Yes but my point is how can you just be happy with that? To my mind it seems wrong you're happy to accept your £250-300 odd Intel G1 SSD is able to install apps in the same time as the average £30-40 HDD, and for me it's even harder to stomach when other SSD's like the Vertex has write speeds up to 180Mb/s which is damn impressive.
I apologies, I quoted the wrong post of yours, which I have now fixed. I was purely responding to the part of your post outlining that you didn't want to purchase a solid state drive that installed software slower than a mechanical hard drive and I was simply clarifying that this was not the case. Though, admittedly, I took very little time in taking the time out to thoroughly test the sort of time it takes when installing software so my experience isn't to be relied upon.
It seems that I myself have caused a massive confusion regarding this because I had stated installation times took around the same amount of time as if I was using a mechanical hard drive which may contradict with actual facts. I very, very much apologise for saying what I had said. I shouldn't have made such a blanket statement regarding my experiences before having thoroughly tested things beforehand.
Moving on though - Firstly, MR.B has reported in his post
here and also this one
here talks about the sorts of time it takes to install software (which was your main concern) amongst a number of other operations is dependent on random read and write performance which the Intel X25-M solid state drives excel in. In this thread
here over at the Anandtech forums, glugglug reports this as well:
glugglug said:
I guarantee installing stuff is dramatically faster than a Velociraptor. Random writes matter more than sequential even for that. Your typical installer application does a lot of random writes to register all the COM classes used by and file type recognized by the app, and to set stuff up for the Add/Remove programs app, etc. The only part that would be mostly sequential is copying game assets. And anyways where are you installing stuff from? Your DVD drive can't read much more than 10MB/s (and even that it can only reach on the second half of the disk).
The ONLY place where you will see an effect from the lower sequential write speed is copying large files to it. Well that and crash dumps. And even then it's better than most conventional hard drives. For the crash dumps I recommend making the WER directory a junction so they go to another drive. Also, consider this:
Velociraptor access time = 7.5ms (4.5ms seek time, plus 3ms for the platter to spin halfway around at 10K rpm to get to where it needs to be on average). 7.5ms * 70MB/s = 525KB head start for the SSD writing each file before the raptor even gets positioned to start the write. Since the Velociraptor's sequential write speed is 27.9MB/s faster than the SSD it takes 18.8ms for it to catch up, after writing 1842.2KB So when we say the Velociraptor has an advantage on "large" writes, this really means multi-megabyte files only. Writes this large are pretty rare. So much so that if the fragments of a huge file are all larger than 64MB, the defraggers built into Vista and Windows 7 don't consider the file to be fragmented.
Edit - I was always under the impression that the installation process of Windows and applications was more of a sequential operation and not random. Would you be able to clarify this please MR.B or anyone else that understands this.
Anandtech reports the following:
Anandtech said:
Arguably much more important to any PC user than sequential read/write performance is random access performance. It's not often that you're writing large files sequentially to your disk, but you do encounter tons of small file reads/writes as you use your PC.
The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - Random Read/Write Performance
Anandtech said:
There are four basic pillars to SSD performance that I like to look at: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. A good SSD must be strong in all four categories, but some are more noticeable than others. Random read and write speed, particularly of small files (e.g. 4KB) are normally what make our desktop hard drives feel so slow. These random operations are everything from file and table updates to search queries and loading applications; they aren't random over the entire space of the disk but they are random enough to bring conventional hard drives to their knees.
Sequential read/write speed is what you encounter when copying large files. How quickly you can move a Blu-ray image around is determined by these values.
Intel X25-M G2: Dissected and Performance Preview - The Performance
It's also only sequential writes that the Intel X25-M solid state series drives falls back on compared to say the OCZ Vertex as shown in the
The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved review on the following page -
The Bright Side: The Vertex is Nearly 3x as Fast.
Edit - Regarding the quote above, it states that sequential writes is what you encounter when copying large files. However, having a read of the article over at PC Perspective -
Intel X25-M 'G2' 34nm 160GB SSD Review -
PCPer File Copy Test it seems to show that the copying of relatively small files is slower on the Intel X25-M G2 compared to say the OCZ Vertex due to the advertised write speeds. Surely this shows that it is not just the copying of large files which is a sequential operation?
I do know what you're saying about how much you read compared to writing, but I think it's an uneven balance, I mean how much do you think your PC actually reads that you would notice while you're sitting there surfing the net? You boot into Windows, you load your apps and job done.
To address what you have said in the above quote - If you're simply taking the viewpoint that your system will not be affected by the random read speeds when you're simply reading the internet, then the same also applies to sequential writes, neither will be effecting things in that kind of situation. In fact, you may as well just use a mechanical hard drive since the difference between one of those and a solid state drive when simply surfing the internet will be minimal. However, I know when I am using my system, my internet browser is always open but I also perform a number of other tasks on my machine where the higher random read and write performance will be off great benefit.
Regarding your last part of the above quote where you have said that once you have loaded into Windows and loaded your applications, it's job done. Though, these operations benefit from random read and write performance.
I simply feel the Intel is lacking as an all round package. If other drives can balance it out better I feel the Intel should be able too as well considering it's meant to be the benchmark for others to follow. Seems to me it will be superceeded as the benchmark very quickly.
Intel have optimised their drives with a main focus on the primary types of situations where the user is likely to be affected the most and the fact is, it's random read and write performance that makes your system so slow and Intel have simply focused on this area more. Though, there is no denying the fact that Intel need to improve their sequential write speeds to keep in line with the competition. However, this shouldn't be much of a concern to anyone since not a lot of people do many sequential write operations.
