Storage Solutions Need suggestions for Fast OS Drive (SSD/Hybrid HDD)

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Lord Nemesis

Lord Nemesis

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Guy's, need suggestion for a fast OS drive (for Win 7 x64) for my new Sandy Bridge build. I am currently using a WD 640AAKS for the windows volume.

On one side I am thinking about going for a 60GB SSD, but I also do need to upgrade my storage by another 2TB and I already have a lot of drives.

I have very little info on SSDs and I am out of touch with the latest in performance HDDs as well.
 
OCZ Vertex 2 60GB ~ 7.5K - It is rated at a 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write with sustained writes of up to 250MB/s. It has many features including Native TRIM support (for fast booting). Read some reviews. All I can say is this is one heck of a fast SSD. A high-performance SSD at a moderate price. :)

2*1 Seagate 7200.12 1TB ~ 5.4K
 
XTechManiac said:
OCZ Vertex 2 60GB ~ 7.5K - It is rated at a 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write with sustained writes of up to 250MB/s. It has many features including Native TRIM support (for fast booting). Read some reviews. All I can say is this is one heck of a fast SSD. A high-performance SSD at a moderate price. :)

2*1 Seagate 7200.12 1TB ~ 5.4K
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Just want to add some more details on speed of OCZ SSD.

The rated speeds are just in bench marks not in real life which depends on file size, random or sequential read and other factors. If you bench the SSD with HDTune the fastest speed(221MBps) is lower than what is declared as sustained data rate(250MBps).
SSD perfomance decreases over time as fill data into it by ~ 5-10% which can be evident from the Windows H/W rating.

The boot time only improves to few seconds - for me the improvement is about 10 seconds compared to WD Black.
These are my observation on OCZ SSD in my sig and what I say after spending 12K on SSD is its not worth spending double compared to WD black.

Better to wait for drives launched with new sandforce controller that can reach up to 500 MBps.
Note: The OCZ SSD have firmware 2.1 and is built on old 40nm NAND.
 
My 2 cents on read-ups of SSD

1. More space the drive (which in turn means more free space) has, the more performance and life it has (Due to it being able to swap, spread the writes and do more parallel writes to mode nand channels translating to faster read/writes)

2. Lesser the nm, the more reduced the life of the SSD (less nm drives are less beneficial from performance view. Inverse of CPU and GPU)

3. One needs to look at the random read/write speeds of the drive when the drive is full. Unlike a conventional HDD, the performance of a SSD gets reduced as the drive gets fuller since it has less free space to work with than when new.

4. TRIM supported drives perform better than non-trim drives, but still they suffer a bit of performance hit with daily use.

5. Drive capacity needs to be looked at carefully. Some drives list the actual capacity while some drives list the total capacity. I dont remember the model, but a few drives use a part of drive capacity as cached/spare area to swap data reducing the available area to user (In addition formatting it will use up still more, robbing us of the precious expensive GB's). Some drives use separate memory as spare area while some use a combination of separate memory and drive nand. Need to give careful attention to see what the actual usable space on the drive is and what sort of spare area option is being used.

Did some basic research and found that choosing a proper SSD requires the most study compared to CPU/GPU/any other componenet. There are so many parameters and there are a host of controllers each using their own algorithm.

Bottom line - three parameters -> performance - cost - life = choose any 2 and compromise on the other.
 
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My 2 cents on read-ups of my OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD:-

1. No more annoying HDD spinning platters noise. Complete silence.

2. Heat factor. SSDs runs at 25-30°C unlike 40-50°C of HDDs.

3. The OCZ Vertex 2 are one of the fastest SSDs right now. Its fast..very fast.. Honestly, its time we dump our HDD as boot drive.

4. So handy tips to increase SSD life-span are: Disable disk defragment, indexing, hibernate, system restore and write caching.

5. You can also force Firefox to use store cache to RAM instead of disk.

6. The Vertex 2 is TRIM compatible. Very useful.

7. Benchmarked my OCZ Vertex 2 60GB read/write speed using HD Tune Pro. Maximum read and write speed were 230MBps and 209MBps respectively AFAIR. Decent speed TBH.

8. OCZ's excellent warranty and support.

I would say, if you have the cash then go for OCZ Vertex 2 60GB and use it as your boot drive and for installing vital softwares. And yes, Seagate 2TB 6Gbps HDD as suggested by Gannu. Completely forgot about it. :ashamed: :P
 
XTechManiac said:
My 2 cents on read-ups of my OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD:-

1. No more annoying HDD spinning platters noise. Complete silence.

2. Heat factor. SSDs runs at 25-30°C unlike 40-50°C of HDDs.

3. The OCZ Vertex 2 are one of the fastest SSDs right now. Its fast..very fast.. Honestly, its time we dump our HDD as boot drive.

4. So handy tips to increase SSD life-span are: Disable disk defragment, indexing, hibernate, system restore and write caching.

5. You can also force Firefox to use store cache to RAM instead of disk.

6. The Vertex 2 is TRIM compatible. Very useful.

7. Benchmarked my OCZ Vertex 2 60GB read/write speed using HD Tune Pro. Maximum read and write speed were 230MBps and 209MBps respectively AFAIR. Decent speed TBH.

8. OCZ's excellent warranty and support.
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My 2 Cents

1. There isn't actually any HDD noise outside the Cabinet, unless you put your ear to the HDD. :S

2. 40-50°C is the idle temp of a HDD (Mine idles at 42), like there is different Idle temp for difference devices, in that sense SSD's have different Idle temps.

3. True Right now! but its not the time right now to dump the Boot Drive yet, not until we have a technology that boots the system up within 10 secs :clap:

4. Disable disk defragment, indexing, hibernate, system restore and write caching < this can be applied to normal HDD's also. but i wont recommend disabling disk defrag, Indexing or writing cache (unless you have a performance HDD).

I wouldn't switch to SSD even though i can afford one, reason being 10 Seconds difference is not a lot for me... This isn't Formula 1 Racing for pete's sake! :cool2:

I remember back in 2009 i purchase 1TB HDD for somewhere around 5.5K whats is price now? 2.8K .

The point I am making is technology when launched will be pricey no matter what the industry. & they will always try to make it better since launch & you should decide what is the right time to purchase that technology based on the performance difference its offering...

No doubt that the 60GB SSD is good, but you can only use it as your boot drive & install applications on it the rest of the data that you have will be on your regular HDD's, Are you going to run Mission Critical Apps? I have the OCZ 60GB SSD on my dedicated server that runs SQL 2008 R2, Do you have similar plans? or its just for your Regular Home use + Some High end Gaming?

When you are downloading something, your SSD Speed doesn't make any difference, it will use your internet speed. When you copy or move a file you cannot store everything on the SSD, its only 60GB, so you save it where? your normal HDD, then the SSD copy speeds don't matter even if you copy from your SSD to your HDD or vice versa it will use your HDD's read write rate as that's the lowest.

Would you be able to install High End Games that take upto 6 - 8GB each all on SSD? No right? you'd install it on the normal HDD, then where does the SSD Performance come into play? In System Boot time?

So do you really think its worth the price to have a SSD that only give you a little faster boot times that the normal?

I like waking up in the morning, pressing the power button on the computer, go do my morning business & come back Login & do my thing.. I don't sit in front of the screen every time i press the power button to count each second till it shows me the login screen

So I don't really see the point in buying an Low size, High Price SSD.
 
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The point I am making is technology when launched will be pricey no matter what the industry. & they will always try to make it better since launch & you should decide what is the right time to purchase that technology based on the performance difference its offering..
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Agreed. Or one can choose to wait until the technology matures and newer ones come up so the older one is already outdated by then. Investing in anything new warrants a lot of moolah!

When you copy or move a file you cannot store everything on the SSD, its only 60GB, so you save it where? your normal HDD, then the SSD copy speeds don't matter even if you copy from your SSD to your HDD or vice versa it will use your HDD's read write rate as that's the lowest.
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True but that isn't the point of investing in the SSD. No one invests in the SSD so he could shuffle the contents between the SSD/HDD. They are possibly concerned about the bootup times, application load times etc.

Would you be able to install High End Games that take upto 6 - 8GB each all on SSD? No right? you'd install it on the normal HDD, then where does the SSD Performance come into play? In System Boot time?
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Yup I just do that albeit one at a time since I don't play more than a game at once. Never mind even if the games occupied 14~18 GB of installation space. I recall I ahd Mass Effect 1 and 2 that totaled to almost 20+GB. Windows 7 occupied roughly 15~16GB IIRC and there was still some space left. So no, I wouldn't install the games on the hard drives. The hard drives are for the mass storage and their backups.

SSD performance comes right from the system bootup - my system took approx. 14 seconds IIRC (I'll give you the updated figures once my new SNB setup is up and running) to boot to the desktop once I had pressed the power button on the chassis. And then you have the regular applications like the Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop and other image/video processing tools opening in a jiffy.

I felt this was the single best upgrade I've given to my system in ages. Unlike those GPU and CPU upgrades where the improvement wasn't phenomenal.

I like waking up in the morning, pressing the power button on the computer, go do my morning business & come back Login & do my thing.. I don't sit in front of the screen every time i press the power button to count each second till it shows me the login screen
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Glad for you! But considering all those points you've mentioned, you shouldn't be really investing in a SSD then. But I can see that you already did. In the 'dedicated server that runs SQL 2008 R2'.
 
after all the 2 cents and what not, here's a single paisa.

SSDs absolutely CLOBBER HDDs when it comes to random access. That is the one and only reason you need to get one as a boot drive :)
Additionally, waiting a month or two might bring prices down on the vertex2 gen drives since most manufacturers are coming out with the 3rd gen drives currently.
I personally don't see any point in getting a 3rd gen drive for the obviously faster read/write rates. 2nd gen drives are fast enough as is. The only thing I'm looking forward to is picking up a higher capacity drive down the line.

Additionally, remember that sandforce controller based drives achieve rated speeds only when the data is mostly compressible. Incompressible data like video clips/images lying around will affect numbers generated by benches.
 
Nice to see some real world impressions. Personally for me biggest advantage is after using the same windows xp install after a year there isn't that much a slow down in boot times and accessing apps when compared to the raptors which would develop the usual slowdowns and hangs as more and more crapware is installed.

Also like stalky said, random access of fragmented data is quicker
 
my 2 cents,

1)avoid ocz as of now

they did mix up with 25 nm ssd drives without informing customer(cheating)

they did not openely say that we have switched over to 25 nm and as we all know,with smaller nm.performance does degrade.

2)regarding speed and silence,i also agree with aasimenator. ssd's dont make much diff.

now in my own case i have seaget 500 gb single platter disk as boot drive and it runs around 34-35 with one fan blowing air on it and second so called wd green runs hotter than this disk

and honestly i dont hear any noise what so ever,

only hdd noise i hear is from second wd10ears drive when it spins up.

3)regarding ssd reliability,intel has best reliability and its failure rates are very minimal.

if i have to buy ssd , i will buy either crucial c300 or intel 80 gb.
 
Gannu said:
True but that isn't the point of investing in the SSD. No one invests in the SSD so he could shuffle the contents between the SSD/HDD. They are possibly concerned about the bootup times, application load times etc.
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He's building an i7 Rig, His concerns are concerning. BTW the OP hasn't mentioned why he needs this Rigs for? so there is no point in asserting things

Gannu said:
Yup I just do that albeit one at a time since I don't play more than a game at once. Never mind even if the games occupied 14~18 GB of installation space. I recall I ahd Mass Effect 1 and 2 that totaled to almost 20+GB. Windows 7 occupied roughly 15~16GB IIRC and there was still some space left. So no, I wouldn't install the games on the hard drives. The hard drives are for the mass storage and their backups.
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Ok so you probably have more time than me, I don't have time to go through each installation every time I want to play a Game & I for one don't want to be limited to the choices of games i can play. I have Installed & kept all the games that I think I will play more than once. for eg. BFBC 2, COD Black Ops, James bond, Formula 1 2010, Crysis 2, Hot Pursuit III etc.. the list goes on & its about 250GB worth of my favorite games.

Gannu said:
SSD performance comes right from the system bootup - my system took approx. 14 seconds IIRC (I'll give you the updated figures once my new SNB setup is up and running) to boot to the desktop once I had pressed the power button on the chassis. And then you have the regular applications like the Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop and other image/video processing tools opening in a jiffy.
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Ok i honestly don't know what IIRC / SNB means, sorry not too much into acronyms.

My Boot time is exactly 34 secs i timed it with my iphone stop watch from pressing the power button to the login screen. If i disable all my crap that load it will be much quicker. Acrobat Loads quick on mine too, not sure about Photoshop though as i don't have it / never felt the need for it.

Gannu said:
I felt this was the single best upgrade I've given to my system in ages. Unlike those GPU and CPU upgrades where the improvement wasn't phenomenal.
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Ok now this point to me is very absurd.

You are tell me that there is no phenomenal improvement from a Core 2 Duo to a i5 OR a Core 2 Quad to an i7? OR there is no phenomenal improvement from a XFX 9800GT to a XFX GTX 480?

Or are you saying that there isn't a phenomenal improvement from a i7 870 to an i7 960 & I'd say who in the right mind would consider that as an upgrade in the first place and expect to see an improvement?

The Right Upgrade path is / was atleast for me

Intel P4 > AMD Athlon x2 2.0 > AMD Phenom II X2 3.1 > AMD Phenom II X4 3.2 > (Hopefully my next switch) AMD Phenom II X6 3.7GHz (Q3 of 2011)

80GB> 120GB > 300GB > 1.5TB + 1TB Ext > 2TB / more

Now you tell me at what point I wouldn't notice a significant Improvement over the other? The same applies for GPU's

Gannu said:
Glad for you! But considering all those points you've mentioned, you shouldn't be really investing in a SSD then. But I can see that you already did. In the 'dedicated server that runs SQL 2008 R2'.
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I wont atleast till we have a high capacity SSD atleast 200GB / above. the only reason i have an SSD on the Dedicated server is because it was for free with the package.

I am not Denying the fact that they are the future of our storage needs; but they are nothing but at experimental stage.

Do you remember how much a 1GB Mirco SD cards was prices over 2 years ago? around 1800bucks they are not worth more than 300 now I have a box of SanDisk 8GB Micro SD card with says 3499/- what its price now 700bucks... Picture this happening to your 60GB SSD's in the next 2 years. At that time no one will ask you for 60GB HDD they will get higher ones.

This is my RAID5 Setup, This is the C Drive of my Server, I have a separate 1TB drive for Data Storage. these are 15k RPM Seagate 80GB HDD's . This setup is custom made. costs me about Rs. 10k / month

snap%20Raid%205-%20Dediserver.png
 
^ Sequential access benchmarks look good on paper, but run it through some random access benchmarks for real-world comparison.

Also, didn't get the part about why your setup costs you 10k/month.

And yes, please follow the siggie rules. No commercial sites. No advertising. We know you love your company, but its not allowed here.
 
Booting an OS/starting up application means reading lots and lots of small files. This is where SSDs beats HDDs. Moreover most of the advantages of SSDs are based on the fact that it doesn't have any moving parts thus it avoid mechanical failure(crash which HDDs suffers). SSDs has no moving parts, so they have a lower failure rate. So more durable and resistance to shock and vibration. And lower power consumption. Oh yes, another advantage is that you can show-off it in your siggy. :P

Though I agree that SSDs are expensive on a cost per GB basis..but..umm..vpraveenis put it aptly "three parameters -> performance - cost - life = choose any 2 and compromise on the other." Now its upto OP to decide. :)
 
Crazy_Eddy said:
^ Sequential access benchmarks look good on paper, but run it through some random access benchmarks for real-world comparison.

Also, didn't get the part about why your setup costs you 10k/month.
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Yes they look & perform good, I actually cannot time the boot times as this is a remote server, but Event Viewer indicates that system boot time is 13 secs, it might be that a count before loading any of the windows services as i have a lot of them running on this server.

I cannot do any further testing on this because this server is accessed 24/7 for SQL DBs, & other custom softwares. the image was taken after I finished the setup of the server & it was ready to be deployed.

My setup is.

Dual Xeons E5520

24GB DDR3 RAM

2 x 1TB HDD @ 7.2k rpm

4 x 80GB @ 15k RPM (this was the cheapest setup for my OS drive, 1 80GB costs me $5 / month so for 20$ I got 4 80GB 15K Drives)

2x 60 GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (Raid 1)

This setups costs me about $250 per month.
 
Ok i honestly don't know what IIRC / SNB means, sorry not too much into acronyms.
My Boot time is exactly 34 secs i timed it with my iphone stop watch from pressing the power button to the login screen. If i disable all my crap that load it will be much quicker. Acrobat Loads quick on mine too, not sure about Photoshop though as i don't have it / never felt the need for it.
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IIRC - If I remember/recall correctly

SNB - Sandy Bridge

I measured the boot time on my previous system (comprising of a G31 board, E8400 processor, 4 gigs RAM) after the SSD was installed and running since a fortnight. Not much bloatware either. I am sure the more apps you install, the longer it takes. In my case, the system is purely meant for gaming and the occasional photo editing.

You are tell me that there is no phenomenal improvement from a Core 2 Duo to a i5 OR a Core 2 Quad to an i7? OR there is no phenomenal improvement from a XFX 9800GT to a XFX GTX 480?

Or are you saying that there isn't a phenomenal improvement from a i7 870 to an i7 960 & I'd say who in the right mind would consider that as an upgrade in the first place and expect to see an improvement?
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Yep! Precisely. The upgrade was definitely in numbers but IRL apps, it wasn't as evident as I wanted it to be. Hell yes, if someone went from a P4 to a Core i5/i7, he may see a definite boost in the frames or a cutdown in the time taken to compress a file on Winrar. But this wasn't my case since I kept swapping the chips when the apps (games in this case) started taking a hit.

Do you remember how much a 1GB Mirco SD cards was prices over 2 years ago? around 1800bucks they are not worth more than 300 now I have a box of SanDisk 8GB Micro SD card with says 3499/- what its price now 700bucks...
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Like I said before, this is the price you would pay if you were to invest in something which is fresh. It will evolve further (like in this case the newer SF-2200 series controller based 6Gbps drives) and the older ones may well be pushed out of the scene for all I care, but FWIW, I think I made the best choice.

Picture this happening to your 60GB SSD's in the next 2 years.
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I have absolutely no complaints my friend. I paid close to 12k for the mushkin Callisto 60GB drive and haven't regretted the decision. Ever! The drive's value has already come down to almost 7k and thereabouts.

At that time no one will ask you for 60GB HDD they will get higher ones.
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Why would anyone ask me for the drive? If I ever intend to put it on sale here, I am sure they will eventually find takers since I would price it accordingly.
 
btw, what do you guy's do with the pagefile.sys when you have a SSD. I guess the swap file would be fatal to SSD's. Do you switch it off all together or just specify a HDD volume for it?

In any case, I guess since a SSD is going to be only for the OS, I guess I can get one any time that I choose. My first priority would be a fast drive for the active storage (games and software installations). The SSD is a luxury that I can have any time later and this is not.

I already have a green series 2TB drive and while its great for storage/backup, its not exactly a performer and I would rather not use such a drive for stuff where speeds matter. So suggest me a fast 2TB HDD first. For the time being I would install the OS on the same. When I am done with the rest of the build and I have the core stuff in order, I would consider whether I should add a SSD or not. This strategy should also also help me get rid of the smaller drives first.
 
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