Are SSDs worth it?

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Nerfherder said:
I have been convinced for a while but the one thing that I read that worried me was that you shouldn't put your swap space on your SSD. Some thing to do with the fact that there are a limited amounts of writes that you can do and having the swap space on the drive will reduce the life of the drive dramatically.
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I thought that was only with earlier models?
 
NomNom said:
To be totally honest with you I do notice a huge difference in speed in my Windows to perform things since moving from a HDD to SSD.
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the best way to notice the difference is to clone your ssd drive onto a mechanical and run it :eek:. We get used to the ssd speed and we forget what the old drive was like but when you clone it and run the mech drive it is insane.
 
Excuse a possible noob question, but can a SSD be fitted in a laptop? Just thinking that a SSD in my work laptop would probably make a huge difference. I often have many files, docs open and need to flip through them. Lag can be both annoying and wastes a bit of time.
 
McT said:
Excuse a possible noob question, but can a SSD be fitted in a laptop? Just thinking that a SSD in my work laptop would probably make a huge difference. I often have many files, docs open and need to flip through them. Lag can be both annoying and wastes a bit of time.
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Yes you can (if your notebook uses SATA drives). I have a Vertex 3 120GB as my primary and a hybrid 500GB as my secondary.
If using Win 7, just do a system image of your primary drive, replace with SSD and restore image. Will be fine in no time.
Win 7 also aligns the SSD partitions correctly on the restore.
 
Mike Smit said:
Yes you can (if your notebook uses SATA drives). I have a Vertex 3 120GB as my primary and a hybrid 500GB as my secondary.
If using Win 7, just do a system image of your primary drive, replace with SSD and restore image. Will be fine in no time.
Win 7 also aligns the SSD partitions correctly on the restore.
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Thank you
 
not now too expensive they will come down and be the standard in the future.
 
How are they too expensive? You can pick up 120gb's for just over 1k. I wonder when ssd's will be considered cheap? when they hit 500 bucks for a 1tb or something.

Considering people blow 5k on gpu's, 3k on cpu's and 2-4k on mobo's ssd's are pretty cheap.
 
Nerfherder said:
I have been convinced for a while but the one thing that I read that worried me was that you shouldn't put your swap space on your SSD. Some thing to do with the fact that there are a limited amounts of writes that you can do and having the swap space on the drive will reduce the life of the drive dramatically.
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That was the case with earlier drives that were running on older MLC NAND modules. If you used them sparingly, they'd probably last you about two to three years as boot drives with the swap space on another HDD and with things like hibernation and drive indexing and defragmenting disabled.

These days, all you'd really have to do is disable indexing and the defrag schedule. You could use MLC or SLC SSD drives for up to five years without a hitch. And if the drive fails, it fails into read-only mode, allowing you to quickly backup your stuff and put it on another drive.

Warrior said:
2 x Vertex3 240gb raid 0 ftw.
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And then you lose TRIM support, hurray! Don't RAID SSDs together, otherwise you'll see performance drops before the end of a year with the array. Unless you're using a server with Whiptail, in which case this performance drop is negated.

If anyone wonders about how they could increase the life of their SSD, Electronic Products did a lengthly look into the benefits of SLC NAND chips compared to MLC. That was written in 2008, but most of it still applies today. One excerpt indirectly points out the easiest way to expand drive life:

Toshiba developed an internal model and studied usage patterns for typical and heavy mobile computer users. Typical users wrote approximately 1.4 Gbytes/day, and heavy users about 5.2 Gbytes/day.

To even begin to reach a conservative endurance limit of a 64-Gbyte MLC NAND-based SSD with wear-leveling technology, a mobile user would have to write approximately 40 Tbytes of data over the expected five-year life of the drive. That’s equal to approximately 22 Gbytes of new data per day, every day.

With a 128-Gbyte drive, the wear would be spread over a larger storage area, doubling the average daily limit to 44 Gbytes. Therefore the endurance limit is so far beyond the likely usage of a typical mobile computer user that it may not be a realistic cause for concern.
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If you're a heavy downloader, shove all your new content straight to a secondary internal drive and put the page file on that same drive. You're mitigating the number of writes needed when you're downloading stuff from the internet (especially if one averages about 40GB a day on a 10Mb/s line) and since many apps don't need to use the pagefile that much anymore, keeping it on a secondary drive doesn't reduce performance drastically.
 
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I have a Ocz Vertex 3 (120GB) as boot drive, 500Gb Seagate Hybrid drive for the user profile etc, and a 2 Tb drive for media.

Boot times with windows 7 are amazing and performance of apps are incredible. Pastel Accounting boots in seconds and database repairs take a fraction of the time.

On large Pervasive files, rebuilding would pause while the HDD was catching up writing, with the SSD there are no delays and rebuilds run smoothly.
 
waynehooper said:
On large Pervasive files, rebuilding would pause while the HDD was catching up writing, with the SSD there are no delays and rebuilds run smoothly.
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I like your setup, it makes a lot of sense. You'd probably get similar performance with a 64GB SSD run as a cache drive, but in your case you wouldn't have the drawbacks to drive caching.

On the use of an SSD for Pervasive, that's one of the reasons why I recommend a SSD with a backup schedule for a server that just needs to run a few things including Pastel. I hated fixing Pastel and Pervasive databases because they would take ages to recover.

Did you just remap your user folder to your 500GB Hybrid?
 
killadoob said:
How are they too expensive? You can pick up 120gb's for just over 1k. I wonder when ssd's will be considered cheap? when they hit 500 bucks for a 1tb or something.

Considering people blow 5k on gpu's, 3k on cpu's and 2-4k on mobo's ssd's are pretty cheap.
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the problem is that you are trying to convince me to pay 1 grand on 120gb over 1TB (saw some HDs priced at that, not sure if they are 7200rpm) Even if false, the 7200rpm is probably not too far.

the thing with ssd is that people say it takes you to a new level. what is forgotten is that the "old" level is not bad. staying at my current HDD speeds is not penalising me.

edit - i think of mass effect. how would ssd benefit me?
 
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killadoob said:
the best way to notice the difference is to clone your ssd drive onto a mechanical and run it :eek:. We get used to the ssd speed and we forget what the old drive was like but when you clone it and run the mech drive it is insane.
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About a week or two ago I decided to format my windows 7 which was on my SSD and move back to my HDD and it was really slow and boot time was at least 5 times longer. Yesterday morning I "accidentally" formatted my OS HDD and moved back to my SSD oh how I have missed the speed, even on my old vertex 2 I will never go back. :love:

waynehooper said:
I have a Ocz Vertex 3 (120GB) as boot drive, 500Gb Seagate Hybrid drive for the user profile etc, and a 2 Tb drive for media.
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Did you move the AppData folder also? As in did you move your entire user folder or just redirect the music/pictures/videos/downloads/desktop folders?
 
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I'm running a windows 7, i7, 8 gigs ram. Will i really see a significant performance boost, besides boot times.
 
nadimm said:
I'm running a windows 7, i7, 8 gigs ram. Will i really see a significant performance boost, besides boot times.
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That is like asking if you upgrade from a Ferrari to a F1 car, will the new one be any faster.

In other words it all depends on how you use it.
 
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NAG - Wesley said:
If you're a heavy downloader, shove all your new content straight to a secondary internal drive and put the page file on that same drive. You're mitigating the number of writes needed when you're downloading stuff from the internet (especially if one averages about 40GB a day on a 10Mb/s line) and since many apps don't need to use the pagefile that much anymore, keeping it on a secondary drive doesn't reduce performance drastically.
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Just a quick question, if a user was writing double the amount mentioned, 80GB per day then say oneday the drive goes into Read-only as mentioned, how does warranty play a role here (i haven't read the warranty cover)? Will it get replaced over the 5 year warranty for example?

Just to add, i want to use my SSD to the full extent hence why i see no need (for me) to not write large amounts of data to the drive. These drives are mean't for performance and hence i expect to use it to the fullest :).
 
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Over a year ago (march) I got an 120GB SSD for R2500

Now, I got a 256 GB SSD for R3300.

Prices are surely plummeting, they are much cheaper now, and definitely worth it!

My MBP's restart time went from 1:30 min to ~15 sec... you know that spinning wheel? Well, it only gets to do half a revolution :D
But of course that's not the important thing... the important thing is that apps load really fast... Like office, it loads as fast as though it were just minimized.
 
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