Need your opinion on getting a solid state drive!

Chaz · 1 Aug 2010 at 12:41

Hey,

I'm tempted to get myself an SSD to use exclusively for work related stuff, which is for the most part web and flash development, photoshop work, that sort of thing. At the moment I've just got everything installed on one drive running XP, and I reckon I could improve my productivity by keeping work related stuff on a seperate operating system so I'm less distracted by Steam and that sort of thing!

Rather than partition my current drive which is chock full, I'd rather just buy a new one and dual boot. SSD's look very cool, but I've got a few questions. Will I see much of a performance increase opening big applications like Photoshop and Flash CS3, compiling code etc as well as better boot times?

Are SSD's reliable in the long run? It's very important I don't lose all my work!

Do their read/write speeds deteriorate over time? I'm using a Samsung Spinpoint F1 at the moment, its read/write speeds were impressive when it was new but after about a year I'm reading at 40-60MB/s and writing at less than 10MB/s!

The Crucial C300 is what I've got my eye on (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-007-CR&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910), 64GB is small but I think it'll be enough for what I need.

Thanks!

Yakyb · 1 Aug 2010 at 12:47

Chaz said:
Are SSD's reliable in the long run? It's very important I don't lose all my work!

i hope you are backing up everyday then

but i have noticed massive improvements on build and load times using my corsair c300 64GB

your f1 shouldnt deteriorate like that, how full is it? when did you last defrag? what other drives are you using? i woudl highly advise you look at your whole Data structure and not just the implementation of an SSD.

iNPUt · 1 Aug 2010 at 12:59

Have you got SATA-3 capabilities on your rig? for the C300.

Also grab HD Tune and check your hdd, how rammed of data are we talking about, might be worth picking up another TB hard drive to spread the load a bit. Give us a screen shot.

Chaz · 1 Aug 2010 at 13:17

Crap, I don't think my board supports SATA-3, thanks for the heads up. My whole rig is almost 4 years old now (wow), but I don't want to change it apart from the graphics and storage because it still runs great, 3.4GHz dual core with 4GB RAM. The board is an old Gigabyte DS3 I chose for overclocking potential, there's no way I'm going through the hassle of changing it.

Reading the wikipedia page on SATA 2 it says:

Taking 8b/10b encoding overhead into account, they have an actual uncoded transfer rate of 2.4 Gbit/s (3000000000*8/10/1024/1024/8 ≅ 286.10 MiB/s).

So if the highest read speed I get is 286MB/s that's not too far off the drives official max of 355MB/s. Presumably the drive will still work in my rig?

I'll get HD Tune and see what it says, thanks.

bifday2k · 1 Aug 2010 at 13:19

Yup it will still work just aswell on sata2, so no worries there.

Chaz · 1 Aug 2010 at 13:26

bifday2k said:
Yup it will still work just aswell on sata2, so no worries there.

Thanks.

HD Tune results are in:

The drive is 97.7% full, is that my problem?

I was previously using 'DiskBench' to measure my read/write speeds, the results seem to look a lot better with HD Tune.

Yakyb · 1 Aug 2010 at 14:38

Chaz said:
Thanks.
The drive is 97.7% full, is that my problem?

yep

how vital is your data to you? i would personally invest in a solid backup / Nas system before getting an SSD

olivier renault · 1 Aug 2010 at 14:39

Chaz said:
Will I see much of a performance increase opening big applications like Photoshop and Flash CS3, compiling code etc as well as better boot times?

all those are the strengths of SSDs.

Are SSD's reliable in the long run? It's very important I don't lose all my work!

Yes. They will deteriorate over time (we're talking years), but are more realible than mechanical drives. What you will see will be a loss of capacity rather than corrupted data. But you would not store your work on a SSD, only applications and OS.

Do their read/write speeds deteriorate over time? I'm using a Samsung Spinpoint F1 at the moment, its read/write speeds were impressive when it was new but after about a year I'm reading at 40-60MB/s and writing at less than 10MB/s!

No but they are sensitive to how full the drive becomes. They have garbage collection algorithms and such to optimise their performance in that regard, so with the latest technology, you will not see much a deterioration in performance, over time or capacity.

Mechanical drives have variable read / write speed, depending on where the data is stored on the platter. SSD's do not have that problem.

The Crucial C300 is what I've got my eye on (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-007-CR&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910), 64GB is small but I think it'll be enough for what I need.

Just do not use your SSD for storage. It also depends on how many applications, and how big they are on a drive, how much space libraries, plug-ins, ect take, but factor in 20-25 GB for windows, drivers, ect... it leaves you with a usable 30 GB capacity for your applications. Do not put your games on the SSD if you rely on it for your work though, imo it's wasted space. if 64 GB (I think the real size on the SSD will be be more like 60GB), the 80GB X25-M is also very good. I think there is a refresh on that drive though, with a new controller. The Vertex 96 GB has great value for money too, and decent performance.

Also, keep your user folders clean. Keep your windows backup, recovery and restore files on another drive. Keeping those files on SSD is pointless, and they take a lot of space.

Delegate that to a mechanical drive. Aside from regular backups, a RAID 1 array will protect you against a single hard drive failure. But regular backups on an external (even several) medium is always the best way yo protect yourself.

Yakyb · 1 Aug 2010 at 16:00

olivier renault said:
But you would not store your work on a SSD, only applications and OS.

I Disagree with that

if your looking for the full benefits of a SSD that is exactly where you want your work, build times a significantly reduced on a SSD

Finguz · 1 Aug 2010 at 19:07

Yakyb said:
I Disagree with that

if your looking for the full benefits of a SSD that is exactly where you want your work, build times a significantly reduced on a SSD

Agreed, simply make sure to backup regularly as you would with any other HDD

westylakey · 1 Aug 2010 at 19:55

slightly on topic, i've got a 40gb ocz vertex 2e on the way for my new build, how much space will windows 7 take up? havent got the o/s yet but will probably go with home premium.

mrteabag · 1 Aug 2010 at 20:11

westylakey said:
slightly on topic, i've got a 40gb ocz vertex 2e on the way for my new build, how much space will windows 7 take up? havent got the o/s yet but will probably go with home premium.

Something like 11gb if I remember,but that drive is gonna fill up quick.

westylakey · 1 Aug 2010 at 20:35

It's only for the o/s and apps, possibly one game. I have a 500gb for the rest. may get a 1tb to go with it.

mrteabag · 1 Aug 2010 at 20:41

That will be fine

Just keep an eye on it

estebanrey · 2 Aug 2010 at 01:36

Until they bring out a 500GB SSD for under £100 I'm gonna wait.

Why is it you can pick up USB pens for next to nothing (my 16GB cost me £17.99) but make it bigger (that's all SSDs are essentially) and it suddenly costs ten times the price?!?!?

Atom · 2 Aug 2010 at 02:17

westylakey said:
slightly on topic, i've got a 40gb ocz vertex 2e on the way for my new build, how much space will windows 7 take up? havent got the o/s yet but will probably go with home premium.

Using 22GB and I haven't got all my apps installed..

_TubbZ_ · 2 Aug 2010 at 03:41

estebanrey said:
Until they bring out a 500GB SSD for under £100 I'm gonna wait.

Why is it you can pick up USB pens for next to nothing (my 16GB cost me £17.99) but make it bigger (that's all SSDs are essentially) and it suddenly costs ten times the price?!?!?

Speed, increased life span, intelligent management, and being new technology with a higher premium.

Personally i am going to wait until i can get a 128GB drive for a slightly more reasonable price than they are now

trentlad · 2 Aug 2010 at 04:48

My data is really important to me and I had benches similar to that on my old HDD. After thinking about SSD I decided to setup a RAID array with just two drives. I just couldn't justify the cost, but if I were to pick one it would definitely be the 64GB C300 (that sandforce controller kicks ***).

You'll get great speed with your SSD but if your data is really that important then a RAID may be an option. You've got a gigabyte mobo so I'm guessing you'll have Intel's Matrix Technology on your onboard RAID controller. With the Matrix RAID it's so easy to setup two RAID arrays on just two HDDs; one partition is stripped RAID 0 (very fast) and the other partition is mirrored RAID 1 (backs up data over both drives).

This is the bench I get on my RAID 0 partition (nothing compared to the access time on an SSD but still impressive):

bifday2k · 2 Aug 2010 at 09:03

westylakey said:
slightly on topic, i've got a 40gb ocz vertex 2e on the way for my new build, how much space will windows 7 take up? havent got the o/s yet but will probably go with home premium.

My intel 40gb has win7 64bit (needs abit more space then the 32bit) and all my apps that i use on a regular basis.

Total space used is 23.5gb giving me 13.7gb left, so i would'nt worry to much.

This is on a 6 month old install.

atmax1 · 2 Aug 2010 at 09:13

I love ssds made my pc so much quicker lol so would always recommend them but i always back my work up on my server.. Like anybody should if the work is important but so far i haven't had a problem with my 80gb intel ssd.