Windows 7, would you switch?

[npal]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

Allow me to translate for the uninitiated.

Annoyingly long loading screens is Microsoftese for, "buy a goddamned SSD."

If MS provides me with cash, I'll buy 2 of these just to be on the safe side.

[synaesthetic]

Likewise.

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

Allow me to translate for the uninitiated.

Annoyingly long loading screens is Microsoftese for, "buy a goddamned SSD."



Seriously, there's not one single upgrade that will speed up your system's overall performance more than replacing those spinning platters with a good SandForce, Indilinx or Intel based SSD.

Whats the warranty on those guys? Last I saw an article, the SSDs were failing much more rapidly than expected.

[Alchemist007]

Regardless, I'm broke before even thinking of getting one.

Good god http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227500

[0utf0xZer0]

Originally Posted by Alchemist007

Regardless, I'm broke before even thinking of getting one.

Good god http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227500

Puny.

Now we're talking business.

[Haruka_Kitten]

SSD's are not yet financially viable. Their low capacities (for disks targeted towards the average home user) and their steep prices aren't competitive, and only Windows 7 can fully optimise the disk. The standard NTFS file system is unsuitable for Solid states and is the leading contributor to the failure rate (as writes will happen constantly to the same memory sector, as opposed to evenly across the disk).

[0utf0xZer0]

Originally Posted by Harufox

SSD's are not yet financially viable. Their low capacities (for disks targeted towards the average home user) and their steep prices aren't competitive, and only Windows 7 can fully optimise the disk. The standard NTFS file system is unsuitable for Solid states and is the leading contributor to the failure rate (as writes will happen constantly to the same memory sector, as opposed to evenly across the disk).

I thought modern SSDs were designed so that they wouldn't continually write to the same sectors, instead spreading them around the disk. Don't most SSDs reserve a few gigs of space to allow the drive to shuffle frequently written data around the drive if the drive gets full?

Anandtech seems to have some pretty impressive articles about SSDs, although you need to be prepared for some long reads.

[Miles Teg]

I have been using an OCZ agility 60Gb (On a Ubuntu 9.10) for the last 7 month and the change from a HDD are really visible, it's not really the bitrate who make the difference but the access time.

For example Firefox starts as soon as soon you click on the icon and the same thing can be said for nearly all the apps (even Writer ).

OCZ has a 3 years warranty on their SSD, and they should be able to outlive that warranty from the conclusion of most of the article I have read.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Whats the warranty on those guys? Last I saw an article, the SSDs were failing much more rapidly than expected.

It varies by controllers. The Intel controller, the Indilinx Barefoot controller and the new SandForce controllers seem to be very well-made and resilient against wear and tear.

SSDs got a bad name thanks to the horrible JMicron controllers that came in a lot of earlier models and up until recently dominated Kingston's entire budget SSD line.

They were also further denigrated by the early Asus netbooks which packed extremely slow PATA Phison SSDs that performed more poorly than a 5400RPM SATA laptop hard drive.

Most SSDs these days have warranties between three and five years, and with further improvements to the design of NAND cells, the lifetime issue has become a moot point. By the time the SSD actually suffers problems, you'd already have upgraded it with a bigger or faster model.

Originally Posted by Harufox

SSD's are not yet financially viable. Their low capacities (for disks targeted towards the average home user) and their steep prices aren't competitive, and only Windows 7 can fully optimise the disk. The standard NTFS file system is unsuitable for Solid states and is the leading contributor to the failure rate (as writes will happen constantly to the same memory sector, as opposed to evenly across the disk).

They are financially viable, but people try to use them for things they're not designed for. You do not store your anime fansubs and MP3 library on an SSD. That's what a $100 7200RPM 1TB hard drive is for.

You get an SSD, you put your OS on it, you put your often-used programs on it, and most importantly you put your page file on it. When a PC has to dip into virtual memory (and it will, even if you're rocking 16GB of RAM) everything grinds to a halt. A fast SSD can handle this kind of thing much, much better than spinning platters.

Also, Windows 7 is not the only OS that can fully optimize an SSD. Many Linux distros can as well, and write-leveling is a firmware-based operation on the SSD controller, so even in Windows XP, modern SSDs are automatically write-leveling and ensuring that specific sectors aren't dinged too many times.

TRIM support is different, and is both firmware and OS-enabled depending on things, but TRIM doesn't reduce wear on the disk; it keeps things moving quickly even once the SSD enters a "used" state.

Originally Posted by 0utf0xZer0

I thought modern SSDs were designed so that they wouldn't continually write to the same sectors, instead spreading them around the disk. Don't most SSDs reserve a few gigs of space to allow the drive to shuffle frequently written data around the drive if the drive gets full?

Anandtech seems to have some pretty impressive articles about SSDs, although you need to be prepared for some long reads.

They are. Modern SSDs make use of write-leveling to ensure that specific sectors don't get written to too many times. All SSDs have what is called "spare area," which is extra NAND cells the end user doesn't see that help the disk run quickly and reliably.

Originally Posted by Miles Teg

I have been using an OCZ agility 60Gb (On a Ubuntu 9.10) for the last 7 month and the change from a HDD are really visible, it's not really the bitrate who make the difference but the access time.

For example Firefox starts as soon as soon you click on the icon and the same thing can be said for nearly all the apps (even Writer ).

OCZ has a 3 years warranty on their SSD, and they should be able to outlive that warranty from the conclusion of most of the article I have read.

Good job. At this point in time, for the average end-user, no single component upgrade will offer more of a performance boost than adding a fast SSD.

The hard drive, with its mechanical parts and spinning platters is the biggest bottleneck to any computer system, whether it's a simple family computer or a beastly gaming rig. Hard drives operate in milliseconds while the rest of the machine operates in nanoseconds.

You don't have to give an arm and a leg and sell your children into slavery to buy an SSD, either. You don't need a 256GB SSD unless you're running a high-speed fileserver, and even then it's better to buy a passel of smaller disks and run them on RAID 0.

The end-user would see immense improvement from picking up a small, fast SSD with a good controller, like an OCZ Vertex 60GB or an Intel X-25M Gen 2 80GB, dropping their OS, page file, Adobe scratch file and commonly-used applications on it, and using a big 7200RPM SATA-II hard drive for media storage. SSDs of these sizes can easily be had for $150-200. Not a bank-breaker by any means, and the performance boost is enormous.

[Miles Teg]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The end-user would see immense improvement from picking up a small, fast SSD with a good controller, like an OCZ Vertex 60GB or an Intel X-25M Gen 2 80GB, dropping their OS, page file, Adobe scratch file and commonly-used applications on it, and using a big 7200RPM SATA-II hard drive for media storage. SSDs of these sizes can easily be had for $150-200. Not a bank-breaker by any means, and the performance boost is enormous.

It's exactly what I have done, the SSD for the OS/software and everything else on classic HDDs And the SSD is way easier to manage than all the RAMdisk I was using before to "accelerate" the system

[Vexx]

You get an SSD, you put your OS on it, you put your often-used programs on it, and most importantly you put your page file on it. When a PC has to dip into virtual memory (and it will, even if you're rocking 16GB of RAM) everything grinds to a halt. A fast SSD can handle this kind of thing much, much better than spinning platters.

Quoted For Great Truth.

And then you buy a rack of 1 or 2 TB spinning drives for your extensive anime and music collection.

Price is no object for gaming and fandom, eh?

(Caveat: $3800 for a drive is not likely in my near future either ... have to win lottery)

[synaesthetic]

What would be really nice would be if more companies would make hybrid drives that contain a small SSD and a larger HDD in the same enclosure for a little more.

I can see a disk maker selling a lot of hybrid 32GB SSD/320GB HDD drives, dropping the OS, web browser, productivity apps, browser cache and page file on the 32GB SSD part, while putting large apps (games) and media on the HDD part.

Hybrid drives would be really good for laptops since most laptops have only one 2.5" bay, meaning you have to choose between an SSD or an HDD, and that choice isn't always easy (while a desktop has plenty of empty space).

[0utf0xZer0]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Quoted For Great Truth.

And then you buy a rack of 1 or 2 TB spinning drives for your extensive anime and music collection.

Price is no object for gaming and fandom, eh?

(Caveat: $3800 for a drive is not likely in my near future either ... have to win lottery)

My biggest problem with storage has always been backups actually. I used to be pretty vigilant about burning stuff to DVD-Rs, which is why I have a couple huge CD binders sitting near my desk, but ever since getting a 1.5TB storage drive for my rig, I've been lax about this. I always like to fill DVD-Rs within about 100MB of capacity to try and keep the number of discs I need to archive down, and that's a lot of work to figure out when groups don't use standard file sizes.

[chikorita157]

I can see some benefit from it, but at the moment, they are still too expensive to buy one with a decent capacity.

Actually, with some laptops, you can remove the Optical Drive and slap another drive providing you get an enclosure to replace the drive to put the drive in. (Most newer laptops use SATA for their optical drives, making it compatible for any SATA drive). This is probably a good way to have a SSD for the OS and HD for storage without carrying external drives, but the downside is you going to need a external optical drive just to read discs, which is okay for some people since some don't use the optical drive that often.

[felix]

Originally Posted by chikorita157

I can see some benefit from it, but at the moment, they are still too expensive to buy one with a decent capacity.

Do they behave well with normal hard disks? ie. if I slap in one decent capacity one just for the operating system partition(s) and things like the majority of programs, would that work?

[chikorita157]

Originally Posted by felix

Do they behave well with normal hard disks? ie. if I slap in one decent capacity one just for the operating system partition(s) and things like the majority of programs, would that work?

SSDs have no moving parts, but I supposed if you install all your programs on the SSD and have the swap and all your documents on a HD, I supposed it will be fine. However, the drawback with SSDs and HDs is file recovery. For HDs, there are already programs that could attempt to recover files, but for SSDs, I do not know...

Keep in mind that SSDs have limited read/write cycles, although that limitation is being fixed in the future and yes, they will work with another HD if installed.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by felix

Do they behave well with normal hard disks? ie. if I slap in one decent capacity one just for the operating system partition(s) and things like the majority of programs, would that work?

Yes, this is the most common usage case of solid state drives for non-enterprise users. You get a smallish (32-64GB) SSD for your boot disk, where you put your OS, your page file and your commonly-used apps (web browser, productivity software, etc).

Then you get a nice big 1TB+ HDD for your large-footprint apps (games) and large media such as HD video and MP3s.

When I finally get around to building my next desktop, it will most likely use a pair of OCZ Vertex 30GB SSDs in RAID 0 configuration as my OS disk, and a bog-standard WD or Samsung 1TB 7200RPM HDD for game installs, video, music, pictures, ISOs and whatever else I decide to fill it with.

Laptop usage is much trickier. I hope somebody sees the light and combines a reasonably quick 32GB SSD with a 320-500 GB hard drive in a single enclosure, so I can have my cake and eat it too even on a laptop.

Originally Posted by chikorita157

SSDs have no moving parts, but I supposed if you install all your programs on the SSD and have the swap and all your documents on a HD, I supposed it will be fine. However, the drawback with SSDs and HDs is file recovery. For HDs, there are already programs that could attempt to recover files, but for SSDs, I do not know...

Keep in mind that SSDs have limited read/write cycles, although that limitation is being fixed in the future and yes, they will work with another HD if installed.

You want the swap or page file to be on the SSD, not on the hard disk. A lot of the speed increase from using an SSD comes from that fact. The constant writing to the page file is not an issue with modern SSDs that have wear-leveling.

The idea that SSDs will not last as long as hard drives is true, however, the difference is minute. By the time the NAND cells start to fail, you'd already have swapped the SSD out for a bigger or faster one, anyway.

[felix]

What lifespan are we looking at currently?

[synaesthetic]

For the average end user, a good-quality consumer-grade MLC SSD... around five years of moderate to heavy use. For instance, the OCZ Vertex series is rated at 1.5m hours MTBF (mean time before failure), which is quite a while. That figure is probably pretty liberal, since it does come from the company itself, but I've never encountered anyone who had an Indilinx-controller SSD croak on them prematurely.

Enterprise SSDs (especially those using SLC NAND) will last much longer in the same usage case, but these disks are really designed for high-speed fileservers that are completing far more write operations than any home user would ever do. They're also a lot more expensive compared to consumer grade MLC disks with prices of $11 or more per GB.

[MakubeX2]

Alright, so I've built myself a new rig yesterday and had Win 7 installed

My main issue with it is that somehow my copy of it is taking up a whopping 25 GB on the 100 GB system partition I've assigned to it. Quite astonishing for me really, after upgrading from XP here.

So the main question I have at hand is to know whether 100 GB is enough to sustian 7 in the long run especially with Service Pack 1 coming up, or should I invest in another HDD for just the OS alone.