Wondering about switching to an SSD?

[MightyDWC]

I thought I would help Caveman get this section moving along with a post about SSD's (solid state drives). I'm not going to go deep deep into them. I only want to express my view point on them, and how much I love them.

I bought 2 Crucial 120gig SSD's for my current system. They have a transfer rate of 6gbs (if you have a mobo that supports it). No platters that spin. Looking at the back of them is like looking a ram on a video card.
(Backside View)
http://www.guru3d.com/imageview.php?image=29333
(Picture of my drives during build)
http://i34.tinypic.com/2i21w1t.jpg

Generally, the basic setup (if you can afford them) is to by a small 20-30 gig SSD, and install only windows on it. Buy a second larger one to install and run all your games on.

I got a deal on mine so I bought 2. I have windows and my games installed on 1. I have my adobe products, sony vegas, 3DS Max installed on the second one.

Now 120 gigs is not alot of space when it comes to windows and games, so what I do is install my games on my c drive so all files go where they need to go. When I run out of room, I make backup copies of every game folder onto an external eSATA drive, then delete the original when I need space for a new game.

Yeah having a good processor, ram, and video card works wonders for framerate in games, but the moment you play a game off a SSD you'll instanly see the diffrence.

Raiding SSD's can be done, but when done with only 2-3 you actually lose readtime.

Here's a pretty cool vid on raiding SSD's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Here's a vid I did showing my boot time with an SSD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3THiLe6d21k

Some advice for new buyers. NEVER defrag an SSD. Yes you have the option, and yes it's fast, but it puts ALOT of strain on the drive, and will cut the life in half.

Also move your windows swap file off the SSD on to a SATA drive, or disable it alltogether if you have 8 gigs or more on your system.

[MI-six]

Nice info now i know what i need to do when i will buy the ssd.
I will come back on this topic :D

[Caveman]

I am really wondering why you did not put them in raid 0?

If you have crucial M4 ssd's you can reach over 1 GB/s read

[MightyDWC]

I am really wondering why you did not put them in raid 0?

If you have crucial M4 ssd's you can reach over 1 GB/s read

These drives are 6 GB/s without raid. And my mobo has 2 6 GB/s ports

SSD link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148348
Mobo link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131631

After doing the research I found that raiding 2 of these drives would actually drop my read time.

[Caveman]

MM that's strange, remember that affactive these port's only do max 500~600MB/s

And your ssd's in raid with the now 009 firmware in raid 0 do arround 1000~1200MB/s

My brother has 2 64GB M4's in raid 0 and i have played with his pc for a while and that speed blew me away! 8O

[MightyDWC]

When I get my new vid card (GTX 590 Dual GPU) I'll probablly reformat again and try a raid 0 setup. It's pretty fast as it is now, and I've always been leary of one drive going bad during a raid setup=you lose everything LOL. But I have a 1TB external eSATA for backup so no worries there.

[Hidde]

When I get my new vid card (GTX 590 Dual GPU) I'll probablly reformat again and try a raid 0 setup. It's pretty fast as it is now, and I've always been leary of one drive going bad during a raid setup=you lose everything LOL. But I have a 1TB external eSATA for backup so no worries there.

What resolution are you planning to play on then? Just read an article about the GTX590 and the HD6990 dual gpu cards, it told me they were only of use for 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 because the 580 and 6970 could easily handle 1920x1200 resolutions by itself, and that going for a crossfire hd 6970 setup or an sli 580 setup was better, not as loud and cheaper. Dunno about that last part though, article was from June I think.

E: Checked the prices, most 580s are just over €400, while the 590s are €640 on average. Cheapest 6990 I could find was €544, most 6970s are about €310, but flashing a 6950 to a 6970 would be cheaper, however, most 6950s are "lasered" now, don't know what it means but if they are you can unlock it to a 6970 anymore. Some models still work but if they don't, problemo.

[Vercetti]

6Gb=600MB, it's not 6GB. So it's the normal new SATA speed.

[jaskaman]

Yeah be careful with terms.
MB = MegaByte, Mbit (or Mb) =Megabit.
GB = GigaByte, Gbit (or Gb) = Gigabit.

As Vercetti explained, 6 Gbit/s (or 6 Gb/sec) = 600 MB/sec (or 600Mbytes/sec).

[st0mpy]

Also move your windows swap file off the SSD on to a SATA drive, or disable it alltogether if you have 8 gigs or more on your system.

PCs are a personal thing, this is only my preference, but thats the opposite of what I do. ÂÂ*SSDs have blistering random access rates compared to a mechanical drive, personally I put all my caches/swapfile ON the SSD so applications can reference them as fast as possible.

Does it wear it out faster? Yes it does, however at my current rate the caching ssd (intel X25M) still has 8 years left at this currently high rate of use before it starts dipping into reserved space. ÂÂ*Im pretty sure ill have upgraded by then.


Lastly, always keep a small swapfile- i remember reading a well researched justification why you shouldnt remove the swapfile - just because we have bucketloads of ram it doesnt mean it will never fill up, it does, believe - more noticable if you are the type to leave your pc on for days at a time, esp with leaky apps, windows memory caching etc.. if it aint broke...:)

[Caveman]

If you have a secondary physical drive, put the pagefile on it, definitely. This has two benefits:

1) It allows for better multitasking overall because the system/OS will be able to read and write at the same time as required - it can read/write from one drive and read/write with the other at the same time. With just one drive, you can only read or write at any given moment, so while modern hard drives are damned fast, they still can't do both at the same time.

2) You'll relieve a lot of small random writes on the SSD which is the Achilles Heel of modern SSD technology. Yes, they're getting faster all the time, that's a given, but still the biggest slowdown on SSD hardware is with small random writes. The page file is typically seen as one big file on the drive in terms of space required, but the OS is reading/writing 4KB chunks (a page of data) so, that's most definitely considered small random writes.

You can leave the page file on the SSD and add a secondary one to the physical hard drive, that works too, but if and when a random write needs to be done on the SSD itself, performance will suffer and you may end up having that "stutter" that a lot of people notice with SSD hardware.

If you have a lot of physical RAM and you're not actively using it (like 4GB and you rarely use more than 2GB or whatever), you could look into disabling the page file (setting it to 0 bytes) and go from there, or just resizing it to a smaller amount if that's not an option. Personally if it were my machine, and I have 2GB or more of RAM, I'd do a lot of tweaking and testing but in the long run I'd end up using a RAMdisk for several different things, one of them being page file duties as well.

The fact that SSD hardware doesn't have "spinning plates" doesn't save it from performance issues. SSD hardware can't read and write at the same time, just like a physical hard drive can't, and the random write issues (even with the best SSD hardware) kills performance overall. There are ways to use work arounds to alleviate the random writes, actually, but that's another thread altogether...