Are you seeing real speed improvements with SSD?

Noel Dear said:

Are people seeing real speed improvements using a SSD on a Windows machine?

Do I need to have my operating system on the SSD or will I see improvement if only my Logos 4 files are on the SSD?

Noel

There are scores of websites out there that offer advice on the best way to allocate and set up an SSD. But in a general, adding one is a good way to get a performace boost.

I have two systems with SSD's. One is my home office PC and the other is the one used in the sanctuary for worship services, video watching etc. On the home system I have a 120 Gig SSD set up as my boot drive  with Windows 7 and all of my major apps (Logos included). On the other system I have a 60 Gig SSD that I have set up as Intel Smart Response Technology cache with WIndows 7 and all apps installed on the mechanical hard drive. Both systems run circles around the setup I had prior to adding the SSD's. In reality I don't see any difference in performance between the two systems.

That said, I would suggest that you let your wallet be your guide. Also whether you have a motherboard that supports ISRT will determine the choice. ISRT will only use up to 64 gig of the SSD. So anything bigger will be partitioned accordingly.

I guess that is a lot more info than you asked for. But if you opt for making the SSD your boot drive and also want to put Logos on it then I wouldn't go for anything less than a 120 gig drive. That will allow you to also put all of your other apps on it. On my 120 gig SSD I have Microsfot Office, Pinnacle Studio HD 15, and Adobe Photoshop Elements installed along with a selection of other apps and utilities. I also have some video files on there that are parts of some active projects. I do video and audio editing and CD/DVD creation as well as all of my sermon prep, Bible study and other lesson prep. There is about 46 gig left free on the drive. It is complemented by two 500 Gig mechanical drives that hold the bulk of my photos, documents, music, and completed projects as well as backups of my system disk.

I hope this helped.

Blessings,

Bob

[Y]

Dave Hooton said:

Slava Novik said:

After one or two years HDD becomes twice slower...

Earlier SSD's could slow dramatically after a few months or became unreliable. The current generation is much improved and is reflected with 3 yr warranties (5 yr if you go for Intel 520 series which are now just as fast as the opposition).

How do you know the difference between earlier SSDs and the current generation of SSDs and would it be the same that after 3 years, the current ssds could become unreliable?

I have a Patriot Wildfire SSD on my desktop system. It just flies with my SATA 3 motherboard. Logos runs very well.

If you are going to buy, check to see whether your motherboard supports SATA 2 or 3. SATA 3 SSDs will scale back to SATA 2 speeds if paired with a SATA 2 controller on the MB. But, there's no reason to spend the extra money for a SATA 3 SSD if you don't have the controller to support it. Unless, of course, you are planning to upgrade to a SATA 3 system in the near future and migrate the SATA 3 SSD over.

Dave Hooton said:

Slava Novik said:

After one or two years HDD becomes twice slower...

Earlier SSD's could slow dramatically after a few months or became unreliable. The current generation is much improved and is reflected with 3 yr warranties (5 yr if you go for Intel 520 series which are now just as fast as the opposition).

My shop works with a couple of SSD vendors for inclusion in our 16 socket systems for database applications. (That's 320 logical processors in one system if hyperthreading is turned on.)  The slowness seen by some SSD subsystems usually has to do with writes.  Also, I believe that it is the finite number of write cycles which results in shorter service life.

Earlier versions were truly sporadic.  I experienced one case where we through an SSD on a system which was used for Linux distribution installation testing.  After a few installations resulting in writes to most of the drive, the performance slowed to about 5 time slower than moving head disk speed.  It recovered, but it took over 1.5 hours.

Service life has a different distribution on these beasts than with spinning magnetic media.  Many even report to the O/S what the remaining service life is as it is "consumed".  Therefore, if you keep important updated data on the drive, you MUST keep good backups.  However, the Logos library and installation is typically kept backed up "on the cloud".  So this would be ideal.

The implication of this would be that one should avoid placing heavily written data on the drives.  I do not believe that even the index for Logos would constitute "heavy" use.  Therefore, one should expect good service life and few slowness issues by limiting SSD space to Logos.

Mark,

Mark said:

Thanks Dave for your input.  I recently purchased Samsung ssd 830 series.  I am assuming that is a current generation drive

I have been using the Samsung 830 SSD for about half a year. It is fast :-) 13 seconds for cold start. The only concern I have is they do not have firmware update tools for Mac users.

I suggest you to get a SSD and install Windows 7 + all your applications to it. It makes the whole system much faster (if the specs of your computer aren't relatively low), because HD is the bottleneck of most of the modern computers nowadays. The usual situation is that CPU is running with light load while waiting for HD to get some data for it to process. Using SSD as a system drive will give your CPU the data needed much faster and you will get more out from your system. It's worth of the work needed to reinstall everything. And you can use your old HD to store data, like images etc.

I have a laptop and a desktop with Win7Pro and same amount of RAM (4GB). The desktop has an ordinary HD, about 50% faster CPU (Core2Duo 3,1GHz) and a much faster GPU than the laptop (Core2Duo 2,1GHz), that has a SSD. My laptob boots up (and shuts down) much faster and programs launches much faster. And Logos lauches, indexes, etc. much faster in my laptop than in my desktop. It's much more fluent to use.

Edit: If your windows is older than Win7, then it's no good idea to buy a SSD, because the older Windowses doesn't support SSDs so well and will wear the SSD out much faster.