SSD drive worth the effort?

[neworldman]

Hello,

I am getting ready to upgrade one of my PC's to a SSD 128gb drive. Below is my current PC configuration. I do alot of HD movies ripping & also some Cad/Cam programming. Will I notice a difference with a SSD drive compared to my current 7200 RPM Seagate 1tb drive? Do applications run faster with SSD drives? Or is it just faster reboot and load times? Also what about data transfer between folders? Is that faster?


-Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition 3.33 Ghz

-8 GB DDR3 1600 Memory

-Nvidia 480 GX

-1tb 7200 RPM Seagate Hard Drive

[MOVIEGEEK]

I would put the OS on a SSD and use the 1TB HDD for video. Start up is faster but the jury is still out whether they last longer than a HDD.

[bendixG15]

Here's a recent discussion with all the answers ................ https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/322092-SSD-for-OS-boot-and-HDD-for-storage?highlight=ssd

[CaptainVideo]

I have had a 60GB SSD for a couple of months now.

Depending on the SSD most hard drives like the Velociraptors 150GB, 300GB and new 600GB models are going to blow away your average SSD in write performance. Even some 1TB/2TB 7200RPM drives will write better. So if you are ripping movies, ripping them to a hard drive is the ideal solution. You'll get better performance.

SSD's are great for bootup and read speed. I use my SSD as my boot drive and application drive. All my documents are on a hard drive and that's also where I rip my CD's/DVD's to. Your CAD/CAM should run great on an SSD.

I will say SSD's are absolutely worth their premium price. When I load Call of Duty for a multiplayer session I'm always the first guy on the map. The read speed is incredible for loading game maps.

There are some SSD's that do have great write performance but they are really expensive.

[neworldman]

Here's a recent discussion with all the answers ................ https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/322092-SSD-for-OS-boot-and-HDD-for-storage?highlight=ssd

Great thanks for the info. I found someone on a PC forum how runs a 64 gb with W7..... he said that is made a huge difference from his 7200 rpm drive. Even webpages load alot faster. The biggest difference he noticed was moving large files from SSD drive to 7200 RPM drive. It was 10 times faster then moving large files with a 7200 RPM drive to 7200 RPM drive. Looks like a winner for me. He was also using the older generation SSD drives. Has had no problems for over a year.

[Kaizen 32]

I have an Intel 80 GB X25M and the performance is great, but I run out of space, and sometimes you just want to do stuff on your boot drive. So my advice is to get a larger one, performance is theoretically much better the larger the SSD and I know everyone plans to use a different drive to work off, store things, etc. ( and I do that) but sometimes its just a pain not having more space on the boot drive. So get a bigger drive than I did, I think you'll regret it if you don't.

[ron spencer]

You will regret the price...best bang for you buck will be in a few years. These are pure luxury item now, not worth it in my opinion. Soon though, but we are in early adapter phase now.

[jagabo]

Do applications run faster with SSD drives? Or is it just faster reboot and load times?

It depends on the application. CPU intensive applications (like h.264 video encoding) won't get significantly faster (you may cut a second off an hour long process). Disk intensive applications will.

Also what about data transfer between folders? Is that faster?

Copying will, but how often do you do this? Moving files/folders (on the same drive) will too, but who cares about the difference between 1/100 of a second and 1/10 of a second.

[neomaine]

I still wouldn't use these in high write environments like an OS drive. The activity of an desktop OS (especially Windows) with paging/swapping continuely going on will eat into the finite life span of one of these drives. The marginal increase just isn't price competitive yet. Move your page/swap file over to another drive and I'd probably go for it.

Use it as a final destination drive for streaming media, I'm 100% behind it.

[jagabo]

Move your page/swap file over to another drive and I'd probably go for it.

Or disable the swapfile completely. I do that on my computers with 4GB of DRAM.

[neworldman]

Move your page/swap file over to another drive and I'd probably go for it.

Or disable the swapfile completely. I do that on my computers with 4GB of DRAM.

What is this page/swap file you are talking about? How do I disable it with W7? What is the advantage?

[jagabo]

What is this page/swap file you are talking about? How do I disable it with W7? What is the advantage?

Windows is a virtual memory O/S. As a very simple explanation, when programs need more memory than the available RAM Windows will use hard drive space as additional RAM. This space is called the swap file or page file (memory is swapped to/from disk in "pages").

The advantage of using disk space as RAM is that it allows you to run more or bigger programs than the amount of physical RAM would support. The disadvantage is that disk access is many orders of magnitude slower than RAM so lots of "paging" can seriously effect performance.

Sometimes a program will not be using some of the memory it allocated in the short term. In cases like that swapping that memory to disk isn't of too much consequence. When the program finally gets around to using that memory it may take a few dozen milliseconds for Windows to fetch it (some other RAM has to swapped to disk, then the required RAM has to be swapped from disk to RAM before it can be used by the program -- this process is invisible to the program). But if two (or more) programs are demanding lots of random access to memory the continuous swapping to disk can cause a huge drop in performance.

I don't know about Win7 but in XP you right click on My Computer, select Properties, go to the Advanced tab, press Settings in the Performance section, go to the Advanced tab, press Change in the Virtual Memory section, then select No Paging File. Exit and reboot.

[neworldman]

What is this page/swap file you are talking about? How do I disable it with W7? What is the advantage?

Windows is a virtual memory O/S. As a very simple explanation, when programs need more memory than the available RAM Windows will use hard drive space as additional RAM. This space is called the swap file or page file (memory is swapped to/from disk in "pages").

The advantage of using disk space as RAM is that it allows you to run more or bigger programs than the amount of physical RAM would support. The disadvantage is that disk access is many orders of magnitude slower than RAM so lots of "paging" can seriously effect performance.

Sometimes a program will not be using some of the memory it allocated in the short term. In cases like that swapping that memory to disk isn't of too much consequence. When the program finally gets around to using that memory it may take a few dozen milliseconds for Windows to fetch it (some other RAM has to swapped to disk, then the required RAM has to be swapped from disk to RAM before it can be used by the program -- this process is invisible to the program). But if two (or more) programs are demanding lots of random access to memory the continuous swapping to disk can cause a huge drop in performance.

I don't know about Win7 but in XP you right click on My Computer, select Properties, go to the Advanced tab, press Settings in the Performance section, go to the Advanced tab, press Change in the Virtual Memory section, then select No Paging File. Exit and reboot.

Wow thanks for the info did not know this. I have 8gb of DDR3 1600 ram right now and will have 16gb next week. With all this ram will the OS still try to use hard drive space for ram?

[neomaine]

Wow thanks for the info did not know this. I have 8gb of DDR3 1600 ram right now and will have 16gb next week. With all this ram will the OS still try to use hard drive space for ram?

You'll only use anything above 4gb (really 3.5gb) if you're using Windows 64-bit. And, I'm assuming the CADCAM software can utilize that extra memory. Otherwise, you'd be hard pressed to use anything over that current 8gb.

[Heywould3]

just a quick note on having a pagefile. this is a quote from a MS programmer. im not saying this person is 100% right but ive tried it both ways and i dont see much difference either way so take it with a grain of salt.

"Can you? Yes.

Should you? No, definitely not.


Note the following:

1. If you don't have a page file, you can't use all the RAM you have.
That's because Windows preallocates virtual memory in anticipation of
a possible need for it, even though that allocated virtual memory may
never be used. Without a page file, that allocation has to be made in
real memory, thus tying up that memory and preventing it from being
used for any purpose.

2. There is never a benefit in not having a page file. If it isn't
needed, it won't be used. Don't confuse allocated memory with used
memory.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) since 2003
Please Reply to the Newsgroup"

[RabidDog]

You mention having 16gb of memory soon... that means that windows will (normally) allocate 16gb for a paging file, and also 16gb for a hibernation file... both of those files are on your boot disk..munching up quite a bit of space on an SSD.
AFAIK Modern SSD will equal or surpass any 7200rpm drive in random 4k writes, and generally will surpass the sequential read/write speed of HDD. The least bang for your buck would be to use them to store large video files.
All modern SSD will easily exceed the usage required by home use (say the Mfrs!) 5years + lifespan. Are you still using 5 year old HDD?


*i still think they're too expensive/too slow/too unproven

[lordsmurf]

Even webpages load alot faster.

That sounds more like his imagination.

[Kaizen 32]

While you might be better off getting a better processor or video card, I totally disagree with the idea that SSDs can't offer a huge performance boost, but it can vary tremendously based on your setup. My only issue is the smaller sizes that the more affordable ones have. I like to have a lot of space on my boot drive for apps, rendered files, etc.. On the other hand, working with smaller boot drives has really made me slim down unecessary crap on the hard drive.

If I was building a system, I'd rather spend extra money on an SSD than an expensive processor that is only a little better than one half its price. I say go for it, but decide how much space you need/want for your boot drive first.

[redwudz]

For video processing/encoding, unless you are using the SSD in your video processing chain, it won't do much but load the OS and programs faster most of the time. Now if you had three or four large (200GB+) SSDs and replaced all your HDDs, that would help for encoding, editing, but likely not as much as a multicore, fast CPU, IMO. And you'd be broke.

I love the speed of my SSD, just couldn't afford a big enough one to deal with the programs I want to run from the boot drive. And putting those programs, along with their temp files on a secondary rotary drive sort of defeats the purpose of having a fast SSD.

[RabidDog]

If you are just storing HD video files (rather than re-encoding them) then your money will be better spent on a 2tb disk, these disks are quite fast anyway, and obviously you are getting vastly more storage space. Copying from disk to disk will work out at twice the speed of intra-disk copys, just make sure to align your partition properly.
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Software-Accessories/Elements-2TB-Advanced-Format-an...sion/m-p/26534

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5758911&SRC...gzkQTLacuYr05w