SSD Hard Drives

[uncle dick]

At work I have an Asus P5KV-M motherboard and E8400 processor but the hard drive (Hitachi 320GB) is getting slower and slower, like below 1MB per sec. I've run various botchecks, virus scans etc but it's still crap. I tried using Defraggle which showed about 40% fragmentation but it seems even worse now.

So, I'm looking at new HDD's - we only need around 100GB max - so thinking about solid state. Anyone using them? I have seen odd threads about certain motherboards and SSD's having conflicts and don't want to end up in that trap. You normally only find out about these issues after you've bought the bloomin' thing.

Any thoughts?

TIA
Dick

 

[cookie]

it's more likely to be windows getting slow, not the hardware.

i have never had ANY joy with programs claiming to de-clutter, de-frag, clean the registry, speed up windows etc.

reinstalling windows on the other hand has a pretty much 100% success record.

 

[longdog]

it's more likely to be windows getting slow, not the hardware.

i have never had ANY joy with programs claiming to de-clutter, de-frag, clean the registry, speed up windows etc.

reinstalling windows on the other hand has a pretty much 100% success record.

+1 on this

 

[Deleted account 190920001]

Depends on your OS as to whether SSD is good or brilliant. Win 7 supports them fully and there is a feature (cant remember what its called) on the drives that keeps them running fast and lasting longer. This isnt supported in XP or Vista. Also take note of the specs given for the drive because they aren't all equal, in fact some of the cheap ones are slower than a good normal drive.

 

[ianf]

Look for details on wear levelling. They don't last forever, so the OS and the drive have to understand to use all the drive in rotation rather than keep writing stuff to the same logical block address over and over. The OS also needs to be able to issue the TRIM command to erase a block it's no longer using, or the next time you go to write to that LBA, it has to erase then write, which is slower.

The other thing is look at how much it over provisions by, i.e. is it a 500gb drive presenting 400gb, and keeping a bad block spare list of 100gb to allow it to remap worn out cells over time.

Good for reading, and occasional writing (i.e. a few times per day) and they outlive the pc. Hammer the shite out of one with writes, and it'll wear out.

www.macsales.com has some good info on their site about it. (Obviously you can use the drives on any os depending on your format of choice.).

 

[Deleted account 190920001]

That's what I couldn't remember, it was TRIM.

 

[rodders]

I have a crucial 120 gb drive running windows 7 and the boot up is FAST.
Even if you only use an SSD to install windows and use spinners for data, well worth it in my opinion..

 

[Deleted account 190920001]

I have a crucial 120 gb drive running windows 7 and the boot up is FAST.
Even if you only use an SSD to install windows and use spinners for data, well worth it in my opinion..

Depends how you run the machine to be honest. You probably only boot a PC once a day so in reality boot time isn't that important. Instant on would be nice but its 2 mins of the day. After boot and given that everything is ok there isnt much difference between SSD and normal drive as far as the OS is concerned. Opening big data files or data bases there is a huge difference. Best example of this is in the server world where you might use a couple of normal (cheap) drives in raid for the OS (it only boots once a month with updates) and the data sits on fast SSD drives. Downside is that in servers you need to swap them out about every 3 years because they start to fail after that. All that said I run an SSD drive in my HTPC because I use hibernate and a remote control. Press the power button and 10 seconds later it is fully booted and ready to play video, music or whatever. A DVD player takes that long to boot as does an LCD TV. I could use standby which would be just as fast whatever the drive but that uses more power. So horses for courses really on what mix is best.

 

[ianf]

yep, booting from them is inherently wrong. Your paging space will be on that drive, along with temp files and other transient data. This is what makes them last a limited time.

We are evaluating them at work for high performance database use, but they break our support model of its broken here's a new one, because a poor configuration choice will wear them out. Kind of like trying to warranty tyres and clutches.

Normal drives have a fixed MTBF, i.e. they will statistically go bang 1 time in 5 years, and it's not the same for SSD.

 

[cookie]

Who boots modern computers every day? Doesn't windoze have have sleep function?

 

[Deleted account 190920001]

Who boots modern computers every day? Doesn't windoze have have sleep function?

Yes it has and your right but a lot of companies make it so you cant sleep a machine and if it is left running for x time it will shut down. Something to do with saving money and their carbon footprint. I suppose it will make a difference if your running several thousand machines right enough like the big corporates are.

 

[uncle dick]

Thanks for the input guys. I currently use a fairly straightforward invoicing program, an Autodata database, Firefox and Outlook and it took 15 minutes today to get these booted up. For ages it's been very slow doing things like virus scans. I used to have it scan every day but it made the machine unusable for an hour so now it's just once per week.

I've read a few reviews and ordered an Intel 120GB SSD which I'll install over the Xmas hols. I can then format the existing drive and keep it for backups and any big chunks of data.

Cheers,
Dick