To SSD or not SSD

[Martin]

My 2009 Macbook Pro is starting to feel a bit slow, perhaps I've just installed too much crap on it.

Anyway, since I've started working again I'm looking to save up for a SSD replacement to my SATA HDD that's in the Macbook. I know the SSD drives are still pretty expensive but I think I can stick with a 60 GB SSD or so, I already have an external harddrive that's 500 GB so I don't need that much space.

So what are you thinking of these?

* Crucial 64GB Real SSD C300 2.5 Inch
* Corsair Force Series F60 60GB
* OCZ Vertex 2 E Series 60GB

They're all around 100 Euros.

I've read some of the pros and cons of a SSD drive. Pros being the access times / boot up and the cons are price per GB and write speeds.

What are you thoughts?

 

[PsyMan]

None of the above. Go for at least a 120gb disk. The flash cells on the rest are too few and drop speed to half and even more.

Then we have the reliability issues. Sure, the vertex series are fast but the exact previous ones started dying already, not to mention the controller they use which is full of bugs and all sorts of issues.

If I were you I'd wait a bit and either get an Intel G3 or a Plextor disk.

Of course there is the price difference but compared to the increase in speed and reliability, it worths it.

 

[smcd]

I bought a samsung 470 64gb and it's great. Around $130 usd currently... only drawback is firmware upgrading, as it requires nuking your disk contents (but using a setup like clonezilla is a fairly easy way to recover quickly) Id recommend checking into what controllers the drives use - samsung, intel, and sandforce based ones seem to be the best bets. jmicrons are poo! As far as results, my laptop is running Windows 7 and is far speedier than the old 5400rpm 80gb sata drive that was in it

 

[NES_player4LIFE]

i resonantly bought a 128 gb ssd hdd from buy.com here are there options for 128GB SSD

i few things to know when upgrading to SSD.

Cons:
SSD's come pre-formatted to NTFS so i am not sure how/if it is advisable to reformat it to mac format.
SSD's Must Not Be Zero Filled.
It is not advisable to partition SSD's
Zero filling a SSD will result in a lower life span.
User must not use a Paging File system (to many writes any deletes).
More expensive. however if you use as just a boot drive and a small amount of programs it will do fine.



Pros:
No moving parts less risk and a much quieter system, all you well hear is your cooling fan and your CD drive (if in use).
SSD's are the fastest drives out today.
SSD's improve boot times.
My Kingstion 128GB has Up to 200MB/sec. read and 160MB/sec. write speed.
Copying files takes less time.
There is no ghost data stored on the drive once data is deleted it is gone.


over all i will recommend SSD's for Boot drive upgrades.
I will not recommend them as secondary storage device, just way to expensive.
Whatever you chose to do make sure you do some online research before buying then you will be satisfied in the end.

cheers.

 

[smcd]

There is no ghost data stored on the drive once data is deleted it is gone.

That's not exactly true...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/...l-Data-Not-Safe-On-Solid-State-Disks?from=rss
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=wear-leveling

 

[NES_player4LIFE]

i stand corrected.

 

[Cyberman]

How does the SSD stand up to SWAP issues?
Windows is pretty freaking nasty when it comes to swap data I've noticed. The swap file it creates kills performance, I know you can direct the swap file to a specific partition and drive however, this is windows Achilles heal with an SSD as far as I am concerned. It tends to swap huge amounts of data, since this data is read and written OVER and OVER again and the SSD is relied upon to manage itself. Things could get messy fast.

If windows allowed a better method of managing your disk allocation it wouldn't be an issue. As far as I know you can't force windows to have read only partitions (IE static data such as the kernal executables libraries etc) user data and dynamic data (swap data temp files) to speicific devices. Did I mention I hate the way windows handles stuff like this?

To be honest Martin I don't think an SSD drive will help unless windows 7 is RADICALLY different than all the prior generations of windows. A lot of people love them for the first few months. However if you look at the underlying technology and parts, windows is a BAD idea on anything solid state like an SSD drive. If it were Windows Embedded your experience might be different, we aren't talking WinCE and Windows Embedded are we?

As I see it windows spends too much time fiddling with it's own file data all the time to make SSD practical for it (perhaps if you had 4G of DRAM cache on the drive it might be).

Cyb

 

[Martin]

Hmm 120 GB drive, that's a bit too expensive at the moment. I guess I'll hold back a bit. Cheers for the info guys.

 

[NES_player4LIFE]

How does the SSD stand up to SWAP issues?
Windows is pretty freaking nasty when it comes to swap data I've noticed. The swap file it creates kills performance, I know you can direct the swap file to a specific partition and drive however, this is windows Achilles heal with an SSD as far as I am concerned. It tends to swap huge amounts of data, since this data is read and written OVER and OVER again and the SSD is relied upon to manage itself. Things could get messy fast.

If windows allowed a better method of managing your disk allocation it wouldn't be an issue. As far as I know you can't force windows to have read only partitions (IE static data such as the kernal executables libraries etc) user data and dynamic data (swap data temp files) to speicific devices. Did I mention I hate the way windows handles stuff like this?

To be honest Martin I don't think an SSD drive will help unless windows 7 is RADICALLY different than all the prior generations of windows. A lot of people love them for the first few months. However if you look at the underlying technology and parts, windows is a BAD idea on anything solid state like an SSD drive. If it were Windows Embedded your experience might be different, we aren't talking WinCE and Windows Embedded are we?

As I see it windows spends too much time fiddling with it's own file data all the time to make SSD practical for it (perhaps if you had 4G of DRAM cache on the drive it might be).

Cyb

swap/paging files should not be used on ssd's.
to disable Paging files go to...

/My computer/Right click/Properties/Advanced System Settings/Advance/[Performance]{settings...}/Advanced/[Virtual  Memory]{Change}.

i am placing this post here for other member that may wish to disable or increase virtual RAM.

 

[squall_leonhart]

heed psymans warning, OCZ are junk SSD's and Crucial have junk controllers.

Intel and Corsair are the only 2 i don't hear people complaining about screwing up.....

 

[MasterPhW]

I'm using a kingston SSD for the system and I'm pretty pleased with its performance and it costs "only" 400 bucks.

 

[Cyberman]

swap/paging files should not be used on ssd's.
to disable Paging files go to...

/My computer/Right click/Properties/Advanced System Settings/Advance/[Performance]{settings...}/Advanced/[Virtual  Memory]{Change}.

i am placing this post here for other member that may wish to disable or increase virtual RAM.

Of course what is the point of having swap on a 4Gig machine (my thought at least) unless you are running a 64bit OS (hmm).
I was mostly curious about how windows dealt with an SSD.

Thanks for clearing that up. SSD devices have memory that only is good for 10000 to 100000 cycles, hence my wonderment as to how windows operates with it. Eliminating the swap will improve other performance as well. It's not a big deal if you can't run something suddenly because you are out of memory (happens to me all the time WITH swap).

Martin:
What are you using your portable device for?

If you are running a stripped down machine for doing say development (IE no games like Oblivion that take 16 gigs of space for example), or remote maintenance etc. 60G wouldn't be a problem. I have a laptop I specifically use for development and testing in field (EEPC 2G with extended battery so it will run 8 hours on a bat) it came with a 160G HD I've filled it with dev tools and stripped out garbage so only 20G is used (Open Office is installed and that's about 1.2G of it). The rest of the space is used for data (not a lot yet but slowly growing).

Cyb

 

[Martin]

Martin:
What are you using your portable device for?

If you are running a stripped down machine for doing say development (IE no games like Oblivion that take 16 gigs of space for example), or remote maintenance etc. 60G wouldn't be a problem. I have a laptop I specifically use for development and testing in field (EEPC 2G with extended battery so it will run 8 hours on a bat) it came with a 160G HD I've filled it with dev tools and stripped out garbage so only 20G is used (Open Office is installed and that's about 1.2G of it). The rest of the space is used for data (not a lot yet but slowly growing).

Cyb

I mostly use this computer for regular office stuff, some photoshoping, editing sites (Dreamweaver mostly), coding, paying bills etc. No heavy stuff apart from Photoshop at times. I don't have any big games installed either. The external drive I just use from time to time when moving files to my gf's computer for example. So yeah, it's pretty much a stripped down machine.

 

[NES_player4LIFE]

I mostly use this computer for regular office stuff, some photoshoping, editing sites (Dreamweaver mostly), coding, paying bills etc. No heavy stuff apart from Photoshop at times. I don't have any big games installed either. The external drive I just use from time to time when moving files to my gf's computer for example. So yeah, it's pretty much a stripped down machine.

i would still say get yourself a small SSD if you can afford it, later on in life.

 

[squall_leonhart]

Of course what is the point of having swap on a 4Gig machine (my thought at least) unless you are running a 64bit OS (hmm).
I was mostly curious about how windows dealt with an SSD.

Thanks for clearing that up. SSD devices have memory that only is good for 10000 to 100000 cycles, hence my wonderment as to how windows operates with it. Eliminating the swap will improve other performance as well. It's not a big deal if you can't run something suddenly because you are out of memory (happens to me all the time WITH swap).

Martin:
What are you using your portable device for?

If you are running a stripped down machine for doing say development (IE no games like Oblivion that take 16 gigs of space for example), or remote maintenance etc. 60G wouldn't be a problem. I have a laptop I specifically use for development and testing in field (EEPC 2G with extended battery so it will run 8 hours on a bat) it came with a 160G HD I've filled it with dev tools and stripped out garbage so only 20G is used (Open Office is installed and that's about 1.2G of it). The rest of the space is used for data (not a lot yet but slowly growing).

Cyb

A swap file should always be available, regardless of what some random monkey from neowin says, so keep a spindle drive handy for paging. Windows 7+ will only use if if absolutely necessary and most of the time it won't be used (W7 is very good at keeping stuff in memory).

i've found the best performance comes from splitting a page file between multiple drives (when the swap is actually used), since the OS will automatically switch drives when activity peaks at a unspecified level on 1 drive it'll switch to the inactive drive. (i used to have steam hang after exiting a game for up to 7 seconds with the page file on a single drive, off of my os drive).

tbh though, Flash based SSD's are a gamble, and they are an infantile technology that i hope is superseded by phase change style modules in the near future.

actually, according to anand after in depth testing, has found that disabling system restore is far more important than disabling the pagefile on an SSD.

heres a ssd optimisation article.

http://thessdreview.com/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/

 

[Azimer]

For an average user, you can expect to get at least 5 years out of it or so. I put one as my boot disk (128G C300) and I haven't been disappointed. I mostly put everything on my second 2TB HDD including temporary data, swap data, and most program installs (ones with frequent updates like Steam and MMOs). If you installed office, that would be a good app to keep on the SSD.

You don't have to be so tweakish like me, but I also want to extend the life of my drive as much as possible. According to an app that estimates the lifetime of the SSD, mine won't have a faulty cell under current usage until 2013. Backup often is all I can recommend.

 

[Cyberman]

SSD and abuse ... err USE in the enterprise

I saw this article and remembered this thread. Thought it was a better analysis (although very specific) of the issues of using NAND for anything that requires a large number of memory cycles.

 

[smcd]

NOR for the win. XIP! I like my ssd for the laptop, can't imagine going back to a spinning drive haha