Hi to All

About time I built myself a new PC. Having been away from the industry for years and just occasionally dipping my toe in the market to build a new PC every two or three years, I see that Solid State Drives are now looking affordable and can be very fast. The PC will be used for the usual home PC sort of stuff, web browsing, email etc, but also for heavy duty 24MP RAW file conversion and Photoshop work, so needs to be quick.

How do we feel about putting a SSD in as a system drive? Are they long term reliable?

Any input greatly appreciated.

Chris

SSDs are great for reading data from, but they are quiet slow at writing data. If your photo processing is going to involve a lot of writing then it could be slower than a conventional HDD.

Try a hybrid drive good mixture of both and really fast, I have one in my Macbook Pro.

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?hl=en&rlz=&q=hybrid+drive&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=13025157019588466692&ei=1_oDTfCvF8zpOcyfhKcB&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDoQ8wIwAg#

SSDs are great for reading data from, but they are quiet slow at writing data. If your photo processing is going to involve a lot of writing then it could be slower than a conventional HDD.

The drive I have my eye on reads and writes around 280Mb/S with continuous rates around 250Mb/S. I know some others write quite slowly by comparison to their read speed. I am thinking this will be a whole lot faster than the current setup.

Chris

Try a hybrid drive good mixture of both and really fast, I have one in my Macbook Pro.

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?hl=en&rlz=&q=hybrid+drive&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=13025157019588466692&ei=1_oDTfCvF8zpOcyfhKcB&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDoQ8wIwAg#

Could be an alternative, but really looking to run the whole OS and applications off the drive. I will have a 2TB hard drive on there for storage too.

Chris

Might be worth waiting 'til 2011:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11430069

Likehood is that the focus on start-up speed will switch away from SSDs to these new motherboards and you'll see a fall in the price of the SSDs to compensate (manufacturers already have ramped-up SSD manufacturing capacity and don't want to see it under utilised).

I think people like Toshiba quote 1,000,000 hours MTBF for SSDs and 600,000 hours MTBF for HDDs. So a factor 1.67 more reliable than HDDs. On paper even if the MTBF is half that quoted, using the machine 24 hours a day, 365 a year gives 57 year life. I haven't as yet purchased an SSD, but from experience with HDDs, out of eight, I've only had one fail prematurely and even that was a suspected virus.

There might be a clue in the willingness of manufacturers to expose themselves to liability - Most SSD manufacturers offer 3 year warranties on their SSDs, whilst the latest HDDS offer 5 years. That seems to go against the MTBF figures.

And the SSDs have the same type of re-mapping software in the disk controllers as the HDDs i.e. if a sector goes bad the software declares it thus and maps round it.

I waiting 'till next year before doing an SSD upgrade.

There is certainly some nice ones around:-

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&sortby=nameAsc&subid=910&mfrid=

The write speed on that OCZ Ibis, 690MB a second and 2.000,000 hours MTBF and a seek time half that of the latest HDDs.

Nick

I am not really too worried about start up times, the main objective of using the SSD is snappy performance once it is running. Once it is built, it needs to be `current` for 2 or 3 years, so building something fast seems like a nice idea.

Chris

The hybrid drive isn't just for start up, when the computer is running it stores parts of you most used programs and speeds everything up due to faster read and write time.

The hybrid drive isn't just for start up, when the computer is running it stores parts of you most used programs and speeds everything up due to faster read and write time.

It certainly has its advantages, but loading big image files is probably the thing it will do most, after starting applications, so it is not really focussing its efforts where I need them. Still, a highly useful drive that I never knew existed. Performance comparison here with the Vertex 2 which I what I will most likely fit:

Test results from Overclokers site

Going to be an expensive month :(

Chris

Edited 12 December, 201015 yr by Chris GB

Just seen this now, but i'll add my 2p worth.

Personally I think the sort of SSDs that a home use will have access to, will have too short a life under heavy write loads to be suited to use as the main drive when you're doing lots of image/video processing.

They can also be incredibly slow for certain write patterns too, when compared to other systems.

I'm sure new technology will over come this in the next few years, but for now I'd go for a bulk 7k2 hard disk with a big cache and lots of ram, with a small fast HDD or SSD (Assuming you don't mind turning indexing off and moving the swap file) for the OS.

Just seen this now, but i'll add my 2p worth.

Personally I think the sort of SSDs that a home use will have access to, will have too short a life under heavy write loads to be suited to use as the main drive when you're doing lots of image/video processing.

They can also be incredibly slow for certain write patterns too, when compared to other systems.

I'm sure new technology will over come this in the next few years, but for now I'd go for a bulk 7k2 hard disk with a big cache and lots of ram, with a small fast HDD or SSD (Assuming you don't mind turning indexing off and moving the swap file) for the OS.

I have gone for the 120GB OCZ drive that reads and writes at circa 280GB/S. I will be using it as the system drive and running my current 64MB cached 1TB 7200rpm drive for storage of the image files. Windows 7 for the OS, with 8GB to work in, so swap file should be redundant. If Photoshop still wants one, I shall put it on the elctromechanical drive. When I work with batches of RAW files, I tend to bring the lot into the image software library (Sony lightbox and IDC) and process out to the storage drive. I am not going to be doing repeated read / writes to the SSD. The drives seem to be specified with high MTBFs and read write quantities on a par with existing HD technology. Will always run a solid backup process. Will keep y'all posted on how it runs.

I would have had it delivered last Tuesday and all built and running by now, but the courier has had it in the local depot backlog since last Thursday. May have to go down there and stomp my feet tomorrow as I am getting knobbed off waiting.

Chris

Well finally got the thing from the courier and built it today. Makes for a decently fast machine in general use, everything opens pretty much instantaneously and image processing / photoshop filters etc are applied quickly. As a guide to how much faster things are, I was running a AMD 6000 dual core (3GHz clock) and it used to take around 20 seconds to decode a Sony A900 RAW file. New machine is Quad core 3.4GHz and the same file now takes around 7 seconds, so nice in full edit mode.

On the downside, Windows 7 64 bit is not compatible with the expensive old scanner I have and the layout is a bit less slick than Vista in some ways, but I will get my head around it.

Chris

Edited 24 December, 201015 yr by Chris GB

I got a RealSSD HDD a few months ago. Best upgrade I ever did. Couldn't believe the boot up times (admittedly after reinstalling W7). But general snapiness is great. I reformatted my sytem drive to be my data drive so have just the OS + apps on the SSD, all my data on the other HDD.

In terms of reliability SSD's are not living up to the hype (anybody surprised about that?).

I saw some IT industry figures the other day that show the the failure rate of SSD's under warranty is right around the industry average for hard drives. The only advantage was that no SSD manufacturer was as bad as the worst hard drive manufacturer (a company begining with H) but the converse is that some hard drives were actually overall marginally more reliable than any SSD.

Overall the failure rate on any drive is tiny and you need to be unlucky to get a dud one but the story is if you are using a SSD don't stop doing back ups because your chances of needing them are the same as if you were using a traditional hard drive.

I got a RealSSD HDD a few months ago. Best upgrade I ever did. Couldn't believe the boot up times (admittedly after reinstalling W7). But general snapiness is great. I reformatted my sytem drive to be my data drive so have just the OS + apps on the SSD, all my data on the other HDD.

That is exactly how I am set up. The more I use it the more impressed I am with the speed. Windows 7 is not impressing me as much though. Seems to be a bit of a bloater idling at 1.2GB, which is pretty much twice what Vista used to idle at. I only put 8GB in the RAM slots, I wonder how long it will take Widows Update to fill that up?

Chris

In terms of reliability SSD's are not living up to the hype (anybody surprised about that?).

I saw some IT industry figures the other day that show the the failure rate of SSD's under warranty is right around the industry average for hard drives. The only advantage was that no SSD manufacturer was as bad as the worst hard drive manufacturer (a company begining with H) but the converse is that some hard drives were actually overall marginally more reliable than any SSD.

Overall the failure rate on any drive is tiny and you need to be unlucky to get a dud one but the story is if you are using a SSD don't stop doing back ups because your chances of needing them are the same as if you were using a traditional hard drive.

Electromechanical hard drives are pretty reliable in general. I never had a warranty claim on one. If the SSD proves to be similarly reliable I will be happy. Backup is of course the key. Cannot say I have been subject to the hype around SSDs myself, just saw them out in the market with very fast performance stats and thought one would make a good system drive.

When you are talking failure rates at the reliability levels of hard drives (either kind) you are really looking at very small probabilities for failure, so it really is just bad luck if you lose a drive.

Chris

Electromechanical hard drives are pretty reliable in general. I never had a warranty claim on one. If the SSD proves to be similarly reliable I will be happy. Backup is of course the key. Cannot say I have been subject to the hype around SSDs myself, just saw them out in the market with very fast performance stats and thought one would make a good system drive.

When you are talking failure rates at the reliability levels of hard drives (either kind) you are really looking at very small probabilities for failure, so it really is just bad luck if you lose a drive.

Chris

If you're doing lots of writes to an SSD you will find they will eventually start to `lose` cells and slow down. (eg cells go faulty)

If you've cycled the SSD a few times fully and the wear levelling has kicked in, you will most likely notice a significant slow down.

FWIW an SSD has a minimum write size, which will almost always be more than you're writing.

To do a write an SSD has to

- READ existing data into RAM (May be in SSD and done by controller)

- ERASE existing flash chip area

- UPDATE data in RAM

- WRITE data from RAM including the update to the SSD chip area.

This is why I'm very surprised WRT the claims that the device can write as fast as it can read for a sustained period.

Obviously when your writes start to get random rather than sequential, things can often get a lot slower.

Edited 29 December, 201015 yr by cheezemonkhai

If you're doing lots of writes to an SSD you will find they will eventually start to `lose` cells and slow down. (eg cells go faulty)

If you've cycled the SSD a few times fully and the wear levelling has kicked in, you will most likely notice a significant slow down.

FWIW an SSD has a minimum write size, which will almost always be more than you're writing.

To do a write an SSD has to

- READ existing data into RAM (May be in SSD and done by controller)

- ERASE existing flash chip area

- UPDATE data in RAM

- WRITE data from RAM including the update to the SSD chip area.

This is why I'm very surprised WRT the claims that the device can write as fast as it can read for a sustained period.

Obviously when your writes start to get random rather than sequential, things can often get a lot slower.

So far, the new drive running in the new system is so much quicker than the old setup that it is really noticeable. The old system was a quick one, but this is in a different class. Looking at the Windows Experience score, the drive is scoring 7.8 ex 7.9 and seems to be transferring files at the quoted speeds. Obviously, the swap file is now located on the fast electromechaical drive and defrag / page file functions are disabled and re assigned as applicable to a SSD. With 8GB of ram though, the pagefile seems to not be in use.

I will keep you all posted on how its performance goes, but so far, well impressive.

Chris