Solid State Drives

Raging Monkey

Raging Monkey

New member
So these precious things are coming down in price slowly. Anyone tried using one yet with your OS or game installs? Not sure what I'd use it for if I had one, probably as a swap drive if it was small.
 
I don't have benchmarks myself, but I decided to try one SSD (OCZ Solid Series SATA II) purely for Fraps.

I run at a native res of 1920x1200 and my current hard drives (2xWestern Digital CAViAR Black 1TB SATA2, not in RAID) were bottlenecking trying to Fraps at that resolution and 30 FPS.

The SSD solved the problem, but it was a really steep price to pay for a drive with such small capacity, Fraps chews through that space in no time at all.
 
I don't own one, but I have seen them in use and read a lot about them. They are most definitely fast. I want one to run my main programs through. But don't think you can get away with only getting a SSD and putting it in a low spec computer. It works best with a good chunk of RAM and all to back it up.
 
Toxin said:
It's also best NOT to use it as your OS drive. Install your games on it and that's it.
Click to expand...

Are you sure? Why would that be? I would think it would be best to have your OS, games and applications installed on it, and all your media on another drive.
 
I'm not exactly sure why, but I read it has something to do witht the way that your OS accesses the drive. I'll try and find where I read it again.
 
I understood the problems with using it as an OS drive were the random read/writes that an OS does all the time. This would cause stuttering in windows while everything was sorted out. I experienced this putting xp onto my baby aspireone - everything would lock up for 2-3 seconds with the hdd light on. Fortunately there's a program called flashfire which uses RAM as a buffer to make the writes in order and in 'chunks'. Difference is night and day. I actually prefer it to my vista laptop.

But for the SSDs you're likely to be referring to, most of the problems were based on the infamous JMicron controller which pumped huge write speads but shocking random read/write. So it depends on the controller of the SSD. Anandtech has a truckload of info on this issue.

The other issue I understood was the life span of drives, both in terms of the number of writes they can take in their lifetime, and the decrease in read spead after writing over data (with out the TRIM command). but I understand these fears are not as great as they appear.

I've heard of loads of guys who run GOOD SSDs as their OS drives. But read Anandtech - really solid info.
 
TheComet said:
I understood the problems with using it as an OS drive were the random read/writes that an OS does all the time. This would cause stuttering in windows while everything was sorted out. I experienced this putting xp onto my baby aspireone - everything would lock up for 2-3 seconds with the hdd light on.
Click to expand...

And why wouldnt a normal harddrive suffer from the same effect? Only a normal hard drive has to wait for the head to move, which is much slower than a SDD.
 
Its a good point, however I understood that good SSDs are far superior in this respect. I understand that is the point of the cache of the HDD, in effect what flashfire does.

However, the cheap controllers were even inferior to HDDs, the main problem being their small caches.

Here is one page of a fantastic article by anand which details this 'stuttering' on the JMicron controller.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top