I am seriously considering purchasing a SSD for my primay system (i7/930, DPX58SO, 6Gb ram, Win7, 64-bit), to become my system drive (os, all exe). All data resides on another physical drive. Does anyone use a SSD for their system drive, and has anyone used one?

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-revodrive-x2-240gb-review/1

I use since one Year for my System Partition a Super Talent Ultradrive GX MLC 64GB SSD...

Helli

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A loooong time ago: First Credits after SETI@home Restart

I use since one Year for my System Partition a Super Talent Ultradrive GX MLC 64GB SSD...

Helli

You might want to take a close look at this one. The OCZ RevoDrive X2 is, an SSD based on MLC NAND flash memory.

The difference though is that it uses its own interface, hence it is not an SSD that you connect to your SATA connection. Quite the contrary. The NAND flash is stored onto a PCB(s) which connects directly can be plugged into your PCI Express x4/x8/x16 slot. The end result here is that you'll get a storage unit with a massive IO performance peaking up-to 740 MB/sec in read performance and a scorching 720 MB/sec write performance.

Well, i know about these SSD PCI-E Cards. Needs one of the spare PCI-E Slots.
But the price is to high - for me. 600 Euro for 240GB? Maybe the price will drop sometime. :D

Helli

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A loooong time ago: First Credits after SETI@home Restart

From what I have read, the SSD performance will degenerate after about a year. Not much, but not as fast as it is when it is new. After a year, the more it is used, the slower it gets. Things may have changed, but it has been several months since I read that.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

As an expeiment , I used 128gb SSD as my primary OS drive for a month, when it became corrupted, and packed up.

It became progressivly slower and slower

I had to initiate the warrantly, and get it replaced.

Not using replacement as the primary OS drive, reverted to a new 1TB HD drive.

After the bad experience, my wife is using the replacement SSD for additional storage for her laptop, without any mishap after 4 months of use.

Don't know if I just got a faulty SSD initially, but I'm certainly not going to trust them to run my primary OS, until I'm satified that they are a stable viable alternative to trusted HD drives.

Charlie

I have a couple Intel X25-M 40G drives in 2 of my systems, they're used for the OS and program files with /users and /programdata on separate SATA drives. They've probably been in there between 4 and 6 months now, I haven't noticed any issues. Hopefully I won't!

-Dave

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There is an interesting article out there comparing a SSDs with Raptor drives in Raid-0, Raid-1 etc. As far as I'm concerned until they bring the price per GB WAY down to at least comparable or close to comparable levels then SSD's simply aren't worth it. With the capacity you get for the price and speed, if you have a laptop with an old 5400 rpm low power drive SSD is for you. If you have a desktop and you actually want storage and speed stick with a Raid setup.

As far as what Steve is talking about performance degrading remember that SSD drives have limited write cycles. Flash-memory cells will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC. Many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this quite quickly. So make sure you get one that supports Trim to keep it in shape, and make sure you are using an operating system that supports it! And no XP won't cut it. Most of those PCIe solid states drives like that are also not bootable, from what I'm seeing they are claiming it is, but I would be weary.

Do some reading and make a decision because only you will be able to tell if you want it, need it, and the price per GB is justified. Personally I don't think it is for all the considerations you have to put into it. IE read page 5 of the review you linked all about trim and taking care of the disk....yuck. I'll stick with HDD's for a few more years before jumping to that boat, I'm not convinced that the technology has matured enough to be on a production rig.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

I think the thing that is keeping me away from them, other than the price, is that although the system will boot faster, and be more responsive to opening up programs, it won't really speed up crunching. My hard drives are not pulling a lot of resources keeping up with what I do.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

I have some SSD-usb devices.. and they are not terribly reliable from what I have seen. So I too am not eager to trust my computer functions to such a drive.

I do recall in the 90's.. there was a huge drive out. I am going by memory so it may be faulty but I believe it was 300 Megabyte, 5.25" drive(over all fitting in about an 8"x6"x20" area), with a 300 Megabyte Cache. Yes, designed to load its full content into RAM memory.

They were incredibly fast for access, and of course incredibly expensive. But in the day of 44, 80 or 120MB Hard drives, it was fun to drool.

There still might be some life left to that general principle.

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Janice

I have 2 machines running with 64G SSDs - so far so good - both are win7 cruncher only boxes.
They are fast - I can tell you that. One has and OCZ agility2 and the other has a Microcenter drive (based on the sandforce controller)
Both drives were 100 usd. So far so good on my end - I just flashed the OCZ with new firmware - didn't notice a difference but I read that it helps.
Lower power, low heat - every little bit helps. Will report back if I see any issues etc.
After a typical install with BOINC etc. I have about 30G free - not really enough for a main
machine with apps etc. but plenty for cruncher-only boxes. BTW running everything in
in ACHI mode - YMMV.

-David

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My experience has been positive with SSD's (so far :)) and have been using 2 for about a year now

As has been posted by others there have been various experiences reported on the Internet about failures, slow downs and confusion around what they are best used for.

If you are going to get one or thinking about SSD's there are a few things you need to consider and there are lots of articles on this - just don't get to carried away with the speeds and expect it to change you PC from a sluggish frustration to a lightning fast beast of a machine.

it will affect certain aspects of the pc operation day to day - which actually you get used to very quickly

The best use i can think of for a SSD is for your OS drive - i.e. for just the OS, application installs etc but not your data - have a second drive to store you data which is a conventional mechanical HD

A few tips so your experience, hopefully, will be positive

No point installing these with XP or Vista as they do not have TRIM support - its only in Win7 - not sure about Linux or Mac OS - TRIM simply realigns the data in the background so it helps maintain performance as it will degrade with use - think of it as a low level defrag that happens when you are not using the drive

avoid using them in a RAID config as TRIM will stop working - lots of people do and they work fine and you get very fast speeds but they will degrade quickly which is where some of the slow down reports come from i suspect

Move you swap file from the SSD to another HD - as the constant use will shorten the life of the drive as BeNt indicated

If TRIM is working correctly then speeds will generally be maintained but they do fluctuate (in bench testing) as it depends if TRIM has been active recently after say a big install like MS Office - as it does appear to take its time to kick in from my experience

Out of curiosity i just re ran my a benchmark on this machine and the speeds are still within 99% of the day i got it.

This tech is new and it needs more time to mature - so keep up to date on the SSD BIOS upgrades from the manufacturers as this can make quite a difference to the experience and they come out on a regular basis - something you do not usually have to do with a normal HD

So does it really affect daily life and productivity on a desktop machine - simply NO in my opinion - apps load quickly yes, os boot times from cold of 20 seconds or less too a fully working system are very achievable - if you do disk intensive work say HD video editing, games then yes they would speed things up but i suspect they would have a shorter life. Others will i am sure have different opinions and it all comes down to what you want to achieve or that inner geek that needs to have the latest tech on his or her machine :)

Laptops are probably one area where real benefit can be gained - low power draw, shock resistance, significant speed increase - tempered with the knowledge they may well not last 3 years with heavy use

yes over time i will probably get more as they come down in price, become more reliable etc, but an very happy with my 2 OCZ Vertex LE disks as 280meg read / write satisfies my inner geek :)

Will it affect SETI crunching nope or at best to a minimal degree - spend your money elsewhere

Sorry this got a bit longer than i was intending :)

Happy Crunching

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Tim

Good info Tim. And kind of fits what I was expecting.

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Janice

I am seriously considering purchasing a SSD for my primay system (i7/930, DPX58SO, 6Gb ram, Win7, 64-bit), to become my system drive (os, all exe). All data resides on another physical drive. Does anyone use a SSD for their system drive, and has anyone used one?

I've carefully looked at them, and, my opinion is...

Unless you have a specific application that can take advantage of their fast random access, or you have nothing else to spend your money on, you'll get a better performance boost by spending your money on other parts of the system.


As for Boinc crunchin'... I've maximised 'disk access' to something far higher performance than an SSD or the fastest of HDDs :-)

... I use tmpfs in the main system RAM to hold all the Boinc working files. In 'Windows parlance', otherwise known as using a "ram-disk".

The HDD is used twice a day to save an rsync -c 'snapshot' in case of system failure or whatever. Also, the Boinc state is retrieved/saved on startup/shutdown.


Much cheaper than an SSD and quite effective is to merely partition your HDD so that the OS is in it's own clean partition at the start of the disk with about 50% utilisation, and then have all user and work files in a much larger partition taking up the rest of the disk. However, that is not the default for Windows. (Most Linux distros arrange the HDD to have in sequence in separate partitions: the OS; swap space; and then the "/home" user area. That also keeps the user data safe for any updates, upgrades, reinstalls, or whatever of the OS partition.)

Another big speedup for Windows is to clean out any folders that have more than a hundred or so files in them. Also keep the registry cleaned out regularly. Finally, restrict any anti-virus to NOT look in the (ever changing) Boinc folders!

(None of that needed for Linux systems ofcourse.)


Hope of help,

Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Good comments. A little further opinion:

My experience has been positive with SSD's (so far :)) and have been using 2 for about a year now...

The best use i can think of for a SSD is for your OS drive - i.e. for just the OS, application installs etc but not your data - have a second drive to store you data which is a conventional mechanical HD...

That shouldn't be necessary, but the high cost of SSD storage vs the low cost of mechanical storage dictates that. All for the sake of maximising the usefulness of the SSD. A bit like the use of CPU cache memory because you can't afford to have your main RAM run at CPU speeds.

No point installing these with XP or Vista as they do not have TRIM support - its only in Win7 - not sure about Linux or Mac OS

TRIM support is in:

Operating System           Supported since                   Scheduled to be supported

Windows 7                  Final release - October 2009
Windows Server 2008 R2     Final release - October 2009
Linux 2.6.33               Feb 2010
OpenSolaris                July 2010
FreeBSD 8.1 (partial)      July 2010                        Version 9.0 (Proposed) possibly May 2011
Mac OS X                   No set timeframe for implementation, but preliminary work is being done.

(Wikipedia: Operating system [TRIM] SSD support)

(I'm sure Linux also had at least partial TRIM support before 2010...)

- TRIM simply realigns the data in the background so it helps maintain performance as it will degrade with use - think of it as a low level defrag that happens when you are not using the drive...

Not quite... The TRIM command allows the OS to tell the SSD which areas of storage are no longer in use by the filesystem. That then allows the SSD firmware to avoid remapping useless areas of storage when they can be simply erased for a new write operation to a part of the same erase block. A glib description is that it lets the firmware keep the wear levelling and block remapping tables clean, and avoids unnecessary rewrites of dead data.

Fragmentation on an SSD is not really an issue considering the near zero seek times for data.

... avoid using them in a RAID config as TRIM will stop working...

I'm not sure of the value of using RAID on SSDs other than what is already done by the firmware across the chips within an SSD. Far better is to operate redundant data storage at the application level across multiple discrete storage devices. Google do this for their data for example. There's further advantages for performance in not using RAID and journaling at the disk/filesystem level... (Enough digression!)

Move you swap file from the SSD to another HD - as the constant use will shorten the life of the drive as BeNt indicated

That is counter to what the SSD should be used for! Fast random access!! Wear levelling should allow the SSD to survive until well longer than obsolescence.

... Laptops are probably one area where real benefit can be gained - low power draw, shock resistance, significant speed increase...

I agree. My mobile devices are all SSD-ed. The only moving parts are the fan, keyboard and my fingers ;-)

Will it affect SETI crunching nope or at best to a minimal degree - spend your money elsewhere...

Happy Crunching

Agreed there!

Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Martin

lol - i was trying to keep it simple and in terms people would understand who are not that techy!!

the "defrag" ref was an analogy rather than explain it fully/correctly or glibly :) (sorry could not resist)

a little more explanation - i move the swap file because of two things

a) no point using up the life of the drive which is expensive
b) most pc's have lots of ram these days so it used a lot less than it used to be and performance is not affected that much - tried it both ways and not any everyday noticeable difference - but others may see the gain - linux?

but accept its what they should be good at and they are but...!

As an addition if people also want another cheaper way to speed up their existing HD and Ram Disk are beyond them look up "short stroking of Hard drives" in Google as it maximises the speed of the drive at the downside of loosing/wasting space

Happy crunching People :)

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Tim

The absolute cheapest way to speed up a HDD for me has been to use a number / name alignment on the drive putting everything as close to the MFT as possible and obviously making sure the programs I use the most is on the outer most side of the drive platter. O&O defrag and Ultimate Defrag do them as well as putting the archive files like zips etc. on the inside of the platter since speed is not absolutely needed for those files. And it makes quite an improvement in disk speeds.

SSD's will be ready for my computer within two years maybe. My main factor has been the gross prices on them. We are already seeing sub $80 terabyte drives and sub $100 2 terabyte drives, along with shrinking prices on SSD's. I think the price and size of the drives along with the technology to make them run will be fully matured in a matter of a few years.

But then again in a situation where power draw isn't necessarily a consideration, IE desktops, RAID keeps coming back to the front of my brain. Why pay $400+ for a small-ish SSD drive with super fast speed when you can achieve about the same speeds and have 4x the storage for less than $200! That's one of the reasons for RAID, besides redundancy, fall back, and speed, well depending on what definition you go by, 'Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks'. (Or 'Redundant Array of Independent Disks' but we are ignoring that one for the point haha.)

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Personally I only use SSD's on systems that are running Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 (Same kernel) and they work well. Also I only use Intel drives and have not experienced any issues - others have reported issues with OCZ drives and older drives with inferior controllers.

I do have clients that are using the Intel drives with the SSD toolbox and XP/Vista and their performance has not taken a hit but the drive is optimized each week to avoid this.

One of the systems that we work with is high speed video on assembly lines to spot defects during production and SSD's really helped this task. Before the SSD's were installed there were many reports of false positives while data was being written very quickly to the drive and filling the cache on standard rotating drives. Since the upgrade - no false positives have been reported.

We have installed 175 of the Intel drives in the local law enforcement patrol car laptops for 2 years and they have reduced their downtime significantly due to drive failures.

One thing to note at this time if you do choose to stripe these drives in RAID 0 the TRIM commands are not sent to the drives from the OS to perform optimization and garbage collection. You will have to be very selective of the RAID controller that you choose to ensure proper performance is maintained.

Todd

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I use since one Year for my System Partition a Super Talent Ultradrive GX MLC 64GB SSD...

Helli

You might want to take a close look at this one. The OCZ RevoDrive X2 is, an SSD based on MLC NAND flash memory.

The difference though is that it uses its own interface, hence it is not an SSD that you connect to your SATA connection. Quite the contrary. The NAND flash is stored onto a PCB(s) which connects directly can be plugged into your PCI Express x4/x8/x16 slot. The end result here is that you'll get a storage unit with a massive IO performance peaking up-to 740 MB/sec in read performance and a scorching 720 MB/sec write performance.

I so desperately want to buy one of those REvo Drives; but at 549.00 for the 160 GB model - I just cant justify it... and i didnt get it for christmas either!

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