David - I have solid-state drives in two of my home laptops - one from a company called "Edge" and another from a company called "Crucial Technology". There are good and bad things about SSD. The main advantage I've realized is that a common task I run - scanning all the directories on my hard-drive - runs much faster after I parallelized the code. I get better than five times speed-up for my parallel code compared to my serial version. I think this is because the SSD handles the multiple access requests well. This was a pleasing surprise that came out of my work on parallelizing J.
However, an occasional problem with the SSD is that my machine seems to freeze up for about 30 seconds every now and then. I might be running both cores at full CPU usage - monitoring this with Perfmon on Windows - when the usage drops to zero and my system becomes unresponsive for about 30 seconds. This happens a few times a week, so it's annoying but not a showstopper. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the SSD because it started after I switched to it and someone I work with agreed that he's seen a similar phenomenon on his SSD. My suspicion is that the drive may move its data around internally for "wear leveling" to prolong the life of the flash memory. I've only noticed this on the "Crucial Technology" drive but that may be because I don't use the other laptop as much. One other caveat has to do with duplicating a disk image - if you don't want to re-install all your software on the SSD, it's simple to copy an existing drive image to it as long as the SSD is the same size or larger than the source drive. This has nothing to do with SSD in particular but it's something to consider if you're swapping a new drive for an old one. I've read good things about the Intel SSDs but I bought cheaper ones - the mixed results I've seen may be a consequence of this but I don't know. Good luck, Devon On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 6:25 AM, David Mitchell <[email protected]>wrote: > The publisher of a local Tech Mag (Justin Ziemniak, www.techny.com) > reported > impressive performance when he installed the OCZ 120GB SATA-II SSD $200. > He > said he used it as his Windows 7 Home install drive and reported > significant > performance improvements in boot up and such things as "his Adobe apps". > > The only negative he reported was that he hadn't checked out and gotten a > PCI-E > version, which is supposed to be twice a fast as the one he got. > > I read the article in the paper version of the mag, it hasn't made it into > the > online version yet. > > I haven't tried the OCZ disks yet myself. > > On 11/4/2010 2:07, david alis wrote: > > Does anyone have experience of using solid state drives from OCZ. > > They are described here. > > > http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_z_drive_p84_pci_express_ssd > > > > Apparently they are available in Switzerland. > > http://en.toppreise.ch/index.php?a=193302 > > > > In particular the 2Tb drive > > HD OCZ SSD Z-Drive Rev 2 2TB > > has the following performance. > > MLC, PCI-E x8, onboard Cache 512MB, read 1.4GB/s, write 1.4GB/s > > > > David > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
