SSD Are Me! - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

FanIn80 · 03-10-2010, 08:02 AM

(Bad BNL rip-off, I know...)

So, I took the plunge yesterday and picked up one of these bad boys: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=1220181546L. I got it price-matched at MemEx and added in their 3 year IPR for $50.

Anyway, I got it up and running last night and I'm impressed. This thing is blazing fast. I had no idea it would have that much impact. I can literally open up every single application installed on my laptop (on the system drive, at least) in under one minute total (I actually did this many times last night after installing it).

Here's a screenshot of my WEI rating and breakdown. Not overly impressive, I'm sure, but you can see the HD rating there. It used to be 5.9 with a 500GB 7200RPM drive. As an aside, I never thought I'd be miffed about a 6.7 graphics rating on a laptop before, but now it's messing with my 7+ overall rating!

Anyway... if I can figure out how to do video screencasting on a PC, I'll upload a clip of all my apps opening, for any SSD non-believers in the house (like I was).

Edit: Doh. I forgot about the point of this thread... I mean besides just posting about some basic experiences with a new-to-me technology. Now that I have this thing installed, and TRIM enabled through the console (thanks Scott), are there any other things I should know about?

Hack&Lube · 03-10-2010, 09:00 AM

Jealously are me!

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...cdfa5c7998360e
has an interesting discussion on this, some people saying the things the guy did were uneccessary

seems like an interesting tool
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...-Tweak-Utility

Tweaktown has a nice 8 page guide
http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/3116...ide/index.html

FanIn80 · 03-10-2010, 09:09 AM

Awesome, I'll give that a read. Thanks!

photon · 03-10-2010, 10:14 AM

Interesting links. I am a bit dubious of moving off the page file (for example) to extend the life of the drive.. I don't doubt it will extend the life, but will that actually be important for most people? SSDs are changing so fast and there's so little data it seems.

FanIn80 · 03-10-2010, 10:43 AM

Personally, I'm hoping mine actually dies sometime during the third year from now. Then I can probably IPR my way to a 320GB Intel SSD (or whatever size they are three years from now).

Hack&Lube · 03-10-2010, 12:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

Interesting links. I am a bit dubious of moving off the page file (for example) to extend the life of the drive.. I don't doubt it will extend the life, but will that actually be important for most people? SSDs are changing so fast and there's so little data it seems.

I'm on a regular old-timey spin-o-rama 20th century style technology harddrive and I eliminated my page file completely once I got 4GB of ram. With 8GB of ram, I don't see a need for a page file at all if you are only running an OS (and not virtualizations to eat up the ram). Everything actually seems faster to be honest!

Hack&Lube · 03-10-2010, 12:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Personally, I'm hoping mine actually dies sometime during the third year from now. Then I can probably IPR my way to a 320GB Intel SSD (or whatever size they are three years from now).

Unfortunately, MemEx is probably going just going to dig up a 160GB drive and give it to you

I can still see them being around in 3 years.

sclitheroe · 03-10-2010, 05:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Now that I have this thing installed, and TRIM enabled through the console (thanks Scott), are there any other things I should know about?

Yes, there is one more thing to know about SSD - don't baby it, don't lay awake at night worrying about TRIM algorithms and write amplification, don't benchmark it like a obsessive compulsive to see how it's holding up.

Just USE IT, and enjoy it. They are fantastic.

Edit: I looked at those tweaktown suggested optimizations. I wouldn't bother with most of that stuff.

In particular, turning off file access time stamping can cause odd issues with apps that may use file dates for internal purposes.

Disabling indexing is silly too - they say to do because the SSD seeks faster, but I don't care what they say - searching an index of files is gonna be faster than searching the file system itself.

Disabling power management on the SSD is dumb too. If the SSD doesn't support power management, it will simply ignore the command to spin down. If it does support power management, its because it has a power managed mode that will help laptops.

Disabling prefetch and superfetch is dumb. The author of the article doesn't know what pre-binding is, and why you want those DLL's loaded and ready to go.

Disabling system restore is extremely silly. It only uses a fixed percentage of your hard drive space. It's vital if you need to roll back a bad patch or in an emergency where the computer is f#$*&^$ but your term paper or report is due tomorrow and the machine has to work.

The only advice they give that is correct is to turn off scheduled defrags - defrags will cause wear and tear that is of no benefit.

FanIn80 · 03-10-2010, 06:10 PM

Awesome thanks!

Now I have a question about heat... do SSDs burn hotter than normal drives? I noticed my laptop was getting a lot warmer than usual today. Also, is there a fan speed control app for Windows that is similar to SMCFanControl for the Mac OS?

Edit: Hmm... found this: "Reduced heat dissipation Hard drives dissipate high levels of failure-inducing heat due to the parts necessary to operate the hard drive (such as the spinning platter). In contrast, SSDs produce little-to-no measurable heat because they have no moving parts, thus helping keep notebooks operating cooler." Here: http://www.crucial.com/promo/index.aspx?prog=ssd

photon · 03-10-2010, 07:10 PM

It might be getting hotter because the processor is working harder? Instead of having to wait around twiddling its thumbs for the hard drive to do stuff, it gets data faster so has to do things faster?

Though that would only make sense if the overall amount of work done by the processor actually increased, but that's not likely since most of the time it's just waiting for you to push a key.

Weird.

REDVAN · 03-10-2010, 07:14 PM

I am excited to re-vamp my computer this summer when I am unemployed (I'm saving now...) so that I can have a machine that doesn't take 10 minutes to open up firefox. Something must be wrong, but I don't have the time to fix it :-(

sclitheroe · 03-10-2010, 07:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Awesome thanks!

Now I have a question about heat... do SSDs burn hotter than normal drives? I noticed my laptop was getting a lot warmer than usual today. Also, is there a fan speed control app for Windows that is similar to SMCFanControl for the Mac OS?

Edit: Hmm... found this: "Reduced heat dissipation Hard drives dissipate high levels of failure-inducing heat due to the parts necessary to operate the hard drive (such as the spinning platter). In contrast, SSDs produce little-to-no measurable heat because they have no moving parts, thus helping keep notebooks operating cooler." Here: http://www.crucial.com/promo/index.aspx?prog=ssd

Power dissipation is lower, particularly at idle, but not by as much as you'd expect. In use, current SSD's are fairly close to mechanical hard drives in power consumption - which is a testament to how good mechanical hard drives have gotten really - it's mind blowing that you can run a laptop hard drive on as little as 2 watts give or take, and down below 1 watt when the drive is spinning but idle.

One thing I did notice on my SSD, is that it doesn't have a temperature monitor. Most hard drives can tell you via SMART or other means what temperature they are operating at - my SSD always reports 0

FanIn80 · 03-11-2010, 06:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Power dissipation is lower, particularly at idle, but not by as much as you'd expect. In use, current SSD's are fairly close to mechanical hard drives in power consumption - which is a testament to how good mechanical hard drives have gotten really - it's mind blowing that you can run a laptop hard drive on as little as 2 watts give or take, and down below 1 watt when the drive is spinning but idle.

One thing I did notice on my SSD, is that it doesn't have a temperature monitor. Most hard drives can tell you via SMART or other means what temperature they are operating at - my SSD always reports 0

I wonder if that's what it is. I can feel that drive getting hot, but I don't think its temperature is registering with the (SMC?) bus. Which means my fans aren't responding to the heat from the drive.

When I feel the bottom of my laptop, the area around the SSD is just as warm as the area around my second drive. So maybe the extra (overall) heat I'm feeling is from my fans not running as much as they used to?

I really wish I could find a decent fan-control app.

Rathji · 03-11-2010, 07:03 AM

I am looking at building, or buying a premade desktop system this summer. I have never seriously considered a SSD due to cost. Since this thread popped up, I thought I would see what the current consensus was.

What do I want in a SSD? Any particular features/brand? Anyone have a ballpark price or a link to a drive that they would buy? As this will only be a system disc, I assume an 80 gig drive is more than sufficient.

Burninator · 03-11-2010, 01:10 PM

How come all the SSD's are 2.5 inch? Would I need some sort of an adapter to fit it into my PC case?

FlamingStuffedTiger · 03-11-2010, 01:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Burninator

How come all the SSD's are 2.5 inch? Would I need some sort of an adapter to fit it into my PC case?

I believe you would need something like this:

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...X1542(ME).aspx

Kipper is King · 03-11-2010, 01:30 PM

What do you guys think of this 32 GB SSD coming out for under $100?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/o...32gb-onyx-ssd/

I'm wondering if it would help to run my OS off that, along with maybe a couple commonly used programs if I have room. Any thoughts?

photon · 03-11-2010, 01:56 PM

It would likely help noticeably.

The big problem with cheaper drives (and the reason more expensive ones are expensive and so worth while) isn't so much the transfer speeds, it's the random read and random write throughput speeds. A good SSD can have random write and read speeds of 40MB-70MB/s or higher, while a cheap SSD will drop down to single digit transfer rates. See the graphs here: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=3757&p=5

However that being said, the overall system performance can still be very good with a cheap SSD, faster than the fastest hard drives, see the graphs on the next page: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=3757&p=6

How much of that improvement will you retain by splitting up most files and running just the OS and a few apps off the SSD? Hard to say, I bet there'll be some reviews and articles similar to that soon.

Vulcan · 04-01-2010, 05:42 PM

For anyone interested in an SSD for cheap,
this Intel X25-V SSD 40GB is on sale for today at newegg for $100.99. It should be about $112 after shipping and tax to Alta.

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16820167025

I bought one last week and my hard drive WPerformance Rating went from 5.9 to 7.3.
Windows 7 Premium 64 bit, takes up about 17GB leaving me with 20GB free space. Enough for a boot drive.

Hack&Lube · 04-01-2010, 06:22 PM

I'm waiting for the 80GB Intel x25s to go on sale one day.