OS drives

gropingmantis · 19 Apr 2011 at 15:54

I've been looking around trying to find out which SSD to get as a boot drive for my system.
Unfortunately nobody seems to care to say which is best for OS work in any reviews or comparisons. What should I be looking for? Obviously read speeds are more important than write speeds but what sizes are more pertinent? 512? 2k? 4K? Sequential? Random?

Please help me to decipher what it all means.

Predicament · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:21

AFAIK you should be looking for random read/write.

Gropingmantis, any recent gen SSD will blow your HDD out of the water in terms of boot time anyways... so whatever you choose will please you.

gropingmantis · 19 Apr 2011 at 18:22

I understand this and will undoubtedly be going for whichever one I can afford at the size I want but it would still be nice to know for reference etc.

Mpemba Effect · 20 Apr 2011 at 07:48

gropingmantis said:
I understand this and will undoubtedly be going for whichever one I can afford at the size I want but it would still be nice to know for reference etc.

Yet you don't actually mention what you can afford and what size you want

It could be because there's dozens of recent threads on this already but even if you were not to read any of them it would probably be quite helpful if you mentioned a) how much you can spend b) what size you'll want or a list of what apps you'll be running off it seeing as most people usually use it for a boot drive as well as to run boot time applications, or just programs they want loading quicker c) perhaps your some details on whether you have a sata 6g controller

gropingmantis · 20 Apr 2011 at 09:16

Nononono you misunderstand this isnt a "spec me an OS drive" thread this is a "Im looking at OS drives and wondered what all the numbers mean" thread.

For your interest though I am torn between M4, 510 and V3 at 120/128GB but are the increases in price indicative of the increase in speed for an OS drive? I dont want to spend £10 extra for the V3 over the 510 or £40-50 over the M4 only to find that I have gained nothing. Oh and I fully intend to use part of the drive for SSD caching once Z68 pops up.

bhavv · 20 Apr 2011 at 10:06

The numbers are meaningless for an OS drive. Take a look at these three drives:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-031-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-014-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-007-CR&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

Going from a HDD to any one of those 3 for a boot drive will make a massive improvement to the overall speed of your PC.

Going from any one of those SSDs to another for use as an OS drive will be completely unnoticable, even with the massive read / write speed differences on paper.

The reason is that SSDs can only get so fast before they are bottlenecked by the rest of the system, and even the 60 Gb Agility drive will greatly exceed the bottleneck created by everything else.

A HDD is a huge bottleneck as an OS drive for the rest of your system, but the rest of your system is a huge bottleneck for an SSD. You can see that in this post I made here:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=18844650&postcount=32

gropingmantis · 20 Apr 2011 at 10:27

So basically there is no point at looking at current gen SSDs for an OS drive and may as well save some money and get a 320 or C300 as the difference is negligible?

What about for caching?

bhavv · 20 Apr 2011 at 11:11

gropingmantis said:
So basically there is no point at looking at current gen SSDs for an OS drive and may as well save some money and get a 320 or C300 as the difference is negligible?

What about for caching?

For an OS / Gaming drive, The OCZ Agility will be just as good as the latest Sata III drives.

Between a Sata III C300 with 365 Mb/s read speeds, and the new Sata drives around 450 Mb/s, you will never notice any difference other than in benchmarks, and in the Guru 3D review, there was a solid cap in loading speed improvements for games that was reached on the Agility drive (7-8s load time for a particular game) that was not bettered by any faster SSD, but the improvement was still huge over a normal HDD (22s on a raptor). The results would be the same with using an SSD as an OS drive, negligible difference between an OCZ agility and a 450 Mb/s Sata III drive because both are bottlenecked by current hardware.

However, with the prices that the Crucial M4 is being released at, it still makes a decent buy over older tech drives, but if all you are looking for an OS drive, the 60 Gb Agility is the best bang for buck.

Gibbo said this when I asked in that thread, and I agree from looking through the review results:

Gibbo said:
Basically it goes as follows:-

Changing your boot drive from a fast 7200rpm HDD to an average SSD like say an Agility will give your system one huge boost when used as a boot drive, probably the best upgrade you will ever do.

But say upgrading your boot drive from something like say an OCZ Agility to an OCZ Vertex 3 will not give anywhere near as noticable improvement unless your running benchmarks or loading and saving very large files to it.

This is simply because what really makes SSD perform so well is the sub 0.1ms access times and they all do that, even the real slow ones, its only the really old ones that had stuttering issues based on Jmicron controllers that were slow but thankfully we no longer sell those, they are long gone.

The reason I got a C300 was because it was it was going into a Sata III port, and the prices back then between the 64 Gb C300 and similar OCZ drives was tiny. Right now, the 60 Gb Agility drive will be more than fast enough for an OS drive.

gropingmantis · 20 Apr 2011 at 12:00

Sounds reasonable, law of diminishing returns and all that.

Thanks

Zarf · 20 Apr 2011 at 15:06

Any of the last couple generations of SSD's feel much the same to use, even an old Samsung 90/70 drive will feel similar to a Vertex3 despite massive spec differences. As long as you avoid the old jMicron drives you'll be fine - plenty of bargains to be had. The Indilinx based Agility series were/are? on offer at OCUK for close to £1/GB.

It only really makes a difference going if you are doing something that needs fast sustained reads or writes - video editing massive uncompressed high-def files etc. Software simply hasn't caught up to the SSD revolution yet, and the design compromises to get best performance from mechanical drives limit the benefits an SSD can bring.

Mpemba Effect · 20 Apr 2011 at 20:20

For a boot drive the things you'll be looking for is basically just a fast boot of your OS and perhaps some apps. As everyone's kinda mentioned already, any newish ssd will be fine and you'll unlikely notice much difference between them for the above purpose. If you're doing heavy IO work then perhaps that's different.

I recently picked up a 60gb ocz agility for a boot drive for £65, it doesn't do much apart from that, heck it's not big enough to do much and mostly everything I have such as temp files, swap, documents etc is offloaded onto a standard hard drive.

It boots up pretty fast with anything I need loaded, and all intents and purposes as fast as anyone else with any ssd. Which is basically what I use it for rather than hardcore read/writes.

Compared with other people

Ferax · 21 Apr 2011 at 15:11

Very interesting that there is very little real world difference between these drives considering the price differential. I'm also after an SSD for use as a boot drive, and the OCZ agility looks spot on for the money. Are there any limitations in terms of motherboard compatibility? I have an Asus P5Q pro - would that be ok?

niftyfifty · 21 Apr 2011 at 18:45

bhavv said:
The numbers are meaningless for an OS drive. Take a look at these three drives:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-031-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-014-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-007-CR&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

Going from a HDD to any one of those 3 for a boot drive will make a massive improvement to the overall speed of your PC.

Going from any one of those SSDs to another for use as an OS drive will be completely unnoticable, even with the massive read / write speed differences on paper.

The reason is that SSDs can only get so fast before they are bottlenecked by the rest of the system, and even the 60 Gb Agility drive will greatly exceed the bottleneck created by everything else.

A HDD is a huge bottleneck as an OS drive for the rest of your system, but the rest of your system is a huge bottleneck for an SSD. You can see that in this post I made here:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=18844650&postcount=32

See i read this but in here

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18266545

others are telling me completely different!?

Mpemba Effect · 22 Apr 2011 at 00:45

Ferax said:
Very interesting that there is very little real world difference between these drives considering the price differential. I'm also after an SSD for use as a boot drive, and the OCZ agility looks spot on for the money. Are there any limitations in terms of motherboard compatibility? I have an Asus P5Q pro - would that be ok?

I wouldn't go as far as to say there's no real world difference since that really depends on what you're using it for. As for compatibility the Asus P5Q pro would be fine.