I have a Sony Vaio Z as my primary laptop. It has 4 x 64GB SSDs in a RAID0 configuration. I've had it for 11 months now, and if there's been performance degradation (through lack of TRIM) it hasn't been enough for me to notice.
Cheers Ken From: Paul Gordon [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 30 March 2011 5:53 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs I just recently purchased an OCZ Revodrive (version 1) - http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-revodrive-pci-express-ssd.html 120GB, which is effectively a pair of 60GB SSDs in RAID0... RATED specs are read 540MB/s, write 480MB/s 75,000 IOPS The newer X2 revision of the card is even faster!! - something like 740MB/s reads... I can't speak to how much of that *theoretical* performance is actually achieved in practice, but what I *can* say is that it makes an absolutely huge difference to startup & app launch speeds... - from power on, my Win 7 Ultimate machine now takes longer to complete the BIOS POST than it does to run the entire Win7 bootup process to the point of presenting the "Press C-A-D to logon" message... somewhere between 15-20 seconds in total (about 8-10 seconds in the BIOS, around 8-10 seconds for boot). The only "downside" - if there is one - is that AFAIK, no current RAID solution for SSDs supports TRIM through to the drives, so you have to make do without it. I did a lot of research because of this "issue" before I purchased, and read a lot of other user reviews, tech site reviews etc... and got the strong impression that overall, these drives really don't seem to suffer performance degradation over time as a result of the lack of TRIM... it seems the Sandforce controllers are very strong on their wear levelling anyway, plus the added expedient of keeping a good portion of that 120GB unused (it's only my C: drive, I have a 1TB HDD as well for bulk storage) Only time will tell if that turns out to be the case, - but even if it did degrade, this thing is SOOOO fast, that I think even if performance halved it would still knock the pants of anything else! Paul G. From: Sam Cayze [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 29 March 2011 18:45 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs 40GB at US$89. Wow. "The new SSD doubles sequential write speeds from its second generation X25-M drive to 220MB/sec sequential writes. The drive simply maintains the read throughput rate of the X25-M at up to 270 MB/sec" Is that pretty good in terms of SSD? Curious if it's better to go this route, or get a PCI-X SSD card and forego the disk controller bottleneck. From: Stefan Jafs [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 12:34 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs I guess prices are dropping: http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/intel-doubles-capacity-drops-price-in-ssd-refresh/142814?sub=29878&utm_source=29878&utm_medium=entinfra&utm_campaign=enews Stefan On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Sam Cayze <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Wow. I might bite the bullet and buy one. Looking around, looks like I can get a PCI-X SSD card that is big enough for a boot drive+my docs for around $200. I had no idea they were this cheap! From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Monday, March 28, 2011 8:09 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs Someone opens Windows Media Player / iTunes / Media Monkey. If your music library is on your SSD, then populating the list of albums and cover art is near instantaneous. Opening the "Recent Item" in Windows 7 (or the Start menu in previous versions) is instantaneous Search in Outlook is instantaneous (as is Windows search) There are many benefits to just putting everything except the most bulky storage onto an SSD. I even put my testing VMs on SSDs now (if I can) Cheers Ken From: Jonathan Link [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Monday, 28 March 2011 8:55 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs I would suspect that those of us on this list aren't the standard consumer. We tend to fall into two types, those who become Luddites at home, and those who manage sophisticated infrastructures at home. I think significant time savings can be gained by having the OS on SSD, the other stuff doesn't seem to need the same level of speed, but I could be talking out of my hat. On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 5:37 AM, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Fair enough. However it seems that any modern SSD has enough redundancy plus resiliency to survive tens of years of consumer use... Cheers Ken From: Rene de Haas [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Monday, 28 March 2011 5:09 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs True, I imagine they are trying to make it last longer by not writing to it so much. On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Why? I'd put as much stuff onto the SSD as you can - the performance difference between an SSD and a mechanical drive is simply unbelievable. Cheers Ken From: Jonathan Link [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Friday, 25 March 2011 9:00 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs And, I would make it only for the OS, moving the user profile(s) and any applications to a standard drive. On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 6:48 AM, Steve Burkett <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Whatever ya do, make sure you get the latest model available of the drive if you can, as they're coming on leaps and bounds with the read and write performances of these things with each new controller. For instance the original OCZ Vertex drives could do 230MB/s read & 135MB/s writes, the Vertex 2 model for the same price can do 285MB/s read & 275MB/s writes, and the Vertex 3 drive that's just been released with the latest Sandforce controller can now do up to 500MB/s read and 500MB/s writes. From: Ames Matthew B (REST) [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: 25 March 2011 10:27 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: OTish: SSDs and cool PCs I have ordered an SSD (I was greedy and went for the 128GB - thing future proofing!) for my slightly aging machine. My plan was to install the OS + Apps onto. I would then retain my current 750GB disk for data, temp, profiles, pagefiles, etc. This I should get fast boot/app load but not kill the SSD. As I run a few VMs I figured the vmdk files could reside on the SSD, and the pagefiles for them to be pointed to a mechanical disk. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin -- Stefan Jafs ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
