For the past few months I’ve been going nuts every time my computer boots up or even at how slow loading programs and everything else were becoming. With the more developing I was doing it was becoming pretty frustrating dealing with this it was actually slowing down my productivity. I finally said enough is enough I’m going to purchase a SSD as I’ve heard nothing but great things for solving the exact issues I was having.
I did some research looked at the OCZ vertex drives as well as the Intel ones. They seemed pretty close in most aspects except the vertex series was 128gb vs the Intel 160GB. I decided I needed the extra space and went ahead and ordered the Intel X25-M G2 drive as well as the essentials like a bay converter so I could put it into my computer and Windows 7 for TRIM support. Getting the drive into the system went without a hitch and I of course disconnected my current 640GB drives to avoid any potential problems. The installation just flew by and in probably less than 30 minutes I had Windows 7 installed. Once I updated everything and had all my drivers for things I went ahead and connected my 640GB drives back up turned on the raid for them and everything still worked. I’ll be honest I was surprised I figured turning on raid for my mechanical drives would have broke everything but surprisingly that was not the case at all. I still have TRIM support on the drive and everything I expected to see is still there so great a working system!
Now the speed of this thing is pretty amazing. Once I had all my programs installed just like on my system before boot times were still unbelievable. Before when I booted my system up to start the work day I’d start it up then go grab a drink and windows would be booted up to the login screen. I’d then need to login and wait another minute to actually be able to load programs without a massive delay. With the SSD I turn my computer on look away and I’m pretty much ready to login to windows. Once I login to windows I can instantly start loading everything up I need which is just crazy. So these days I actually go grab a drink first then turn on my computer since there is basically no wait time anyways as far as booting up.
For loading of actual applications and things of that nature there is a major improvement. I can load up everything just clicking as I go rather than dealing with my sl0w mechanical drive seeking things at random parts on disk. So I can load up Zend Studio, Firefox, Apache, MySQL, SecureCRT and other programs all at once with no regard to how much trashing the drive is taking. It just loads them one after another no problem without it slowing down my system at all. What has me surprised the most is even the improvement of sequential reads and writes over my mechanical drive. Although I’m not sure if the drives I was using were that great or if my raid was part of the problem for such slowness. Anyways here’s a quick comparison:
640GB Drives Raid-1:
Intel X25-M G2 160GB:
So I’d say if you looking for an upgrade for your computer and you’re a workaholic like I am then a SSD can be one of the best upgrades you can do.
Here is what I go.
https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D646876_018575_23754
Raid-1 vs Raid-0 there I saw data as very important and doubling the failure rate was not something I wanted to do.
My SSD really blows your raid-0 out of the water when we talk about reads and the more random they become the better. Although I’ve read crystal disk mark isn’t the best for testing drives anyways just the easiest to do.
Hope SSDs become popular also for servers use soon.
Wow, that’s really great – so much savings in wasted time.
Any idea if SSD can be partitioned?
It works exactly like a normal disk drive. I could partition it in half or however I wanted to just like a normal disk.
In many ways, SSDs are better than the mechanical HHDs – faster, uses less power, silent, tolerate extreme temperatures and vibrations. The SSD reads are fantastic but there are concerns over the writes. SSD’s weakness is its write endurance – a block of flash has a limited number of write cycles and if that limit is reached, then the disk becomes unreliable. Rather worrisome, I thought.
What’s the limit of the write cycles on your Intel SSD and its MTBF as compared to your hard drives?
Supposedly worst case scenario is 10,000 writes per bit and a MTBF on that is 1.2 million hours which is usually what you see for a enterprise SAS drive. Most normal SATA drives I believe are about 500,000 hours.
For a desktop the 10,000 write is not a big deal. For most servers it probably wouldn’t be either considering how often you lose normal drives anyways. You’d lose less SSD’s due to writes than you would normal drives. Of course if it’s a big worry using SLC SSD’s which I think have something like 100,000 writes would solve that issue.
SLC is more expensive, although it might end up as a more cost effective solution in the longer run. Like all technology, its price will drop as time passes. The speed is awesome but I’ll have to wait. It’s in my wishlist for my dream PC, though.
Did you consider the ACARD ANS-9010 RAM-Drive?
errr… i like getting the cup of tea when waiting for my machine to boot up