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Solid State Drives - Explain it to me
Kewop Decam
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been waiting for Windows 7 to drop to build a new PC and now it's here. I haven't built a new PC in 4 years and I haven't been keeping up with the new technology and I need some help with that. Now, there's this new Solid State Drives (SSD) craze that I know little about. Correct me if I'm wrong, but people use it basically as a harddrive setup just for your OS so you have quicker load times? It's basically a giant flashdrive correct which speeds it up? Do you also install programs on this drive or do you save that for your second, traditional SATA drive? What are the true advantages of SSD? I've heard speed, but is the speed worth the huge price? Most of these drivers are like $200+ just for 80gb which is crazy. And what is all this SATA II and SATA III?
Would it be better to just get one big 1TB HD and put everything there, or a smaller driver around 200-300GB for the OS and programs and another HD for files that don't need to be on the main drive like music, art work, pics, videos, and ect?
The reason I'm building this new PC is because I need a faster computer for all the 3d modeling I do. The one I'm working with now barely gets the things I want to do done and usually I have to do hacky stuff to get things to work. It's very frustrating, annoying, and like I said earlier since Win 7 is here I'm ready to build a new PC.
So far, this is what I have in my cart at newegg:
ASUS P6T Delux V2 LGA 1366 - $290
Intel i7-920 - $290
EVGA Geforce GTX 275 - $270
G.Skill Trident 4gb (2 x 2gb) DDR3 2000 (2 of these for 8gb) - $250 ($125 each)
OCZ 700W PSU - $100 (comes with $30 mail in rebate)
then all the other little things like DVD drives, heatsink, ect.
Any help would be appreciated.
Would it be better to just get one big 1TB HD and put everything there, or a smaller driver around 200-300GB for the OS and programs and another HD for files that don't need to be on the main drive like music, art work, pics, videos, and ect?
The reason I'm building this new PC is because I need a faster computer for all the 3d modeling I do. The one I'm working with now barely gets the things I want to do done and usually I have to do hacky stuff to get things to work. It's very frustrating, annoying, and like I said earlier since Win 7 is here I'm ready to build a new PC.
So far, this is what I have in my cart at newegg:
ASUS P6T Delux V2 LGA 1366 - $290
Intel i7-920 - $290
EVGA Geforce GTX 275 - $270
G.Skill Trident 4gb (2 x 2gb) DDR3 2000 (2 of these for 8gb) - $250 ($125 each)
OCZ 700W PSU - $100 (comes with $30 mail in rebate)
then all the other little things like DVD drives, heatsink, ect.
Any help would be appreciated.
Kewop Decam on
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As for SSD, they are nothing new... but they have traditionally been OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive and had some limitations in terms of lifespan and performance that have kept them from being a very attractive option (save bragging rights).
Now they are most certainly getting a lot of attention because their prices have come down a LOT.
As far as your assumptions.. yes, you would basically put the OS on the drive, and keep data elsewhere. If the drive is large enough, you would also install applications there. However, in order to keep space a non issue, you should identify which applications would benefit the most.
If you have an application that loads entirely into memory and does not cache to the hard drive, it would not benefit a great deal from being on the SSD drive, so you could toss it on a standard drive. Likewise, if you have ana pplication that you just don't care about speeds all that much, why take up prime real estate with it?
On the other hand, if you have a game that does a tremendous amount of data swapping to the drive, or an application that creates its own large scratch files (Like Photochop), they can absolutely benefit from being on an SSD.
The technology is, as you mentioned, essentially a large flash drive... that is more or less what many of the early ones started as, but they have evolved a bit more to have more mature controllers, as well as refining the technology beyond being a really big thumb drive.
One thing to make sure to look for is that the drive should use Single-Level Cell (SLC) memory as opposed to MLC (Multi Level Cell) as it operates faster (for now anyways). You will, in most cases, be paying a premium for that however.
The technology is still "growing up" so your best best would be to not spend a fortune on a huge SSD drive right now if you want one, jsut get one that is large enough to support your OS, virtual memory, and the main applications you want to see the benefits.
Unless something has changed in windows 7, the pagefile is defaulted to the system drive and only by changing that will you change where ANYTHING gets swapped to.
So you could install everything onto a platter drive and have windows using a SSD for the pagefile and nothing would get swapped to the platter drive. At least I'm fairly certain.
Some applications create their own swap file separate from the Windows Swap file. Depending upon application, sometimes this defaulted to every single available drive/partition on the system, sometimes it is not set at all until the user sets it (or a first run wizard walks you through it).
I've just never run into an application that handled its own pagefile. I'm hardly a power user, but I could see 3d modeling or video editing software benefiting from a configurable pagefile.
Absolutely wrong.
A lot of Solid State Drives are crap, but the recent Generation 2 SSDs from Intel are absolutely worth the money.
to the op,
It doesn't matter how fast your processor is or how much RAM you have or what video card you got, none of these will make your computer as snappy and as responsive as a SSD.
An Intel SSD G2 will rape 3D graphics modeling programs. Expect your programs to load in just 2 or 3 seconds at most, no matter how big.
Look at these read speeds
You see those little shitty seagate drives down there with pitiful 32MBps and 72MBps read speeds? That's the shitty terabyte harddrive you're thinking about buying.
Notice the intel x25-M is reading at a speed of 222 MBps. And that's not even in a RAID 0 setup. And that's the old Intel X25-M (G1).
In RAID 0, there will be times where you could reach speeds of up to half a gigabyte per second (500 MBps). Holy fucking shit. Get three or two 80 gb SSDs and put them in RAID 0, and you will forget what the fuck a loading bar is.
For big file storage, you could get your terabyte drive to put stuff away for backup, but for every day use, you absolutely want your applications and OS and all your recently used files on a SSD.
If you don't buy SSDs, you are already buying an inferior machine. Don't even waste your money, just stay with what you have until you can afford an SSD.
Buy now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs
Another thing I didn't mention, is that many people will take an SSD drive and create a small RAID array with it to further increase performance... but you have to be careful, if you get a shitty drive putting it into a RAID array can completely fuck its lifespan. Higher end drives will account for this and will not have an issue. And FYI, standard drives can have the same issue. I know a couple years back the "consumer" grade Seagate and Western Digitals had a few models that were shitting themselves when people were putting them in RAID configurations.
It's worth your time to research the drives you want and how you want them set up to avoid issues like that.
You should get a kick back from intel. You just sold ME a SSD.
However, I'm drinking just a bit less from the cup of Intel at the moment. When their first round of the SSDs came out they were expensive but they were undeniably the king. This second round? On paper it was awesome...improved speed, much cheaper, king of the hill. But then they had to pull off the market to correct a major firmware problem. Then we had supply issues that drove the price back up to high levels (this hasn't changed yet). Then they introduce TRIM support, which they then immediately have to remove because it caused ANOTHER firmware update.
While all this has been going on, other SSD manufacturers have been getting smarter. The end of this article had some interesting conclusions...I would read that and then check out the remainder of the article if you so desire.
Edit: just to clarify on why I think Tycho's comment sucked, lets examine the most common argument on people who bitch about SSDs..."WHY WOULD I PAY SO MANY DOLLARS FOR SO FEWER GB". How many people really need that 500GB drive? If you honestly have THAT MANY movies (because for the home user, that's about the only way normal people are going to get that much space unless you're using .wav instead of .mp3 for music), then you can go buy a second drive to hold it all. Obviously your media won't benefit from SSD performance. But the gains in general computer responsiveness and quickness make an SSD a no-contest purchase, especially since 80GB drives are down near the sub-200 level.
PSN: TheScrublet
I would disagree with this comment. SLC isn't going to have a noticeable effect on any home-user's system. It matters more when you do a TON of writing to disk, for example in server usage. And "paying a premium" is a large understatement...I'm not going to quote current Intel prices because they are so grossly overinflated right now, but at one point the 80GB MLC drive was around $260 or something while the 32GB SLC drive was over $400. In general SLC will cost a TON more for MUCH less space.
PSN: TheScrublet
Eh, it's going to depend on needs I suppose. But I've only ever seen the really nice performance increases from SLC drives. The MLC one's always seem to have performance that sits right around their (much cheaper) platter based cousins... with some aspects better, and some worse. And if he's doing 3D modeling (serious 3D, not hobby), then he is not exactly a normal home use situation.
3d modeling is mostly what I use a computer for. So you're saying SSD could benefit me enough to get one or is the benefit not big enough?
EDIT - my only poblem with SSD is that they are so small. I'm one that can easily fill up an 80 gig, but I think I could buy an extra HD and when I'm done with projects, move them over to that drive and only keep current projects on the 80 gig HD. Maybe use the second HD for games and storages.
but 80 gigs is so tiny...
EDIT 2 - so this will make my 3d programs load faster, but that's not a real issue for me really. Most of them load fast now (like 3-5 seconds. There's one program though, Zbrush, that is kind of unique in the way it handles files. Zbrush writes all it's memory into ram, but when it runs out of ram to use, it writes to the HD which reduces the speed drastically (like an undo can take 2-3 minutes to do as opposed to 1 second). Do you think an SSD HD would help in that program? It's a 32 bit program, so it can't read over like 3.2 gbs of ram or something like that. Don't ask me why such an important program hasn't been recompiled to 64bit yet. I'll admit, typically getting a model big enough so that it has to write to the HD means you're usually modeling something inefficient and wrong... usually
Performance wise, yes.. you would certainly see some good gains... Worth it? Up to you. How much is a few seconds to a few minutes per operation saved worth to you? If you do a lot of saves and loads, it could add up to many hours saved per project, possibly more.
And as far as size go.. this would not be the place to store all your files. Things like meshes and animations would probably be elsewhere (get a large secondary drive). You would basically only keep your current project(s) on the SSD, and even then, maybe not all of it. You would have to look at how you work to figure out where the bottlenecks are in your workflow. If textures take forever to load, put those on the SSD, if not, don't bother. Until you feel like dropping $$ on enough SSD's to handle all of your files, or they get large and cheap enough, it's all about managing what goes on them.
Is there a special way of installing them or is it basically just plug-in and go like most HDs? IS this something you change to RAID or is that not necessary?
Sorry for all the questions.
Provided you do not get them as just a bare drive, they should come with mounting brackets to fit in a standard desktop case. Even if you do get them bare, you can buy those brackets cheap anyways. They are just another hard drive, if you installed a standard, it is no different with these, same with any RAID options. Provided your motherboard can do RAID, you can put these drives in RAID. Just read up on the model(s) you are interested in to make sure there are not any quirks if you are going to do anything other than run them as a stand alone drive.
I've bought my self one of Intel X25-M (2nd generation) drives and connection wise it uses the same cables as any regular 3.5" hard drive with a SATA interface so no trouble there. Size wise it is smaller than a 3.5" so my case had no place for it but it is so light I let i lay around in there. Since there are no moving parts, little heat produced the location and orientation does not really matter - only if I am to move my PC to a new address I may have to make it has not slid around inside the case and ended up i a fan or something. In other word - don't worry about how to fit it just don't place it so it blocks airflow or similar.
RAID - not something you need to do. It is an option like with normal hard drives where you can combine two, or more, drives for speed and/or safety
Speed wise I took down a few before and after numbers when I upgraded.
Hard drive (10,000 rpm WD 150 GB drive, so a fast one) replaced with the Intel X25-M SSD (80 GB)
Loading a level in S.T.A.L.K.E.R (with a lot of mods): Before 75 seconds, now 43 seconds.
Opening Open Office Writer (nothing preloaded): Before 12 seconds, now 9 seconds.
Rebooting XP (Complete as I normally run it): Before 110 seconds, now 67 seconds.
The SSD is an exact mirror of my hard drive so it is the same installation and all. Only the media has changed. Already my 10,000 rpm hard drive was faster than most hard drives and the difference feels even bigger than what the numbers imply. I just can not wait till SSD's get bigger and cheaper (and even faster).
Of course, it'll make stuff load faster, but hundreds of dollars for 3 seconds off your Open Office startup doesn't seem like the kind of trade I would make, especially when you could put those hundreds of dollars towards a CPU or GPU that would literally shave hours off of your rendering times.
So I might just skip out on the SSD now and probably look back into it later.
Thanks everyone for giving me a heads up on what SSD is all about
With the duel drive options your setup should be something like so.
SSD (Single or Raid array) OS, your work programs and current job files.
Secondary hard drive (1 tB)
Three partitions.
1) Not-current Jobs, general media data, porn, basically stuff no matter how many times you wipe the computer this is stuff that you will need to carry over.
2) Program files, these are non critical programs that you don't need to be running on the SSD this is stuff like games and other little programs that you use day to day. This is so that it is easy to nuke and you know you wont lose any media of files if you decide to nuke it. Maybe 100 gigs so you wont fill it up to fast.
3) An image of a freshly installed windows and all critical 3D modelling programs. This one is pretty important, as you have a limited amount of "good" space you will want to keep it as clean as possible. This will allow you to scrub it clean semi regularly and still not lose very much progress.
I have this setup except for number three on my partition. I will probably set it up next install. The reason why I am recomending this is that you will only have 60 or 80 gigs that is not comparitively very much space (and might not be enough for you I would strongly recommend closely looking at recommended hard drive specs for all of your critical programs) it is very easy to accidentally install something onto that drive and chew it up the remaining space fast. I gave myself a 40 gig partition for the W7 RC build and I am down to two gig remaining, this is hardly ideal. I mean an accidental install of a game or two nowdays can chew up a lot of space on a small drive. If you run out of space it is a simple case of backing up your current file, nuking the drive and get a fresh install easily.
Additionally this is a work computer, you need it to work, if shit goes up the creek again it is a simple matter of nuking the drive and reinstalling, you can be up and running again in about an hour.
Satans..... hints.....
If he's using programs that write large amounts of data to the Hard Drive (which he has said happens, and my 3D modelling files do, though admittedly mine do a lot more than just look pretty) and will have a two to three minute wait time between tasks it will make a pretty significant difference.
Satans..... hints.....
I'm a bit confused. Maybe I'm retarded, but you said on the SSD to have to OS and my work programs and the current project I'm working on, but on the regular HD partition you say you put this on partition 3. Am I reading this wrong?
I'm still on the fence on if to get the SSD or not.
It's an image of freshly installed windows and basic essential programs such as your 3D modelling. Basically when you get your new computer, you boot it up install all essential "I need this to run fast" programs and make a copy of it.
If you run out of space on your main hard drive due to install issues or the registary starts getting overly bloated or you know, shit happens you can format your drive and re-image it and have a working copy of your windows and programs up and running again in under an hour.
The main reason I suggest this is that SSD hard drives are small enough that running out of space for a home user is annoying but for a work user it is an issue. You will need an escape plan if one day you realise you only have a gig or two of space free.
Satans..... hints.....
I wouldn't even think about recommending it for a home user. I wouldn't even tell them the advantages of it, because you wouldn't really notice it unless you were told what they were.
Write speeds for large files (constant saving) will drastically decrease. So will your undo waiting time. As you really haven't specified what type of 3D modelling you do it's hard to say how else it will benifit you. It will save me a bunch of time doing Finite Element analysis because I have large result files generated from modelling. If you do buy it, think of it as a three year investment because you will be able to carry it from new computer to new computer and in three years time you should be able to buy a decent sized one for a reasonable price.
Bootup times I am going to skip over because while it is genuinely nice to wait less time for shit to boot up, realistically you start, or restart your computer once, maybe twice a day. And in terms of booting up programs, unless you boot up difference programs constantly it will not save you a significant amount of time.
Satans..... hints.....
You know, I've been meaning to looking into how to image a drive for quicker reformats, but I actually have no clue how. And once you image it, how do you get it from one drive onto another in a reformat? Do you just wipe the main drive (assuming it's the SSD) and then just copy it over or is it more than just that?
Every time he saves a model, he'll see a time difference. Every time he loads a new model, he'll see a time difference. And, if he hits a situation where he's working with several things at once and starts hitting disk because his entire program can't fit in memory, he'll DEFINITELY see a difference. Though on that last case, it'd take several characters at once given his last post. So maybe he won't run into it.
The reason people like me are shitting on you is because hands down the memory<->hard drive bottleneck is the biggest bottleneck facing computers. This isn't debatable, there's no opposing point here...IT IS. Hardcore overclockers get themselves interested in pushing memory and CPU speed as far as possible but at the end of the day the fastest, most overclocked computer in the world is going to skip a beat if it has to hit a platter drive. And the chance of hitting his platter may vary depending on what he's doing. Is he running a low-footprint Unix OS, his 3D modeling program, and that's it? Yea he may not ever touch his disk and thus the SSD benefit during normal operation (not saving/reading) may be less. Is he running Windows Vista/7, 3D modeling, and a bunch of other shit taking up memory? All of a sudden it's much more conceivable his large models will start using some virtual RAM.
Now, all this being said, I'd wait on an SSD purchase for a couple months to see what comes out at CES in January, and give Intel some more time to clean up all of its firmware and supply issues with the G2. I'm guessing early next year you can make a choice between a faster, more expensive Intel drive, or a cheaper and bigger drive from someone else. The difference in speed between those options may make buying from someone else than Intel a much better option than it was in 2009.
PSN: TheScrublet
But it's not going to vastly improve your quality of life while doing 3D modeling.
Gobs and gobs of RAM, my friend. And sufficient video power.
Really 3D modeling is lots of ram and processing, but faster loading is nice when I have like 3 programs open. It isn't that odd to have 3DSMax (or Maya), Zbrush, and photoshop (bodypaint, or deeppaint too) opened at the same time.
I'm usually dealing with like 2048x2048 texture PSDs that hold a shit ton of layers and sometimes that file can be 4096x4096, so ram, processing, and faster loading will all make a difference. Question is if that difference work the smaller harddrive and more cash. Sounds like it to me.
Also vidcard doesn't take that much precedence. You have to remember, a REAL 3D modeling rendering computer uses different videocards (workstation vid cards) that can't play games for shit, but can render like no one's business (and can cost up to $1,200+ alone). I on the other hand don't have a need for that type of card (I'm not making pixar movies over here) and I still would like to play games on the computer.
SSDs shine at random access of large files or multiple file access. Linear access isn't a huge improvement if one at all, unless you have heavily fragmented files.
Also, if your files are that large, the cost is prohibitive to store any significant amount of them on an SSD when you could get a fast and large platter drive. Even if you get a bit of time back during saves and loads, you're paying too much a premium at $/GB for that.
I was taking these into account when recommending not going SSD.
Does that sound like a venture that's worth it? I think I mgiht just got with the 1TB drive and see how I like it and if I feel it loads quick enough, then I won't even bother with SSD for like another year.
If you used the SSD and had a Working Folder that you copied over your current assets, worked and saved on that for a bit, and then moved it back over to larger cheaper storage, that would probably work. Again it's not likely to be a huge improvement but if you have the money it might be worth it to you.
This would actually work nicely if you're already using some version control like SVN for managing your data, where you only have like 10 gigs of working files at a time and everything stored in the repository. Plus, yay version control.
Personally, I don't do any 3D rendering, but having an SSD as my main boot disk has considerably improved my home computing experience. The past summer I upgraded to a 64GB Indilinx (SuperTalent UltraDrive) for my main desktop and was so impressed with the responsiveness of the system I recently purchased a 2nd gen Intel X25-M 80GB for my secondary PC. The biggest problem now is the agony I have to endure when working on my office computer which actually has a better CPU. These days I also find myself shutting down my computer more often when it's not in use because booting up Win 7 takes less than 20 seconds. If your pretty good at hibernating your PC then the energy savings might not make much difference, but if you're like me they can really add up.
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
A quick google turned up this site.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml
To clarify I haven't done this before but since I have been working with smaller OS drives (much like you might be dealing with) I've run into this problem and am going to be setting it up next install.
Satans..... hints.....
i dunno what this even means. Can it not read 8gb or something?
Instead of pairs of ram it uses 3 channels.
So instead of 8gb (2x 4gb, or 4x 2gb), you would have 3 x 2gb. Or any other config that would equal 3 channels (or 6 depending on board).
ooooh. Had no clue that what three channel meant. So if you only put in 4gb (2 x 2gb), would it go apeshit or something? If you put 8, it wouldn't only read six or just not move as fast?
No, you could put whatever the hell you want in so long as the board supports it. The reason to go in pairs of same size RAM on older systems, and in 3's on the newer is the way it uses the memory.
You don't really need to know how the tech works to just know that it's a good thing to follow those guidelines.
But in general you can say that, yes, not following that configuration means slower memory performance.