Solid state drives

FlyTVR

FlyTVR

Messages
4,234
Edit My Images
No
Anyone using a solid state drive? Do you find a massive performance gain?
 
neil_g said:
i use an ocz vertex 60gb.

in terms of OS loading speeds i dont find much gains, however once loaded programs and the general feel of the OS is much much snappier.
Click to expand...

Thanks Neil.

Any others?
 
Snappier just about sums it up I think and quieter but as for massive performance gain? no. These things are subjective though, as you get used to it you stop noticing.
 
I would definitely use one if I was building a media centre pc, due to them being silent :)
 
Yep, I have a corsair 64GB (i think) SSD for my windows 7 install and i'd say my experience is similar to Neil_gs.

It's bumped my windows experience index from 5.9 to 7.2 or 7.4, can't remember which.
 
I have a 30gb drive, but having it in there since the machine was first built i can't directly compare it to anything. But it is quick.

Only downside is it is nearly full, and the windows install is all that is on it.
 
Office, lightroom and potatoshop, along with every other piece of software is on the standard hard drives. :(
 
Just a tad. Though it is still friggin rapid compared to my old machine.
But i'm not ready to kill the wallet just yet.
 
Running 2 in this machine, both ocz agility 120gb jobbies, one is used for the system drive, apps etc, the other is used as a cache and catalog drive for photoshop, lightroom and capture nx.

Fast isn't the word compared to normal hard disks, the system drive makes the biggest performance difference with windows and apps taking seconds to open.

I also put a 30gb drive in my old laptop that I use for web browsing and testing and it performs like a top of the range laptop now!
 
Last edited:
I was thinking along the lines of only installing the essentials / current set of images I am working with onto a solid state drive. The rest can live on a 'normal' drive. 60GB is nothing really these days :(
 
Last edited:
I installed a Momentus XT hybrid drive in my laptop recently, it's a 320Gb hard drive with 4Gb adaptive flash memory. The aim is to give you big storage with SSD performance at a good price point.

I spent a bit of time with a stopwatch before and after the upgrade, results were Windows boot up time reduced from 45 sec to 30sec, time to launch DXO optics reduced from 34 sec to 14 sec.

Not bad for £80!
 
Deasy said:
I installed a Momentus XT hybrid drive in my laptop recently, it's a 320Gb hard drive with 4Gb adaptive flash memory. The aim is to give you big storage with SSD performance at a good price point.

I spent a bit of time with a stopwatch before and after the upgrade, results were Windows boot up time reduced from 45 sec to 30sec, time to launch DXO optics reduced from 34 sec to 14 sec.

Not bad for £80!
Click to expand...

4gb is puny though, youd be hard pressed to install anything decent on that worth of speeding up (windows 7 folder is going to blow that out of the water). you may as well buy a 7200rpm mechanical in my opinion. especially as a 60gb SSD is only about £25 more.
 
neil_g said:
4gb is puny though, youd be hard pressed to install anything decent on that worth of speeding up (windows 7 folder is going to blow that out of the water). you may as well buy a 7200rpm mechanical in my opinion. especially as a 60gb SSD is only about £25 more.
Click to expand...

The Momentus XT is a 7200rpm mechanical, with added flash memory. The 'adaptive' feature means that the drive monitors which files you use most frequently and puts these in the flash memory.

The point of it is large storage with SSD speed, it's ideal for me as my laptop has only one drive bay (no option of SSD+ mechanical) and my RAW files are quite large. :)
 
Deasy said:
The Momentus XT is a 7200rpm mechanical, with added flash memory. The 'adaptive' feature means that the drive monitors which files you use most frequently and puts these in the flash memory.

The point of it is large storage with SSD speed, it's ideal for me as my laptop has only one drive bay (no option of SSD+ mechanical) and my RAW files are quite large. :)
Click to expand...

no offence but still sounds like a bit of a bodge to me. i mean surely when the drive is trying to decide what files you use the most and transfer them between portions of the disk there is going to be access/write delays?
 
What's dodgy about it? It's not difficult to see which files are being used most frequently and shifting them onto solid state. The whole point is it does this *before* you need to read the file, so instead of waiting for the disk heads to find the right track, it just zips straight off the SS part. Windows does much the same thing with ReadyBoost and flash drives.

Sure it's only a stop-gap until solid state prices come down, but it works.
 
I'm using the Intel X-25M 80GB SSD. I'm using Win7 which is installed on it along with the swapfile and all my apps. LR and my photos are all on a 7200RPM SATA drive.

The performance boost is huge. OS load time is just 10 seconds (from BIOS POST completion to logon screen). Photoshop CS4 starts in 4 seconds. LR3 about 4 seconds.

Not all SSDs are equal, check the read/write speeds.
 
mid_gen said:
What's dodgy about it? It's not difficult to see which files are being used most frequently and shifting them onto solid state. The whole point is it does this *before* you need to read the file, so instead of waiting for the disk heads to find the right track, it just zips straight off the SS part. Windows does much the same thing with ReadyBoost and flash drives.

Sure it's only a stop-gap until solid state prices come down, but it works.
Click to expand...

but there must be at some point some sort of monitoring/processing to decide/move files which is an overhead in my opinion.

im just thinking out loud without actually looking into those drives.

readyboost, does anyone actually use that to any advantage in the real world at the moment?
 
neil_g said:
no offence but still sounds like a bit of a bodge to me. i mean surely when the drive is trying to decide what files you use the most and transfer them between portions of the disk there is going to be access/write delays?
Click to expand...

It's no different in principle to the CPU memory cache that you'll find embedded on just about every CPU in every computer on the planet for the last twenty years - Intel implemented it with the 386 onward. Frequently used data and instructions from the RAM are stored in a small area of memory that's built into the processor where latency is much lower than shifting it across the memory bus.

Though you may not know it, it makes a huge difference to the performance of your computer.
 
id hazard a guess that your CPU does it much quicker across its BUS though.. but like i say im thinking out loud and havent actually looked at these mixed type drives. initially off the cuff to me it sounded like there would be an overhead negating the benefits. however i may be wrong as i have not looked into it.
 
chrisgeary said:
I'm using the Intel X-25M 80GB SSD. I'm using Win7 which is installed on it along with the swapfile and all my apps. LR and my photos are all on a 7200RPM SATA drive.

The performance boost is huge. OS load time is just 10 seconds (from BIOS POST completion to logon screen). Photoshop CS4 starts in 4 seconds. LR3 about 4 seconds.

Not all SSDs are equal, check the read/write speeds.
Click to expand...

Another Intel user (I have the 160 GB Gen2). Chris is right about the speed boost - it is unbelievable.

When choosing an SSD, remember that sequential transfer rates (the really big numbers that everybody focusses on) aren't that important. What you want is a drive that's good at the small (4 kB is normally measured) random reads and writes - that's what Windows spends a hell of a lot of time doing.
 
I'm not a Windows user, but I'm given to understand that you see much better SSD performance with Windows 7 over earlier incarnations of the OS.
 
neil_g said:
id hazard a guess that your CPU does it much quicker across its BUS though.. but like i say im thinking out loud and havent actually looked at these mixed type drives. initially off the cuff to me it sounded like there would be an overhead negating the benefits. however i may be wrong as i have not looked into it.
Click to expand...

The drive does all the work- it's own processor is in charge of the adaptive bit so there's no additional load on the operating system.

I can see why you're cautious about the idea but it makes a real difference- my laptop now loads DXO as quickly as my desktop (phenom x4 955 + velociraptor).
 
they should start making SSD's with trim enabled while runnig in IDE not only AHCI ... .that would speed up system start :)
 
Cor blimey. I still remember when the operating system was on a 5 1/4" floppy and, if you were lucky, you had a second floppy drive to store data on.

How time flys !
Sinclair, Amstrad 1512 then 1640 then an ibm clone with 100mb hard disk where the disk cost over £1 per mb.

I'm getting old !!
 
neil_g said:
a quick bump to add my latest opinion...

SSDs are great until you realise your LR catalogue is chomping through the disk space and you need another drive to move it on to.. :|
Click to expand...

The Catalog file?

Mine is a touch over 950MB and I've got about 60,000 photos, mostly from my 5D with a a 1300 or so 3200 dpi 35mm and 120 scans.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top