Not convinced by SSD

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

Soldato
Joined
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Hi everyone,

I was looking at SSD's for a while and pondering over to get one or not, eventually I took the plunge and got myself two of the new Vertex 2e ssd's.

I set them up in a raid0 configuration using my onboard raid controller on the asus maximus formula.

The first thing I noticed was the installation of Windows 7 x64 wasn't at all quicker than installing to my old standard HDD, if anything was a little slower.

Program's also dont install lightning fast like I was hoping for, granted they were a little quicker at installing but definitely not £340 worth of a difference.

If I am opening multiple applications one after the other, then yes there is a difference but very rarely do i open photoshop, word, lightroom, e-mail and firefox one after the other rapidly.

One other thing that I found really strange was the benchmark results. The first day I was only getting results similar to the performance of one drive, they are definitely in raid0. Then all of a sudden the performance nearly doubles. I was installing all sorts and doing all the tricks suggested to improve performance, disable superfetch, disable indexing etc etc. So i'm not sure what caused the increase. I decided to reinstall Windows 7 again to make sure I never missed anything or it was a bad install. This time I used the "load driver" utility when installing and loaded the raid sata driver. I then got the higher set of results on first install so it must have been that.

So far the only thing I am enjoying about these drives is the noise, they are of course silent and it's bliss. My old 74GB raptor was terrible for noise.

Is there any tests I can do or can someone maybe try and reassure me I haven't wasted £340.

Any help would be amazing, and I am pretty new to forums so If I have made any fundemental mistakes, sorry in advance.

Cheers, Graeme
 
i have the WD VR drive and its fairl quiet, my tower sits on the floor, and the more benches and info that i read the less im convinced by ssd, especially like you say, how often do you open loads of programs at the same time? i usually only open one once per session, ie ff stays open until i shutdown

i think the hype is the only thing making me want one, my head cant justify the cost, the noisest part of my set up is the fans, considering i paid 115 for my vr 300gb £180 for an 80gb intel ssd for small increases just doesnt work in my head, one thread on here was saying boot time is 40secs mine isnt much slower than that

edt
77 processes after startup and 80 seconds AFTER POST, 100seconds from pushing the on button
 
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Mr Paul said:
Are you running is ACHI mode? Also you need to use the Intel rapid storage drivers
Click to expand...

My bios is configured for RAID rather than AHCI. I thought this was only if you had one drive rather than a raid0 config?

I installed the intel rapid storage drivers and it never made the slightest bit of difference in the benchmarks. I am getting respectable results in the bench.

I just dont see a real world performance difference.
 
al4x said:
i have the WD VR drive and its fairl quiet, my tower sits on the floor, and the more benches and info that i read the less im convinced by ssd, especially like you say, how often do you open loads of programs at the same time? i usually only open one once per session, ie ff stays open until i shutdown

i think the hype is the only thing making me want one, my head cant justify the cost, the noisest part of my set up is the fans, considering i paid 115 for my vr 300gb £180 for an 80gb intel ssd for small increases just doesnt work in my head, one thread on here was saying boot time is 40secs mine isnt much slower than that

edt
77 processes after startup and 80 seconds AFTER POST, 100seconds from pushing the on button
Click to expand...

Well like you said. It was the hype that drew me in and now I wish I hadn't. A new velociraptor would have been a much more sensible choice.
 
I think something is probably wrong dude, I haven't heard anyone being left cold by ssds let alone raided ones, perhaps try with a single drive, see if it is much faster, they should leave a 74gb raptor for dead.
 
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installing things isn't always about the speed of the drive. Usually when you install things your processor has to spend some time decompressing the files, rather than reading/writing to the ssd.

also remember that things like TRIM dont work when you use SSD's in raid.


100 seconds for startup is pretty slow tbh. Mine takes a quater of that, timed at about 17-20 seconds for boot up, considerably quicker than my VR
 
Even the slow cheapy patriot ones are very different to a mechanical HDD...

I have several of them:

In my gaming PC I use a couple of them each partitioned into 3 smaller drives each dedicated to a different game install from steam (using filesystem links) and I can tell you for a fact those games now load MUCH faster than they did from my old mechanical RAID (and that does 300MB/s sustained) at a guess I'd say in the region of 3x faster load times.

I have another in a low power atom system - baring in mind the CPU on this is pretty slow to start with - from the 7200.12 drive I had in there before windows would take a good 30-40 seconds to load but just swapping it out for a SSD (mostly for low power and less noise/heat) dropped that to around 10 seconds max (very slimmed down XP install).
 
Cycrow said:
installing things isn't always about the speed of the drive. Usually when you install things your processor has to spend some time decompressing the files, rather than reading/writing to the ssd.

also remember that things like TRIM dont work when you use SSD's in raid.


100 seconds for startup is pretty slow tbh. Mine takes a quater of that, timed at about 17-20 seconds for boot up, considerably quicker than my VR
Click to expand...

It wasn't myself that said it took 100 seconds to boot. It was the other fellow. Mines is around the 15 second mark from when i see the windows boot screen.

TRIM doesn't effect the performance of the drive as far as I am aware, so doesnt really matter.
 
As others have said you wont see much of a difference installing applications as there is various other things being done at that time, its not just the hard drive working.

I also don't notice a massive difference in boot up times, maybe only 10-15 difference secs on my vertex. Where SSD's are strong though is opening applications, with the low access times and good bandwidth. I can load goggle chrome with 50 tabs and it loads instantly, and I can see the difference loading photoshop for example too, there is actual no loading screen comes up for it. :p
 
Ok, so applications open faster, but in the real world is this any use, you gain 10 seconds or whatever, its just less time you spend picking your nose waiting for things to happen.

These SSD's are the biggest single con trick foisted on the computer public for years, speed advantages, so what, it's seconds and the improvement to the users work output in reality is minimal.

I was thinking of getting one of these but for the cost and the hassle that users are having with them they are not worth the bother.


Rgds
Binty
 
The main point is the speed and access time, but they also have no noise and use a little less power.

Did you expect them to make you a coffee or something?
 
Guess it all depends on how heavy a computer user you are. I spend a lot of time multitasking on the desktop and for me SSD's were very noticable, like when I went from a Athlon XP system to a Core2Duo. Not to mention that silence is golden after Raid0 RaptorX's.
I'm running SSD's in my gaming comp, laptop, and HTPC now. I definitely don't regret spending the money on them instead of going i5 or getting a DX11 card.
 
I'm just not convinced that the speed benefits in the real world justify the cost and the hassle people are having with them.

Sure, I can see how a user thinks "nice, this is fast", but is this worth the outlay of hundreds of pounds when a traditional drive will do the same thing in a little longer.

Also, you only have to read the "why is my SSD so slow" threads on this forum to see the configuration issues they bring with them.

If the user is comfortable in shelling out hundreds of their "hard earned" for a "nice, this is fast" feeling then I respect their right to do so. For me, its a sham.


Rgds
Binty
 
They are still new tech though and everyone that buys are early adopters. Traditional mechanical hard disks are about as fast and refined as they will get - it will be years until SSDs will become mainstream.
 
As I said for me it works a treat... no more waiting around on map change when playing a video game and my backup storage system is quieter, uses less power and incidentally is much faster to.
 
Bint Box said:
I'm just not convinced that the speed benefits in the real world justify the cost and the hassle people are having with them.

Sure, I can see how a user thinks "nice, this is fast", but is this worth the outlay of hundreds of pounds when a traditional drive will do the same thing in a little longer.

Rgds
Binty
Click to expand...

I think it's just a question of accepting that storage is now the third equally valid choice when it comes to upgrade time as changing your CPU or Graphics card.
I'm pretty sure that anyone who upgraded from a Core2Quad to an i5 or i7 would have had a more all-round satisfying system if they picked an SSD instead, and it would've cost them less.
Same argument goes for graphics cards, is being able to run on High instead of medium really worth dropping £300 (don't even get me started on SLI :P)

As always it comes down to what you use your PC for, if you spend a lot of time multitasking on the desktop, you'll see massive improvements with an SSD, medium improvements from a CPU/RAM change and no benefit at all from upgrading your GPU ... whereas if you're a gamer an SSD will get you in game a bit faster but after that it's not going to do anything for you.
Now with SSD's providing that third option for upgrades we have even more control in how we overcome the bottlenecks our system imposes on the activities we most care about.

Also, you only have to read the "why is my SSD so slow" threads on this forum to see the configuration issues they bring with them.
Click to expand...
This mainly comes from people being obsessed with benchmarks and the liberties marketing guys take with the numbers on the packaging.
It's not that people think their SSD actually feels slow, it's that the bechmarks don't match their expectations.
If you're using Win7 you don't actually need to do anything different to a normal hard disk to configure it properly. Of course if you have the time and inclination to tweak, as with anything else in your comp, there are lots of things to play around with. Even on mechanical drives you could play around with short stroking and different Defrag methods.
 
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