Replace your hard disk with an SSD

[whiteman 14028]

Well, folks, I just upgraded the boot disk on my PC with an SSD (i.e. Solid-State Disk). For those who don't know what it is, it is a new form of long-term data storage that will likely replace hard disks one day. Instead of using a spinning magnetic disk as the recording medium, it uses computer memory chips similar to the USB thumb drives you use nowadays, only much, much faster. In fact, it's much, much faster than hard disks too. However, hard disks still have the advantage in storage capacity. The price of a hard disk vs. an SSD is still huge, especially if you look at the price/capacity ratios. Mainstream SSD's now have the 250GB capacity, which is what is necessary for Windows and some additional data.

 

But SSD's are probably now in the range of good-enough capacity now, and reasonably priced. Changing the boot disk just made the whole computer feel faster, more so than any other upgrade I've done in recent times. These SSD's also work equally well in laptops. My desktop now has an overall Windows Experience number of 7.5 out of 7.9. Before the SSD, the overall number was only 5.9 out of 7.9!

[lipualipua 4704]

Interesting. Thank you.

[Guest Ou**or**n]

I use an SSD in my laptop with a regular HD as a second drive for storing media files (pics, movies and so on). I'll never use anything other than an SSD for my boot drive / applications again.

 

Also, I find there is a big benefit to using Windows 7 and at least 8 GB of RAM. At this level you can disable your swapfile and get even more performance improvements.

[whiteman 14028]

I use an SSD in my laptop with a regular HD as a second drive for storing media files (pics, movies and so on). I'll never use anything other than an SSD for my boot drive / applications again.

 

Also, I find there is a big benefit to using Windows 7 and at least 8 GB of RAM. At this level you can disable your swapfile and get even more performance improvements.

 

Well I wouldn't disable the swapfile as it doesn't really hurt performance if you got that much memory as it won't get used all that frequently anyways. It does still use swap even then.

[backrubman 64800]

Excellent post and now a cheap idea. I admit that when I first saw these hit the market I took a lets wait and see attitude and even waited for the SATA 6 Gb/s versions (of course your mother board has to support SATA 6 Gb/s also). Before that, it wasn't that compelling over a 15k rpm enterprise grade drive with lots of built in cache but now it sure is.

 

Gave my trader workstation that drives 8 wide screen monitors a new lease on life!

[whiteman 14028]

I've not seen such a noticeable performance upgrade to my PC since my very first ever upgrade which was an upgrade from an 8088 processor to a 386. Every other upgrade has been slightly disappointing compared to that.

[Rodster 476]

I too am interested in the development of this technology however, there is I believe a valid risk/return trade off. At least for now. Quite often when an HD crashes or becomes corrupted, the damaged is often relegated to certain sectors. Therefore, data recovery from other sectors is possible.

 

When a solid state device crashes or becomes corrupted, and they do, the entire unit is lost. There is no partial recovery.

 

We'll see how the technology evolves past this.

[backrubman 64800]

I too am interested in the development of this technology however, there is I believe a valid risk/return trade off. At least for now. Quite often when an HD crashes or becomes corrupted, the damaged is often relegated to certain sectors. Therefore, data recovery from other sectors is possible. When a solid state device crashes or becomes corrupted, and they do, the entire unit is lost. There is no partial recovery.

We'll see how the technology evolves past this.

 

That was one of my main concerns also as I can't afford to be off the air. So every so often I do an image backup of the 120 GB SSD to a 2 TB conventional HD. Of course I'm so paranoid about this I have a complete backup computer at the ready to address any failure.

 

I don't store anything of value on my SSD boot drive, just the OS and my software so it loads fast. You are very right, I'm still not completely comfortable with the technology enough for it to be my only drive in the system, although they do say they are more rugged than conventional drives it isn't time tested and proven to be true yet.

[whiteman 14028]

I too am interested in the development of this technology however, there is I believe a valid risk/return trade off. At least for now. Quite often when an HD crashes or becomes corrupted, the damaged is often relegated to certain sectors. Therefore, data recovery from other sectors is possible.

 

When a solid state device crashes or becomes corrupted, and they do, the entire unit is lost. There is no partial recovery.

 

We'll see how the technology evolves past this.

Actually there are plenty of spare sectors on SSD's too. In fact, it's absolutely necessary on an SSD because that's how they do their rewriting. Unlike a hard disk, you can't simply overwrite the data on a SSD, you must first erase the whole sector to zero and then write the new data. Due to this extra step, SSD's maintain a spare pool of sectors which are already erased, and they just bring those spare sectors in as needed whenever you write new data. The old sector is then marked for erasure, and it gets erased in the background and goes back to the spare pool. Everytime you rewrite a sector, you'll never get the exact same sector twice in succession. This is also how they maintain the longevity of the SSD, they call this "wear-leveling", by balancing out the amount of writing they do to each cell in the SSD.

 

As for losing the entire data, the same thing can happen on a hard disk, when the hard disk's circuit board dies. And that happens quite often too. So there's not much more danger in an SSD than in an HDD. If still concerned, then do image backups.

 

Also speaking of backups, I do do weekly backups on the boot drive. When the boot drive was a hard disk, it took about 1 hour. Now that it's an SSD, it takes about 6 minutes! 10 times faster. So even backing it up is easier.

[Guest s**nflute]

Well, folks, I just upgraded the boot disk on my PC with an SSD (i.e. Solid-State Disk).

 

Good thread Whiteman!

I purchased a 256GB Corsair Peformance Pro and yet have the time to install it. Running Win 7 Pro 64 bit on a Asus P8P67 Pro REV 3.1 mobo.

My question is, does Win7 Pro turn off defrag, and prefetch automaticaly or does the ssd do that for you?

 

Additional Comments:

Actually there are plenty of spare sectors on SSD's too. In fact, it's absolutely necessary on an SSD because that's how they do their rewriting. Unlike a hard disk, you can't simply overwrite the data on a SSD, you must first erase the whole sector to zero and then write the new data. Due to this extra step, SSD's maintain a spare pool of sectors which are already erased, and they just bring those spare sectors in as needed whenever you write new data. The old sector is then marked for erasure, and it gets erased in the background and goes back to the spare pool. Everytime you rewrite a sector, you'll never get the exact same sector twice in succession. This is also how they maintain the longevity of the SSD, they call this "wear-leveling", by balancing out the amount of writing they do to each cell in the SSD.

 

Is this when the TRIM feature kicks in to fill the gap from caused by erasing?

[backrubman 64800]

Good thread Whiteman!

I purchased a 256GB Corsair Peformance Pro and yet have the time to install it. Running Win 7 Pro 64 bit on a Asus P8P67 Pro REV 3.1 mobo.

My question is, does Win7 Pro turn off defrag, and prefetch automaticaly or does the ssd do that for you?

 

Windows 7 is designed to automatically turn off certain features such as Disk Defrag and Superfetch on drives it detects as solid state disks (SSD).

 

http://tweaks.com/windows/39643/optimize-solid-state-drives-in-windows-7/

 

I just got rid of the services like suggested in the link above to be sure and I didn't care about the performance of the remaining conventional drives as they are only used for long term storage.

[whiteman 14028]

Good thread Whiteman!

I purchased a 256GB Corsair Peformance Pro and yet have the time to install it. Running Win 7 Pro 64 bit on a Asus P8P67 Pro REV 3.1 mobo.

My question is, does Win7 Pro turn off defrag, and prefetch automaticaly or does the ssd do that for you?

 

Additional Comments:

 

 

Is this when the TRIM feature kicks in to fill the gap from caused by erasing?

 

The Windows 7 defrag is smart enough to know the difference between an SSD & HDD and it doesn't even allow defrag on the SSD. As for prefetch, there's some debate about how effective turning it off is so Windows leaves it active. I don't think it negatively affects it, so I have left it running.

 

The TRIM feature is actually what marks a sector for future erasing. Instead of doing it right away, TRIM just marks it for erasing during an idle moment.

[Guest s**nflute]

Windows 7 is designed to automatically turn off certain features such as Disk Defrag and Superfetch on drives it detects as solid state disks (SSD).

 

http://tweaks.com/windows/39643/optimize-solid-state-drives-in-windows-7/

 

I just got rid of the services like suggested in the link above to be sure and I didn't care about the performance of the remaining conventional drives as they are only used for long term storage.

 

Using my SSD as the boot drive C: and the use of my applications, do I have to turn off defrag and superfetch on OTHER physical drives that are used for storage only on as D: and E: drives?

 

Many thanks for the link and info gentlemen!!:icon_smile:

[whiteman 14028]

Using my SSD as the boot drive C: and the use of my applications, do I have to turn off defrag and superfetch on OTHER physical drives that are used for storage only on as D: and E: drives?

 

Many thanks for the link and info gentlemen!!:icon_smile:

No, leave defrag on for other drives. As for Superfetch, I think that's a global setting, it's either on for everything or off for everything. Besides, you won't have programs installed on anything other than C: drive, which is going to be your SSD, so you won't need the assistance of Superfetch with an SSD. Superfetch was mainly to speed up hard drive access to startup programs.

[xBen 120]

You will see a better performance increase, especially at booting up.

I now get an overall 7.0 windows experience score on my laptop after switching to a SSD.

 

The problem is price, luckily I can fit two drives in my laptop so I ended up doing what most people do use the solid state drive for my OS and a larger 500gb 7200 rpm sata for storage.

[Leber 1328]

When a solid state device crashes or becomes corrupted, and they do, the entire unit is lost. There is no partial recovery.

 

So it's a great idea to sign up for free cloud drives such as SkyDrive and/or Google Drive.

[mooncabanaboy 191]

Thanks for the info on SSD drives - I made the mistake of just going RAID on the main drive even though the experts recommended a single SSD for boot and RAID for the applications/data drives.

 

I do have a question for the experts about the use of Cloud backup - given I have a 90GB/month Rogers plan the data bandwidth should be an issue but I have been worried about privacy issues but have happily used DropBox even though the terms and conditions are similar:

article on cloud privacy.

[whiteman 14028]

I do have a question for the experts about the use of Cloud backup - given I have a 90GB/month Rogers plan the data bandwidth should be an issue but I have been worried about privacy issues but have happily used DropBox even though the terms and conditions are similar:

article on cloud privacy.

To me cloud storage is just a great way to share large files occasionally. I'd never use it to store important data. I backup to a regular old hard drive (even a USB HDD will do). No worries about ISP overages, no worries about cloud privacy, faster and cheaper than either in the long run.

[haliwood 101]

SSD's are great, but most of them use nand flash so they do have a limited amount writes (10k or so, usually balanced across the capacity of the drive), which is more than enough for 20 years or so of average use. Some things to avoid are having heavy downloads going ot it, or swapping on it.

For windows users that means disabling the pagefile or putting it on another drive (I don't know if that is possible i'm a long time linux user).

For Linux, just make sure your swap partition is not on a SSD.