SSD drives - anyone using them as a boot drive?

[djdube525]

I've had the parts to build a new PC for a while now... just not the time. In the mean time I keep oscillating back and forth about whether or not to get an SSD drive - something in the 60-80GB range for OS and apps only.

Decisions decisions... curious if there are folks here with real world experience that could talk to improved boot and app load times.

Dave

[bpape]

It could potentially speed things up - especially if your virtual RAM is located on it.  I just don't know if the MTBF and number of writes is up to the task yet.

Bryan

[djdube525]

It could potentially speed things up - especially if your virtual RAM is located on it.  I just don't know if the MTBF and number of writes is up to the task yet.

Bryan

A lot of people have mentioned this... and I understand the reasoning behind it... but if the drive is solely a OS and Apps drive, and a traditional hard drive is used for storing data, documents, pagefile, etc, I'm wondering if this is going to be an issue given the application.

Not critiquing... more thinking/musing "out load"...

[bpape]

Your page file (VRAM) gets read and written to every time you use more memory than you have physically. That's generally MANY MANY times more often than reading or writing data files or accessing programs.  Think about multiple web sessions open.  No file opens or writes but potentially lots of HD (and hence VRAM/page file) usage.

Bryan

[hometheaterdoc]

It's the only way to fly....  most of the newer firmware on even the cheap ones supports TRIM in Win7.... but even without that, it's MILES faster even with the slight slowdown over a brand new drive.

This is exactly how all 8 of my machines are setup... actually 6 of them have SSDs and two of them use Velociraptors.... the SSDs eat the Velociraptors for lunch.  Instant app loading, Win7 boots in 4-7 seconds... virus scanning, indexing, etc. is obscenely fast.  I will never go back.

look at the ratings for these.  They are dead silent (no moving parts) and have been very reliable for me so far...

[djdube525]

It's the only way to fly....  most of the newer firmware on even the cheap ones supports TRIM in Win7.... but even without that, it's MILES faster even with the slight slowdown over a brand new drive.

This is exactly how all 8 of my machines are setup... actually 6 of them have SSDs and two of them use Velociraptors.... the SSDs eat the Velociraptors for lunch.  Instant app loading, Win7 boots in 4-7 seconds... virus scanning, indexing, etc. is obscenely fast.  I will never go back.

look at the ratings for these.  They are dead silent (no moving parts) and have been very reliable for me so far...

If you don't mind my asking... which one(s) are you using?
 
Do you have your page file on your hard drive?

How much disk space are you eating up on your boot drive? Personally, I don't do games, but if I did I'd put those on the traditional drive. I'm primarily thinking win7 pro 64bit, Office Ultimate, Photoshop CS, and then a host of utilities (scanners, audio/video editing, browsers, mail clients, etc) nothing that I would expect to be huge... was thinking a 60GB would be plenty big enough if I put the page file on the mechanical disk.

Thanks for your thoughts? My gut is saying for $150 I'd see a much bigger improvement in responsiveness than what a $150 video card (it would be different if I were a heavy gamer), or extra CPU would get me (I had picked up a AMD 720 x3 - that should be plenty, especially if/when I overclock).

Thanks for the feedback!

Dave

[Carlman]

When I build a replacement 'audio terminal pc' (the PC in my soundroom that just plays through Foobar) my plan was to use an SSD with Ubuntu on it.  The only time I use it for anything else is when Windows needs patches.  Getting rid of Windows fixes that.
I would discourage using virtual memory in general.  There really shouldn't be a need on a new PC.

-C

[bpape]

No virtual memory?  Heh, that'll never happen on my work machine.  Just too many things open at once, even with 8GB of real RAM.

I agree completely that the SSD drives have a huge performance advantage.  For me, it's more a matter of how hard I use them and how long they'll last for the money.  Once their lifespan gets  up there, I'll be there in a heartbeat.

Bryan

[hometheaterdoc]

I use multiple different OCZ ones, as well as the Intel ones.  I've got an 80GB Intel in the office machine and various 60GB in the other machines.  I could get away with 30GB ones as none of them has more than that on them.  I have one machine with 64bit Vista, everything else is 64bit Win 7 Ultimate in the house.  Various apps, video editing, video playback, etc.  I don't tax my machines with software.  Page file is on the SSD.  I use green drives that spin down when not serving up music or video everywhere else for data.  I just added 12 WD 1.5TB green drives with the 64MB cache... and of course Newegg put them on sale today for $20 less per drive than what I paid last week... They also have a 30Gb OCZ for $90 today...

The SSDs have an MTBF of 1.5 million hours in the case of the OCZ.... what more do you want?  You'll replace the PC long before you wear out the drive...

If you're using more than 8GB real RAM, you've got too many windows open   It's ok to close them every now and again... I run the crap out of my office machine and even with all the downloading, parity fixing, media serving, DVR'ing, and video editing at once, I'm not really taxing it enough to need virtual memory...

[Carlman]

No virtual memory?  Heh, that'll never happen on my work machine.  Just too many things open at once, even with 8GB of real RAM.

Holy smokes!    Windows 7 takes up 9G (efficiently installed) to 16G (poorly installed) on your hard drive.  So you could almost have the entire operating system running just on your RAM.

You've either got a problem or really terrible software on your work machine.  There is no way I could use up 8G on my work PC.. even running large files in Photoshop, using Dreamweaver, Remote Desktop, browsers, and all the other stuff I have open at one time.  

Sorry.. but wow.

-C

[bpape]

Um, try about 15 Firefox tabs, 4-6 Visio instances, multiple Excel spreadsheets, multiple Word documents, AOL, Skype, multiple Adobe instances, various .jpg files, MS Outlook, etc.  Oh, and I also have to use PowerPoint now and then.  Powerpoint and Adobe don't work and play well together in sharing memory (or releasing it properly when closed for that matter...)

Right now between AOL, Firefox, and IE, it's over 2GB of memory.  My page file is about 2GB or a tad more.

Bryan

[Carlman]

I do not want your job.

[bpape]

LOL.  Well, just glad I have one to fall back on after I got canned from my day job.  Doing your hobby for a living isn't too bad...

If I could find a way to upgrade my laptop (primary work machine) to 16GB, I could get by without a page file.  Unfortunately, I'm 99% sure 8GB is the most I can put in it - and it's only a year old dual core with a separate NVidia 9600 GT wifh 512MB dedicated RAM, 19" widescreen, and running dual monitor out to a Samsung 23".  I need to depreciate it a little more before I go and switch again.

Now if I could just scale back to only having to read 1 or 2 email accounts instead of 5  

Bryan

[richidoo]

Bryan is on every English speaking audio forum known to man. Now we know how he does it - brute force.  This is what you need, Bryan:

http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/hpcc-cray-cx1-iws.aspx

[bpape]

Nice - a micro-Cray!   

Maybe they'll start making palmtops next or cPhones 

Bryan