Let's talk Solid State Hard Drives

[BaumannPhotography]

So, I have been in the process of building a computer for editing and recording video tutorials. I have $1800 to spend on a tower that I need to last quite a while. In the process of hard drive selection my original plan was to use a WD Velociraptor 150gb for the system disk and 2-1TB drives in raid 1 with a solid state drive as a scratch disk. But in researching Solid states, I found people are using them as system disks with much success. I also found that you need some tweaking of the OS to get them to work to its potential (vista), but windows 7 beta users seem to love the SSD. And they are making these things larger and larger, and faster every time I look.

So anyone use a SSD as a system disk or interested in doing it also?

[Faolan]

My next build is likely to have one. I will be building a new system around August with a RAID controller. Drive size isn't important to me as most people I prefer to store everything over several volumes (something that W7 will make easier). So I will be looking at the 120Gb mark drives.

Intel is also due to release more X series drives nearer the end of the year and with the raft of other drives coming out there should be something for everyone to consider.

There's also the new controllers due out as some of the current ones caused 'stuttering' which is one of the reasons why a lot of people used a controller card with cache to smooth it out (but necessarily eliminate all of it).

[tim]

My opinion after reading a few articles is hard drives are fast enough for most people most of the time. SSDs will give you a marginal gain.

[BaumannPhotography]

I've heard PS4 loading on a Raptor taking ~20-25 secs, compared to 2 secs on the same system only with a SSD. Seems pretty good to me. But I would assume that the speed of SSD is all based on the entire system and not just the SSD itself.

Simple tasks (navigating, opeing programs, etc.) in windows would be so much faster with a SSD as a system disk, I would think.

[Tsmith]

I've heard PS4 loading on a Raptor taking ~20-25 secs, compared to 2 secs on the same system only with a SSD. Seems pretty good to me. But I would assume that the speed of SSD is all based on the entire system and not just the SSD itself.

Simple tasks (navigating, opeing programs, etc.) in windows would be so much faster with a SSD as a system disk, I would think.

On my Vista x64 setup (E6700/4 gigs RAM/previous gen. Raptor drive) its loads the first time at 6 seconds when clicked on. 3 seconds once the application has been opened. Way faster than what I was seeing in CS3 in a (x86) environment.

[Zepher]

CS3 opens up in 10 seconds from a cold boot on my machine, and 3 seconds the second time.
7200Rpm WD RE 250GB drive.

my machine is also currently really bloated too. I have 85 processes running. I have 82 processes when the machine starts up cold.

[tim]

Who cares how long photoshop takes to load? I load it once and then use it for hours.

[TheHoff]

Who cares how long photoshop takes to load? I load it once and then use it for hours.

Any time you are diskbound, an SSD will help -- loading large previews in LR is one place I am diskbound a lot as you go from frame to frame in E or D viewing mode (full screen pic).

I am certainly upgrading to SSD in my laptop very, very soon. The 256gb GSkill is getting very good reviews (close to the Intel in speed) because it uses the crappy JMicron controller (two of them) in parallel.

That ain't good enough for me. And neither is 256gb really. A number of manufacturers including Samsung and Toshiba have announced 512gb drives due out Q1 of this year, so any time now. They are using different controllers so speed should be excellent and they should be release near the $1/gb range. I would definitely use an SSD as a system disk over a raptor now; the only caveat being you can't bootcamp windows on OS X right now with an SSD but that should change shortly.

I disagree that SSD gains look marginal -- only the half-ass 1st gen had issues. All drives will be SSD in a few years, there isn't any reason to fight it, you luddite, Tim :)

[tim]

SSD's will be big, once capacities go up and cost goes down. Sure if you can afford them now you will probably get a performance increase if you run a single drive, like in a laptop. If you have multiple drives set up well the performance difference probably won't be that big. If you have plenty of RAM and a 64 bit OS then the gain is probably marginal since caching will increase speed, and RAM is faster than flash via a SATA controller.

For 99% of people I don't think SSDs are good value or a good idea. For the 1% who want the fastest possible system and don't care about cost they might be worth it.

THG SSD conclusion (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-flash,2127-14.html).

[Palladium]

I've posted this before, If you have an external powered eSATA connection take a look at the

OCZ Throttle drives

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_throttle_esata_flash_drive

I use one for my scratch drive and I'm very happy with the performance.

I remember seeing on their website they also have or will soon have Throttle drives for internal applications.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_core_series_v2_sata_ii_2_5-ssd

[tim]

Throttle drives look interesting, but Vista 64 and more RAM is probably more cost effective.

[Tsmith]

From my experience with an MSI board with eSATA support, the feature isn't quite plug and play as USB 2.0 is. I have to actually enable the device by restarting the computer before it will recognize the eSATA device.

[Faolan]

From my experience with an MSI board with eSATA support, the feature isn't quite plug and play as USB 2.0 is. I have to actually enable the device by restarting the computer before it will recognize the eSATA devive.

e-SATA is generally plug and pray, but there is two caveats I've come across one is XP is rather flakey about it (even with updated drivers) and also your mobo has to support the hot plug functionality of SATA. If you're board supports AHCI then there is a good chance it will.

Vista (and W7) is a lot better at handling this technology from my experience.

[TheHoff]

SSD's will be big, once capacities go up and cost goes down. Sure if you can afford them now you will probably get a performance increase if you run a single drive, like in a laptop. If you have multiple drives set up well the performance difference probably won't be that big. If you have plenty of RAM and a 64 bit OS then the gain is probably marginal since caching will increase speed, and RAM is faster than flash via a SATA controller.

For 99% of people I don't think SSDs are good value or a good idea. For the 1% who want the fastest possible system and don't care about cost they might be worth it.

THG SSD conclusion (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-flash,2127-14.html).

Hmm I think you're off here, still, Tim, or maybe that I focus on laptops more now that I've abandoned towers. I read the THG page you linked and it was only about the disappointing performance of some new off-brand drives and says that they don't come close to the major brand offerings. And the new drives coming in this quarter should be even better once they abandon the cheap flaky controller (that Intel and the Apple Samsung (?) drives don't use).

Here is a thread on the MacRumors forum where more than one person says that installing an SSD is the best upgrade they've ever done, to any system, ever

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=630306

That forum is full of comments like that with only a few disappointments from those getting the cheaper drives. Yes, they are expensive, but like all things memory related, the price should drop quickly.


If you have plenty of RAM and a 64 bit OS then the gain is probably marginal since caching will increase speed, and RAM is faster than flash via a SATA controller.

But caching can't predict where I'm going next. I'm looking at this from a photographer's point of view, not a video editor's, and I see a ton of benefit possible from the SSD. Even if the write speed isn't up to snuff yet, we should be more interested in the read speed -- opening up these huge RAW files, whether browsing through large previews in LR, or swapping that TIFF out to Photoshop, you better believe we are DISKBOUND! Bring on the faster disks!

[tim]

I'm sure they're faster, and i'm sure they'll be everywhere in a few years. I just don't think they're the right solution for everyone.

[Moppie]

I have 4 drives running in my tower, speed is not much of an issue because I can spread the load accross all 4 of them.
The OS on one, PS loads from another, Photos on another, Scratch on another.
BUS speed, RAM and number of cores has a bigger impact than HDD speed.

4 Solid state drives might be faster, but no so much faster I would care about it.


In a laptop, where you can only fit one drive, then there might be a more noticable performance difference as you start queing tasks for the disc.
But then laptops are always about compromise.

[Quad]

I will relate my experience with SSD drives. I am currently using 4 of them off an adaptec 2405 controller in RAID 0. They have very good read performance and decent write performance but I would not use them for a scratch disk. The scratch disk needs phenominal write performance. They load my apps and OS and it is very responsive there.

For scratch I would use one of two things a couple of iRAM disks (this is what I used in my previous computer) they are very fast read and write but have no error correction like a hard drive and would upon occasion give me errors that showed up as defects in the image.

The second option is two or more fast regular disk drives. I had two 73 gb raptors so I use those off of the intel controller in RAID 0 and I only use the top half of the array. You could also use some 15K SAS drives for probably better performance.

Pack the computer with memory and use 64 bit photoshop when possible. This will avoid the scratch disk as much as possible.

I am sure SSD drives will increase in performance, The major problem with write performance appears to be that SSD must do a wipe then write and not a simple write over data. That would explain the sort of performance I am seeing quite nicely.

As far as RAID performance I ran some synthetic benchmarks and each time I added a drive to the array I saw an increase in speed but the first three drives inceased it the most. There are also some RAID controlllers that have a couple of gig of memory (eg Areca ARC1680) and they may be far better for a swap drive array but you have to test it yourself to be sure.

I am sure there are better solutions this is just my own experience.


I just read the comment about PS loading times CS4 takes about 2 seconds on my system.

[tim]

CS4 loads in 3 seconds on my PC - Q6600, 4GB RAM, XP32, 3 seagate dsks. It may have been cached in ram from when I loaded it a couple of days ago.