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Just posting this as a thought process more than anything else. Hopefully others will find it useful.
I've been running an i7-2600K/16G memory system for 18 months. In that time, I've always run it with a 90G Vertex 2 SSD as boot drive and 1TB of storage space. Having recently been using a couple of laptops with SSDs in, I've become a bit "meh" about the performance of the i7 system. I know it isn't the processor that's doing that as it's much more powerful than the laptops, and has more memory. It HAS to be the disks.
Playing with browsing through Lightroom the other night and monitoring what was going on in the Disk tab of Resource Monitor, it was very easy to see that the reason LR was slow was that it was reading a lot of data from the data disk. This surprised me - I expected that it would be reading from the Camera Raw cache directory, but not the image files themselves.
This is actually one of the system after I've upgraded, but you can see that it hits the filestore disk hard. Note: I think Resource Monitor has a decay function - that is, it reports more files open than are actually open.
Time to get the data files onto a faster SSD. Now which one....
I've been a little wary of Sandforce based SSDs (the ones that end in 10's of GBs - 60, 120, 240 etc...). This is because they compress the data as it gets written to flash to gain speed and space. This is a problem as images and videos - essentially everything I work with - is already compressed. This means write performance is often compromised with this data. I prefer the more expensive Marvell based disks, as they tend to have a more even performance profile and they have very fast compressed data write times too (in practice, this is probably me being prejudiced as 95% of the time I'll be reading from the disk and that's just as fast). I don't have that many pictures - perhaps 100GBytes and I don't have much else in Documents: a 128G SSD is not going to be enough, 256G is what's needed. I'll probably manage this down to something lower than 100GB but I don't want to be constantly managing my data (I'll be keeping the 1TB drive in as extra storage). I decided on a 256G Corsair Performance Pro.
Looking at the price of 128G SSDs the newer ones are at a price/performance point where I might as well upgrade my system disk as well. Here write performance is immaterial (I rarely add new programs to the system) but something more current generation with excellent read performance. Might as well go for an OCZ-Vertex 3.
Like any benchmark, there's allsorts which will provide numbers, and they're all just numbers... Starting with the old system (read only benchmarks) here's the two graphs for the Vertex 2 and the old HDD
The Vertex 2 is pretty patchy on performance, and the HDD shows a slowing down the further out you get. Also, notice the access times 18.6ms for the HDD and 0.17ms for the Vertex 2. The 18ms will cause significant slowing down of reads from the HDD if you're reading multiple things at once.
The new drives (OCZ-Vertex 3 and 256G Corsair)
which are much more consistent and much higher performance (I have a motherboard that supports SATA III 6Gbps links). These benchmarks are for 64k blocks - if you up it to 1MByte blocks, the latter two get into the late 400MB/s read performance. Notice the much lower - and more consistent - access times.
What's the result? Well, everything is more snappy. All apps that read data from my home directory start much quicker. Thunderbird starts significantly quicker - it's reading a fairly large folder off my home SSD now. Browsing performance in Lightroom is significantly better too.
Bottom line: keep an older HDD in the system for relatively infrequently used data, but try and keep as much of your current data as you can on fast SSDs - including your user directories.
I've been running an i7-2600K/16G memory system for 18 months. In that time, I've always run it with a 90G Vertex 2 SSD as boot drive and 1TB of storage space. Having recently been using a couple of laptops with SSDs in, I've become a bit "meh" about the performance of the i7 system. I know it isn't the processor that's doing that as it's much more powerful than the laptops, and has more memory. It HAS to be the disks.
Playing with browsing through Lightroom the other night and monitoring what was going on in the Disk tab of Resource Monitor, it was very easy to see that the reason LR was slow was that it was reading a lot of data from the data disk. This surprised me - I expected that it would be reading from the Camera Raw cache directory, but not the image files themselves.
This is actually one of the system after I've upgraded, but you can see that it hits the filestore disk hard. Note: I think Resource Monitor has a decay function - that is, it reports more files open than are actually open.
Time to get the data files onto a faster SSD. Now which one....
I've been a little wary of Sandforce based SSDs (the ones that end in 10's of GBs - 60, 120, 240 etc...). This is because they compress the data as it gets written to flash to gain speed and space. This is a problem as images and videos - essentially everything I work with - is already compressed. This means write performance is often compromised with this data. I prefer the more expensive Marvell based disks, as they tend to have a more even performance profile and they have very fast compressed data write times too (in practice, this is probably me being prejudiced as 95% of the time I'll be reading from the disk and that's just as fast). I don't have that many pictures - perhaps 100GBytes and I don't have much else in Documents: a 128G SSD is not going to be enough, 256G is what's needed. I'll probably manage this down to something lower than 100GB but I don't want to be constantly managing my data (I'll be keeping the 1TB drive in as extra storage). I decided on a 256G Corsair Performance Pro.
Looking at the price of 128G SSDs the newer ones are at a price/performance point where I might as well upgrade my system disk as well. Here write performance is immaterial (I rarely add new programs to the system) but something more current generation with excellent read performance. Might as well go for an OCZ-Vertex 3.
Like any benchmark, there's allsorts which will provide numbers, and they're all just numbers... Starting with the old system (read only benchmarks) here's the two graphs for the Vertex 2 and the old HDD
The Vertex 2 is pretty patchy on performance, and the HDD shows a slowing down the further out you get. Also, notice the access times 18.6ms for the HDD and 0.17ms for the Vertex 2. The 18ms will cause significant slowing down of reads from the HDD if you're reading multiple things at once.
The new drives (OCZ-Vertex 3 and 256G Corsair)
which are much more consistent and much higher performance (I have a motherboard that supports SATA III 6Gbps links). These benchmarks are for 64k blocks - if you up it to 1MByte blocks, the latter two get into the late 400MB/s read performance. Notice the much lower - and more consistent - access times.
What's the result? Well, everything is more snappy. All apps that read data from my home directory start much quicker. Thunderbird starts significantly quicker - it's reading a fairly large folder off my home SSD now. Browsing performance in Lightroom is significantly better too.
Bottom line: keep an older HDD in the system for relatively infrequently used data, but try and keep as much of your current data as you can on fast SSDs - including your user directories.
