ssd chat

[scrooge]

hello RichardPearce

i looked around abit but can't seem to find anything on the ( DDR2 RAM drive ) that you were talking about.
maybe you can post a link so i can check them out. as for the defragment of a ssd here's what thay say (IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER
Please DO NOT defragment Solid State Drive as it may shorten the life span of the product. the Warp SSD drives has 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) and built in wear leveling technology in addition to the standard 2 year warranty to maximize the life span of the drive . i was reading somewhere that the price should start comming down soon. hope that's true i'd like to get 2 more.

scrooge

 

[RichardPearce]

Hey Sccrooge,

ACard's ANS-9010 Serial ATA RAM disk - The Tech Report - Page 1

It's not cheap and I dug around and found a couple of reviews and when I looked closely there doesn't sseem to be that much of an advantage over what you've got. I was quite surprised as it uses DDR2 RAM and that has to be about a squillion times quicker than any hard drive or SSD, it even has two SATA connectors so you can RAID it with just one drive.

As I said on the other thread though, it's the limitations of the onboard SATA controller. I don't regret paying for an Adaptec controller one bit, it's on the PCI Express bus (x4) and probably gives me about 50% more speed than when I simply plug the drives into the motherboard. It's worth having. The downside is it really does slow the boot time right down. It is an enterprise standard bit of kit for servers really, so it slowly counts the drives on POST, spinning them up one by one.

Anyway I spent quite some time looking at SSD drives as you've really got me quite errrrrrr excited with your results. (I am sad)

The price isn't that bad for the 32 gig ones, I know it means a lot of rebuilds but I kind of fancy buying them one by one and building up an array like you've got. I'd love to see what a 4 SSD RAID 0 could do on a really good controller, maybe an Adaptec with a x8 PCI Express interface. And no spin up time!

I mentioned putting the pagefile on an SSD, but in reality if you are using just SSDs for your system drive then your pagefile is already on them. It might be worth using one of the two other SSDs as a dedicated pagefile drive though as I reckon with three of them in a RAID 0 array you'll have pretty much saturated the SATA controller's bandwidth.

When you get them it HAS to be major playtime. Better buy some reinforced SATA cables so they don't melt!

Richard

 

[garysgold]

(IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER
Please DO NOT defragment Solid State Drive as it may shorten the life span of the product. the Warp SSD drives has 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) and built in wear leveling technology in addition to the standard 2 year warranty to maximize the life span of the drive .

scrooge

Just a thought... 1.5 million hours is 171 years. I doubt if I'll use it more than 5 or 6 before it is obsolete. :huh:

When Seven goes public, I've been thinking I'd like to get two, 80GB ssd's. Create a small partition on each drive for the pagefile. I'll still have Vista and Seven one on each drive, and I'll use the small partition on the Seven drive for Vista's pagefile and the space on the Vista drive for Seven's pagefile.

Gary

 

[RichardPearce]

Yeah, kind of like a dual, cross over thing! I like the symmetry!

I can live with 171 years, by then my wife's cooking may have improved.

I did read in some of the reviews that the speed of SSDs could suffer because of the JMicron controller that is used in a lot of them Gary, what Scrooge has kind of overcomes this by using the pair of them together, although if you're waiting for Seven to go live I bet there will be better and cheaper drives available as the things are really developing quickly it seems.

Perhaps you could get three, make a RAID 0 array out of two of them and then make two partitions, one for each operating system and just use the third as a pagefile? I guess it all depends on how cheap the things are by then.

Richard

 

[techcal]

I had plans to get an Intel X-25 soon, but I've been reading up on SSDs, and I don't really like what i find. SSD longevity seems to be less of an issue than the drop in performance after these things are used for a period of time. The culprit seems to be the extra time needed for the erase/write cycle for the blocks.

Internal fragmentation and filesystem free space fragmentation seem to cause the slowdown. There is no cure (yet) for the former, but for non-Intel SSDs, the latter problem can be fixed with Hyperfast.
PC Perspective - Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs
[ame=http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?p=4351675]Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs - PC Perspective Forums[/ame]
The Diskeeper Blog: HyperFast is also here!

 

[RichardPearce]

With the Intel X-25 being so expensive I think it's wise to wait until the technology has matured somewhat, put simply that particular piece of hardware is too expensive to enjoy a performance hit in the short term only to be disappointed within a short space of time by the performance drop.

I'm not sure if hyperfast is the answer to the problem, or simply waiting for a technology different to the use of NAND memory.

I'm still interested in the newer SSDs that have come on the market, but then their price is a lot less than the Intel X-25 SSD and wouldn't "upset" me as much if I only got a year or two use from one.

Thanks for the articles, interesting reading.

 

[smarteyeball]

I can live with 171 years, by then my wife's cooking may have improved.

lmao

 

[Joan Archer]

I can live with 171 years, by then my wife's cooking may have improved.

Richard

You could always do it yourself if it's that bad :devil:

 

[patio]

Sic 'em Joan...

 

[angryman]

I liked the idea of SSD.... I am going to wait a few years, but no moving parts = best solution!