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With these two new harddrives in my machine seems to work well.

C:\ [OS]

I've got the SSD as drive 0, and only have the OS, program files, and some additional software on it. Windows launches fairly fast, but the applications that seem to mostly benefit are Word, Excel, etc.

D:\ [BLACK] WD1TB part 1

I partitioned the WD Black 1 TB in two partitions. The first one is about 100 GB, and contains my swap file, the purebasic folder, and the temp folder. As this drive has a 32 MB (edit: oops, nope, it's the 64 MB version) buffer in addition to Windows itself buffering, things fly. In fact, the write / buffer combination of this drive + Windows caching is equal to the SSD when it comes to PureBasic itself. Interestingly it's faster than the dual Raptor setup, though I must admit those were two old drives it seems Windows caching is still somewhat affected by the drive caching, not something I expected.

Of course, I did create the swap file fixed size and as the very first file on this drive. I rarely see the swapfile in use (got 4 GB RAM) but if it kicks in it's primarily for very large stuff related to images. If it's a lot of very small blocks it needs the 32 MB cache of the disk itself should fix that nicely. Edit: heh, just noticed I received a different model, this one has 64 MB cache instead of 32 MB cache, and still is a 512 bytes sector unit. I should not complain

E:\ [CHAOS] WD 1 TB part 2

After reading up on the behaviour of SSD's and browsers, I decided to put all caches, download folders, and other rubbish here. It's 800+ GB so space enough for a few downloads However, first I stored my TrueCrypt vaults on this partition, so they're nicely near to the start of the drive.

F:\ [FILES]

My first Seagate 500 GB drive (which is going to be removed and become part of a raid setup once I'm done with a homeserver) for games, backup, emulator data, virtual machines etc.

G:\ [DATA]

The second 500 GB drive, containing pictures, ebooks, music, emulator data, etc.

What will be the next lemon in my hardware setup? Sigh...

Although it's nice and fast and performs well, I'm not convinced I'm going to go with an SSD... I've been having two spontaneous hickups / hangs during (very) extensive drive I/O which I have never experienced before.

One more and the SSD goes back and I will replace it with a new VelociRaptor.

(Appearently the SSD's do not play nice with an NVidia chipset. Also the Intel 'SSD toolbox' isn't able to connect to the drives on my NForce based Dell XPS710. Too bad. Exit SSD if need be. Hmmm... or I'll keep it for a HTPC )

Question: Does the 10,000 RPM speed of the Velociraptor's produce a noticeable speed improvement over the 7,200 RPM speeds of most other drives?

I'm getting ready to switch to Windows 7 and am thinking on leaving my Windows XP installation intact and just buy new hard drives to install Windows 7 on. I usually always buy Seagate drives because I've never had one go bad but would consider the Velociraptor drives if the speed improvement noticeable enough.

blueznl wrote:Although it's nice and fast and performs well, I'm not convinced I'm going to go with an SSD... I've been having two spontaneous hickups / hangs during (very) extensive drive I/O which I have never experienced before.

One more and the SSD goes back and I will replace it with a new VelociRaptor.

(Appearently the SSD's do not play nice with an NVidia chipset. Also the Intel 'SSD toolbox' isn't able to connect to the drives on my NForce based Dell XPS710. Too bad. Exit SSD if need be. Hmmm... or I'll keep it for a HTPC )

Be sure to check the forums for the ssd. For my ocz there are consistent firmware upgrades and performance tips posted which can help to alleviate some of the hangs, (write bits need to be reset periodically for optimal performance, Win 7 acts much differently than XP . . . etc) - but as I said, I wish I had it to do over.

cheers

GWarner wrote:Question: Does the 10,000 RPM speed of the Velociraptor's produce a noticeable speed improvement over the 7,200 RPM speeds of most other drives?

That depends. It does help Windows XP booting faster, and works well for temp files etc. It doesn't work for large files, where a WD Caviar Black might be the better choice, dunno.

As for Windows 7, I guess if you have an Intel set you might go for an SSD. Speeds are impressive, I must admit.

It seems the NVidia NForce chipsets have issues with the Intel SSD's. And as I cannot do a firmware upgrade on the SSD because Intel's toolbox doesn't want to play nice with my NForce either, I think the SSD will be on its way out. Fortunately the local hardware shop I deal with is quite good, well, I do spend enough with them

I just picked up a new VelociRaptor 150 (there were no 300's in stock) to see if that fixes the hangups, if so the SSD goes back to the shop. On a newer mainboard (Intel based) running Win7 I have no doubt the SSD will perform great, on my trusty Dell XPS710 running XP it seems to be not as good.

I must say I am impressed with the speed of the WD Caviar Black with 64 MB cache. I'm going to do a little testing this week with the VelociRaptor vs. the SSD vs. the Caviar Black. I might skip my Raid 0 setup if the VelociRaptor is fast enough, or I might install two Caviar Blacks and simply not use the spare space (2 TB in Raid 0 is a little too risky for my taste )

More information:

As a bootdisk the SSD is indeed faster than the VelociRaptor. I've done some testing, and in spite of poor sector alignment and poor write speeds the Intel SSD performs better (boot wise and application launch wise) than the VelociRaptor. (Booting is about 25% faster than the VelociRaptor.) The whole machine feels 'snappier'.

Slow boots, however, may be caused by other things as well... There's for example external USB harddrives that cause some minor hickups during boot, al the more visible when booting from a (fast) SSD.

Once things are up and running, the VelociRaptors keep up fairly well.

Now this gives me a dilemma... should I stay with the SSD or go for a VelociRaptor Raid 0? As I cannot run the Intel toolbox, the SSD drive is, without a doubt, going to run out of untrimmed sectors, and thus may become slower and slower, something a single VelociRaptor, or even a Raid 0 VelociRaptor, doesn't suffer from. Speedwise the (limited number) of writes are well handled by the SSD's cache, so as long as I do not copy large amounts to the SSD there's no speed limit in sight.

Now I can test the SSD by deliberately screwing around (for example by doing some useless defragmenting) just to see what impact on speed is...

blueznl wrote: Now I can test the SSD by deliberately screwing around (for example by doing some useless defragmenting) just to see what impact on speed is...

Defragmenting on SSD's don't work and they don't need it. It's because the controller tries to use all chips the same and don't write many times to the same chip. That increases the life time of the SSD but it gets haviely fragmented, but thats no problem for a SSD.

hard drives can not compete in performance with a SSD, the only default of ssd is their limited lifespan, it says it does not use a SSD as a hard disk, it must optimize windows:

- Disable automatic defragmentation
- Disable indexing of the disc
- Move the pagefile to another hard drive classic
- Disable Windows Search
- Disable write cache ...
- Disable SuperFetch ...

better to use Windows 7, this system handles perfectly ssd ...

I did not regretted the purchase of KINGSTON, windows 7 64 bit is very fast ...

As i allready wrote: The life time of SSD's is very high. I don't believe a HDD can take 5GB write accesses every day for 180 years. A SSD can. I dont think anyone of us lifs long enough to see a SSD dieing a natural death. ^^
At least not if you use it for normal private things.

I'll stay with mechanical hard drives for now. 160 GB SSD costs more than 10 times as much as an equivalent mechanical drive.

160 GB SSD = $500 vs. 160 GB Seagate Barracuda = $40, no brainer easy choice.

If you move from a 160 GB to a 128GB SSD the price drops to around $350.00 to $375.00 price range. But, if price is your concern then yeah a $40.00 160 GB drive is better price wise, but only price wise as the SSD will probably offer much better performance and lifetime reliability then the mechanical drive. It all depends on your focus and view point. If I were building a new system, or upgrading a system that was made in the last year or so, and was using Windows 7 i'd go for the SSD. If I were using WindowsXP i'd go for the mechanical drive as an SSD in WIndowsXP is wasted. All of my current systems are Windows 7 Ultimate and using nothing but SSD's. Although I did get almost all of the SSD's through work (which was no cost to me), two of them I did purchase. Even though the price was hefty, $485.00 each, I think it was well worth the cost. The machines cost me around $700.00 each for hardware to build and with the SSD's this bought the cost up to around $1185.00 per machine which is not that far off from what purchasing an off the shelf computer would have cost with comparable specs. I'm satisfied with the SSD's and considered it a good decision. I had mechanical SATA drives in the machines and they were fast but the difference between the mechanical and the SSD is like night and day and i'd never go back to a mechanical drive again.

That's it. The SSD is OUT.

Reason: unpredictable performance on an NVida platform using Windows XP, especially hangups.

Here's the breakdown (a little Tom's Hardware in the bowels of the PureBasic forum )...

Considering...

1. If you use an Intel chipset AND you run Windows 7: go for an SSD. They are very fast, and around $200 they're large enough now for a boot disk. Limit yourself a little when it comes to writing to them, but my oh my, it's outright incredible how fast Windows XP or Windows 7 starts.

2. If you can afford it and your temp files are small, OR very large, you may opt for a second WD Caviar Black. With its 64 MB cache it will handle all smaller writes in cache (those that Windows doesn't catch) and the caching algoritms must be quite smart. The combo SSD + Caviar Black was often faster than putting it all on the SSD. (In fact, if you don't mind the slightly slower boot-up and start program times, then the Caviar Black seems to be a winner cost / performance wise.)

3. If you run Windows XP you may be in for a gamble. Windows XP seems to run fine on Intel chipsets, though it may require installation of the Intel SSD 'toolbox' (or whatever the thing is called) which gives you 'TRIM' functionality.

4. People often state that you would not have a speed increase with XP, well, this is utterly wrong: the Intel X25M 'postville' SSD still allows writing speeds op 60..70 MB per sec. As I understood this strongly depends on the brand and model SSD but I had no issues. Vista should run a bit better with an SSD, but hey, Vista itself is sluggish so why would you move to Vista?

5. SSD's without 'TRIM' DO slow down over time, or at least the X25M does. However, I tried very hard to confuse the drive, and did not manage to. Even by fully loading it, and deliberately messing it up (using different bench marks) the maximal slow down I could bring the drive to was about 20%.

6. RAM beats SSD and HDD. If you don't have to swap, then there's no disc activity. So if you're using memory hungry apps (video, graphics) go for RAM. It's cheaper and (except for starting programs that are not yet in the cache) is the better solution to speed up your overal machine.

7. If you have a NON-INTEL chipset AND do run XP or Vista then DO NOT use an (Intel) SSD. You may be treated to irregular hickups, or even end up in total freezes. These only occured for me when doing massive amounts of disk IO and CPU IO simultanously. (Running two Vista 64's inside VirtualBox was a sure way to make me reboot inside an hour or two when I was running XP from the SSD.) Perhaps there will be a firmware upgrade some day, but you cannot install it as the toolbox wouldn't work on a non-Intel platform.

8. An SSD is faster than a Raid 0 Raptor or VelociRaptor setup, unless you write a lot. As most caching by windows and HDD memory is taking care of your smaller writes, the slower write speed of the SSD doesn't matter much.

9. Games do load faster from a Raid 0 VelociRaptor setup than they do from the single SSD. (Nothing's going to stop you going Raid 0 on SSD's though, although 'Trim' may not work on Raid 0's.)

In a little table, here's how all setups that I tested compared, boot wise. I gave the SSD ten points, and it's highly subjective based upon my usage patterns


Windows boot

Yes, I seriously tested all the combos below in two gruelsome evenings! (Except for the Raptor Raid 0, as one of the old drives had gone the way of the dodo, so that's just a guess.)

1x SSD Intel X25M 80GB - 10.0
2x VelociRaptor 150 GB Raid 0 - 8.5
1x VelociRaptor 150 GB - 8
1x WD Caviar Black 1TB - 7.5
2x Raptor WD740 Raid 0 - 6.5
2x Samsung Spinpoint 500 GB Raid 0 - 6
2x Seagate 350 GB Raid 0 - 5.5


Programming

Mostly PureBasic, and as everything fitted inside the cache, it just didn't matter much. It was the browsing around for documents etc. that mattered here. (I did not test all combos.)

1x SSD Intel X25M 80GB - 10.0
1x WD Caviar Black 1TB - 9.0
2x VelociRaptor 150 GB Raid 0 -9.0
1x VelociRaptor 150 GB - 8 - 9.0
1x Raptor WD740 - 8.0
1x Samsung Spinpoint 500 GB - 7.0
1x Seagate 350 GB - 6.0


Gaming

2x VelociRaptor 150 GB Raid 0 - 10.0
1x SSD Intel X25M 80GB - 9.0
1x WD Caviar Black 1TB - 8.5

The Caviar Black launched my games about just as fast as the Intel SSD. I'm not going to discuss the rest of the field


Would I?

1. Would I buy an SSD for PureBasic alone? Nope.

2. Would I buy an SSD for Windows XP? Only on an Intel mainboard, and somewhat reluctantly.

3. Would I buy it for faster booting? Yes. (Oh yes!)

4. Will it increase your (purebasic) development speed? Only if you crash your machine a lot and have to reboot

5. Would I buy an SSD for gaming? Nope.

6. Is it time to dump your two years old harddrive? Yes. (The newer drives have become so much faster that even buying something just below the ultra fast level is a huge improvement over what is probably now in your rig.)

Conclusion

Unless you need to squeeze the last bit out of your machine, your best buy is probably going to be two Caviar Blacks, with some smart partitioning, and putting the temp and swap file on the first partition of the second drive, you'll end up with 2 TB of data for less than 200 bucks, even cheaper than a single SSD and almost as fast in reading and writing as the VelciRaptor Raid 0 or that same SSD.

If you need to donate me some money as I've saved you so much time investigating yourself I can pass you my bank account

SFSxOI wrote:If you move from a 160 GB to a 128GB SSD the price drops to around $350.00 to $375.00 price range. But, if price is your concern then yeah a $40.00 160 GB drive is better price wise, but only price wise as the SSD will probably offer much better performance and lifetime reliability then the mechanical drive.

I'm not saying I wouldn't want SSDs, the fact is I do, but right now the benefits of SSD don't justify the cost yet. Maybe in a few years when competition and technology advances bring the price of SSDs down, there will come a point where I'm willing to pay the extra cost for the benefits.

For now mechanical drives with SMART monitoring will do for me.

So many years later I stumbled over this post... And realized I am still running the very same Dell XPS710. Not with an Intel SSD (which didn't play nice with the mainboard) but I did replace my Velociraptor 150 Raid 0 with a Samsung Evo, when I moved from XP to Windows 7.

No hickups, though I was one of the people suffering from the 'slow down' bug. (Moving the drive to another PC and updating the firmware on it fixed things.) Even without trim (still isn't clear if trim actually works on my mainboard) the SSD is tons faster than the ol' HDD.

Funny. Still the same WD Black as drive D. That thing is more than 6 years old, and this PC is in use every day... That must have been one of the best drives I've ever bought.

... and that ol' Raptor has been serving my homeserver ever since... and still runs...