Some calculations will follow.

If one has 8 gigabytes (8192 MB) of RAM and one wants to hibernate his/her Windows, it will take 8192 MB / 250 MB/s = about 33 seconds to write that amount of data to the Intel 32GB X-25E Extreme SATA Solid State Drive disk.

For comparsion, let's assume one's Hard Disk Drive writes 50 MB/s. It will take 8192 MB / 50 MB/s = about 164 seconds to hibernate! That is about 5 times the time it took for the SSD to write the same amount of data.

Not just the hibernation or booting time, SSD will make also chkdsk/scandisk, defrag and virus scanning faster. SSDs should also last years in a normal use and they will not crash like the HDDs do. They will slowly wear out and the available disk space should automatically go down (because the bad areas are no longer usable).

SSD is the future.

Henri.

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Not just the hibernation or booting time, SSD will make also chkdsk/scandisk, defrag and virus scanning faster. SSDs should also last years in a normal use and they will not crash like the HDDs do. They will slowly wear out and the available disk space should automatically go down (because the bad areas are no longer usable).

Can't remember where I saw it, but I believe defrag is not recommended for SSDs. Also, why would you want to hibernate with Seti (or Boinc) running?

-Dave

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Can't remember where I saw it, but I believe defrag is not recommended for SSDs. Also, why would you want to hibernate with Seti (or Boinc) running?

One has to defrag every now and then or otherwise the filesystem will become very very slow (because the files are fragmented). Actually, I do not know is the fragmentation a problem in SSDs, because the latencies are very slow compared to HDDs. But I do not think that defragmenting, say, once a month is a problem in modern SSDs.

Why not to hibernate when running SETI@home? Hibernating is usually much faster than shutting down the computer (for the night) and the booting the machine (and Windows) again in the morning.

Henri.

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One has to defrag every now and then or otherwise the filesystem will become very very slow (because the files are fragmented). Actually, I do not know is the fragmentation a problem in SSDs, because the latencies are very slow compared to HDDs. But I do not think that defragmenting, say, once a month is a problem in modern SSDs.

Well, like I said, I can't remember where I read it, but here's one quote:
"Remember, these are solid-state devices, so the classical issue of data fragmentation that can occur on a rotating drive platter doesn't apply, due to the extremely high access time."

It's from a review here.

Why not to hibernate when running SETI@home? Hibernating is usually much faster than shutting down the computer (for the night) and the booting the machine (and Windows) again in the morning.

Henri.

The suggestion was tongue-in-cheek... a little joke.

-Dave

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It's from a review here.

Thanks for the link.

Why not to hibernate when running SETI@home? Hibernating is usually much faster than shutting down the computer (for the night) and the booting the machine (and Windows) again in the morning.

The suggestion was tongue-in-cheek... a little joke.

Oh, I get it. :D

Henri.

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If one has 8 gigabytes (8192 MB) of RAM and one wants to hibernate his/her Windows, it will take 8192 MB / 250 MB/s = about 33 seconds to write that amount of data to the Intel 32GB X-25E Extreme SATA Solid State Drive disk.

I believe that's a theoretical write speed of the flash drive since 250MB/s is impossible with today's HDD controllers (and these SSD's plug into the SATA controller, correct?).

Not just the hibernation or booting time, SSD will make also chkdsk/scandisk, defrag and virus scanning faster. SSDs should also last years in a normal use and they will not crash like the HDDs do. They will slowly wear out and the available disk space should automatically go down (because the bad areas are no longer usable).

SSD is the future.

SSD may be the future, but not for the foreseeable future. HDDs have capacity, which is very important to many people out there, HDDs aren't as unreliable as people make them out to be (though a good backup is always recommended - even when using SSDs), and HDDs have the best price per gigabyte, and cost is everything in a capitalistic environment unless the task demands more.

Why not to hibernate when running SETI@home? Hibernating is usually much faster than shutting down the computer (for the night) and the booting the machine (and Windows) again in the morning.

Because I'd rather keep running the science. I don't hibernate any of my machines.

I believe that's a theoretical write speed of the flash drive since 250MB/s is impossible with today's HDD controllers (and these SSD's plug into the SATA controller, correct?).

Yes, but SATA II (or SATA 3.0 Gbit/s to be correct) should be able to transfer 300 megabytes per second. That should be enough for the Intel SSD. Of course, "SATA III" (or SATA 6.0 Gbit/s) is needed for even faster SSDs. That is why I wrote earlier:

- motherboard supporting Nehalem, USB 3, SATA 6.0 Gbit/s and UEFI

See this.

Henri.

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Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition <-- Sign this, please.

I believe that's a theoretical write speed of the flash drive since 250MB/s is impossible with today's HDD controllers (and these SSD's plug into the SATA controller, correct?).

Yes, but SATA II (or SATA 3.0 Gbit/s to be correct) should be able to transfer 300 megabytes per second. That should be enough for the Intel SSD. Of course, "SATA III" (or SATA 6.0 Gbit/s) is needed for even faster SSDs. That is why I wrote earlier:

- motherboard supporting Nehalem, USB 3, SATA 6.0 Gbit/s and UEFI

See this.

Henri.

SATA II's 3Gbit/s is a burst rate, not a sustained rate. Protocol overhead always keeps that number down.

there is a interesting article, maybe this helps clarify your questions

heinz

Hi!

SATA II's 3Gbit/s is a burst rate, not a sustained rate. Protocol overhead always keeps that number down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Serial_ATA#Burst_rate_or_sustained_rate.3F

Henri.

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Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition <-- Sign this, please.

Hi!

SATA II's 3Gbit/s is a burst rate, not a sustained rate. Protocol overhead always keeps that number down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Serial_ATA#Burst_rate_or_sustained_rate.3F

Henri.

I wouldn't trust those at Wikipedia to truly know what they're talking about, especially the one guy that says he thinks SSD drives can get up to 450MB/s. These are not necessarily people who have studied up on the technology, but casual internet users who like to pretend they know what they're talking about. This is one of the downsides to WikiPedia.

Every aspect of the computer, whether it is PCI, ISA, PATA, SATA, PCI-e, the Front Side Bus, the Backside Bus, AGP, even Intel's new QuickPath Interconnect - they all have protocol overhead, or in other words, part of the theoretical bandwidth is used up by electrical signals that verify the integrity of the payload being delivered, or that the data is delivered at all. These protocols are built into the spec itself when the spec is designed by engineers to ensure that data gets where its supposed to go, and follows a strict set of rules to get there, and that it actually gets there because no one likes lost data.

This is why no piece of hardware actually achieves full bandwidth saturation, and many times the bandwidth has to be shared with other devices, which add extra protocols to ensure the right data gets delivered to the right device.

3Gb/s SATA ~ 300MB/s

This is normally approachable in "burst" bandwidth benchmarks as the bandwidth of the internal drive cache. A number of disk benchmarking programs can test for this. I've not seen any exceed the theoretical 300MB/s of SATA 3.0Gb but I've seen some in the 250MB/s range.

Edit: Mechanical hard drives have a small amount of discrete cache memory, SSD drives don't. Didn't mean to imply they did.

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"Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh." - The Doctor