PCs, at an extra $150 per machine (I wouldn't consider any SSD under 128GB for flexibiltiy purposes), that would equate to an additional $2.25 Mil on my "system refresh" projections. It just doesn't make business sense.

People can "boot" up faster? We don't let people "shutdown" in most cases, most of the time we operate 24/7.. We already control all startup programs etc...

Not to mention most places, mine included aren't replacing drives within machines, we select what we desire at time of "system refresh" to make things like support/replacement the easiest transactions possible. Now if 128GB (I'd rather have 300GB+) or higher SSDs are offered at the same price point as say 500GB standard HDDs then we would consider it. The dollar is what matters in most cases, and normal office apps simply don't tax systems enough to make much of a difference.

 

[Craigmandu]

Woops, my math was wrong...I mean an extra 225K, not 2.25M.

 

[Guest]

You left out one key benchmark, installing the unending stream of Windows/Firefox/Adobe updates. After moving to an SSD sytem disk, the updates install noticeably more quickly compared to HD systems (a suggestion for a benchmark, the wall clock time it takes to build and patch a new Win7 machine).

Question - what about durability? Most consumer SSDs provide only a limited number of write cycles. While most of the files on a system disk are write once read many, a few are repeatedly rewritten (e.g. email files). What happens to performance of an SSD for these files? Are they able to migrate off failed blocks automatically and unobtrusively?

 

[j2j663]

Are you seriously still bringing up SSD's write cycles? I can see the validity if you were going to use them in a server setting, but that is not consumer SSDs. I could even see the validity if you were talking about using an SSD as a cache device.

But lets be realistic, no average user, not even a power user on a computer at work is going to come anywhere close to the write cycle of an SSD. The daily virus scan at work is probably going to be the most taxing part of the day for the write cycle lifetime of an SSD. Unless you are keeping your computers for 8 or more years at a time and you have a crazy every 2 hour virus scanning policy, you are not going to run into SSD write cycle issues in the work place.

 

[Guest]

I work as a system administrator and have been pretty 'You don't need an SSD'. Being a system administrator I of course got an SSD when I upgraded to a new computer a few month ago.

I must say, even with basic tasks (mail, internet, scripting, programming) it made a fair bit of difference and I now generally recommend SSD:s even to people who only do 'simple' stuff.

 

[Guest]

We need data on SSD with FDE (full disk encryption). Most office machine have FDE, AV and other security software loaded.

 

[JonnyDough]

If you really want to drive the point home, feature graphs that start all the way at 0 and include several HDD drives. Then we can see that choosing the RIGHT ssd matters almost nothing, as compared to choosing an SSD. I am still having issues using a Solid 3 with an Opteron 185 and 4GB's of ram to play Steam games based on the Source engine. It seems the issue may lie with Windows 7 though...

 

[andywork78]

Great review.

SSD + RAMDisk (1~2GB) helps lot.

TEMP + cache is on RAMDisk

try this option.

let see how the benchmark changes lol

 

[Christopher1]

[citation][nom]richboyliang[/nom]SSD's are meant for holding only your operating system and a few key applications you can't live without. All your data/media should be stored on a regular, large hard disk.[/citation]

Bingo. Everything else than your applications should be stored on another hard drive in the machine. Personally, I just put an SSD into my relatives computer.

I used the old hard drive as a 'keep the pictures/videos/music' drive, because when accessing those things a regular hard disk is 99% of the time fast enough.