Anyone else got a SSD yet?

[Caydr]

About... 6 months ago maybe... well... let's say 5.... I bought an OCZ Vertex 120 gb SSD. I installed on it Windows 7. Unfortunately W7, or at least the RC, does not by default turn off things like superfetch and similar features that are counterproductive on a drive with no seek latency.

But once you've got it all set up, it's like rum + Coke or anime and pedophilia. They were made for each other.

A couple days ago I joined a Spring game. The players had just finished a match, and I got them to wait for me to download the map so I could spec. Combined with my DDR2 running at 1000mhz and 3.6ghz CPU, I actually loaded faster than any of the other players - despite having to calculate pathing.

No program takes more than a second (a literal second) to load. Even Photoshop loads almost instantaneously. The only things that does take longer is 3D Studio Max, at about 6 seconds.

[Jazcash]

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... arch_type=

[Caydr]

Well... er... I meant more like, people on this forum.

Also, I should mention, I have a second 500 gb hard drive that I use for anything that will have a negative effect on the SSD, for instance things that write small bits a lot like torrents, page file, etc.

I disabled my paging file entirely for a while but I kept having out of memory problems. I guess I can't do that until I go to 64-bit and get 8 gigs of ram.

[aegis]

caching (superfetch) is still beneficial on a ssd with zero seek latency, because ram is much faster than solid storage.

[yuritch]

I disabled my paging file entirely for a while but I kept having out of memory problems.

AFAIK you'd better not do that no matter how much RAM you have. Windows is just built to use the page file, it needs it to run normally. You can probably set it to some very small size (as in a few MB), but disabling it entirely cripples the system.

[Caydr]

What I lack in page file I make up for in testosterone.

[CarRepairer]

I'm pretty sure that claims that these drives run faster are all speculation by random users and that they don't perform better than well-made magnetic drives (I have a Raptor). They are still first generation after all. Their real benefits are less heat and shock protection and you don't have to worry about spinning disks of death inside your computer. I'm looking to get one myself but the prices are still too high to justify getting one for a desktop. For a laptop on the other hand, it's a no brainer.

[tombom]

I'm pretty sure that claims that these drives run faster are all speculation by random users and that they don't perform better than well-made magnetic drives (I have a Raptor). They are still first generation after all.

you're wrong

[CarRepairer]

Well I've seen both sides of the argument, like for example that for SSDs have better seek times but transfer speeds are not as good. I wouldn't be able to find where I read this stuff anymore but it doesn't matter really, because there are different brands and quality levels so nothing is constant. But I am certain of the fact that these are first gen and I'd wait a bit more time, as I'm not in a hurry to test out the first of the line.

[==Troy==]

Well, having both SSD drives and HDD ones I have to say that it really depends on the drive. 15k rpm HDD will beat the hell out of the SSD on a linear read, but SSDs are great for tiny files.

if your SSD does not have the vitrual wear-leveling layer then windows is going to kill it pretty soon (page file and general ntfs behaviour). If it does, its not going to be the fastest one (abstraction layers, I found, take a bit of the response time, but this is unverified claim, so you can take it as a lie).


Having tested both Windows and Linux on the SSD drives I have to say that win7 "flies" generally, independent of your drive, you might be comparing your SSD to an old HDD, or having HW problems with the HDD.

There are differences in loading speeds of the system, or operation with fragmented system, and I wouldv guessed that it is the main case for you, spring maps could have been fragmented + it needs to load different things besides the map, which is mostly seek times than read times.


I personally found that for spring, the linux caching is best. Let it load once, but next map load takes about 1/4 of the time. ( I have caching strongly encouraged on my distro).

SSDs are also great for linux distros optimised for boot up, such as moblin, which loads in about 5seconds (which windows will not see in QUITE a while)

[aegis]

my primary win7 drive is a crappy old one, but win7 seriously does fly after booting and logging in all the way

[Caydr]

SSDs have come a long way, especially in just the last 6 months. The Vertex series is one of a family of SSDs from various companies that finally have proper controller chipsets, combined with much faster flash memory. I considered getting 2 of them and putting them in a RAID 0, but I found out that the performance increase would actually be quite small because a single Vertex drive practically saturates most moboards' I/O. Only ICH10 (iirc/afaik only i7 boards use this so far) motherboards could really take advantage.

So, while it's true that in sequential reads a Velociraptor or some crazy 15k RPM drive would probably destroy a SSD, sequential reads of large files are a tiny minority of what I use my computer for. The only things on my main drive (the SSD) are operating system and games. Everything else is on my secondary cheap WD 7200.

This leaves me with about 30gb of breathing room, so I'm thankful I didn't decide to go cheap and just get a 60 gb drive.

I'll try to come up with some charts for your comparison later if I remember. Contrary to what is probably believed, I didn't make this thread exclusively to pimp my extravagant purchase, I wanted to try to advocate these for everyone. They're a great new technology that's finally become mature and borderline affordable.

Consider, CPUs aren't getting dramatically faster anymore. It's mostly efficiency gains, miniaturization, and adding cores now. RAM isn't getting dramatically faster, and it would require a completely new system even if you wanted to take advantage of DDR3. Video cards made the big leap with the 8800 generation for Nvidia and the 48xx generation for ATI... all I see in the short to mid term are small improvements. So for ubergeeks like me, a SSD really is one of the last things to buy if you want to see an immediately recognizable general improvement.

edit:
Someone already posted this, but here's a very good one-page-read if you don't have time:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17183/10

Vertex, average write: 196 mb/s
Vertex, average read: 233 mb/s
Vertex, burst read: 196 mb
Vertex, seek: 0.1 ms
Velociraptor, average write: 110 mb/s
Velociraptor, average read: 108 mb/s
Velociraptor, burst read: 256 mb/s (limited by SATA2 interface)
Velociraptor, seek: 7.2 ms
Raptor, average write: 78 mb/s
Raptor, average read: 76 mb/s
Raptor, burst read: 135 mb/s
Raptor, seek: 8.2 ms

Consumer SSDs still lose out in categories involving writes, but these are irrelevant for me and for most other people as well IMHO. Most times you are "writing" data it's going into RAM and will get written to SSD at some convenient time when performance won't be a factor - same for HDDs. But the same can't be said of loading that data into RAM in the first place, it needs to actually come from somewhere, and that's usually your disk. It's like saying that putting a motorcycle engine in a sports car is a sensible move because it means you've got more storage space.

[Masure]

I have a SSD for monthes (Samsung SLC)

Before that I owned a short stroked dual WD WD6400AAKS RAID 0 (80GB)



And before that I had a 15krpm 74GB fujitsu 3073NC (80MB/s 6ms)

SSD owns and that's all I can say as a HDD bottlenecked experienced user. Poor people who don't have the money to have a SSD can say what they want, good SSDs (Indilinx MLCs or SLCs) own.

[==Troy==]

The only issue with SSD is that they die. And really they do. Maybe they did optimise the win7 for it (which I hardly beleive) but one of my SSD (high performance kingston, 32GB) started getting badblocks after about half a year of 24/7 usage. I do run some services on it that do extensive logging though, but it doesnt make much difference just bearing in mind that the pagefile on windows is always in the same place on an SSD, effectively resulting in a "skidding car".

Also bear in mind that windows uses pagefile as much as possible, whether linux tries to keep it all in RAM before writing on SSD (4GB of ram here, NEVER even attempted to write to swap). And frequent writes to pagefile result in wear of the SSD.

[Masure]

You know what ?

WE DON'T CARE

People don't buy SSD with years of usage in mind. In 2 years, they will be deprecated and another 200$ shot will provide some brand new fresh SSD to play with.

[CarRepairer]

Hey angry guy... I looked up your Samsung SLC and they range from $200 to $400 for 32gb/64gb. I can't imagine in my mind how fast this thing must be for you to find a halfway decent cost/benefit ratio. It must be faster than light for that.

I repeat, these top of the line SSDs are still too expensive to be of any value in a desktop. There are lower end models that are cheaper (I saw one 64gb for $130) but then I'd assume you lose the speed benefit. Laptops can greatly benefit however.

[Masure]

Hey angry guy... I looked up your Samsung SLC and they range from $200 to $400 for 32gb/64gb. I can't imagine in my mind how fast this thing must be for you to find a halfway decent cost/benefit ratio. It must be faster than light for that.

I repeat, these top of the line SSDs are still too expensive to be of any value in a desktop. There are lower end models that are cheaper (I saw one 64gb for $130) but then I'd assume you lose the speed benefit. Laptops can greatly benefit however.

lol

[CarRepairer]

What can I say? You seem upset. I disagree with you in that I think most people do want a drive that will last more than two years.

[Masure]

What can I say? You seem upset. I disagree with you in that I think most people do want a drive that will last more than two years.

lol

[CarRepairer]

Stop posting so much, your browser cache will wear out your SSD.