Use an SSD?

I'm currently running a WD 250Gig AAKS and I'm thinking to upgrade it to SSD

I've not yet owned one, know little about them other than "trim" seems desirable but I'm wondering if I would see any performance advantage here? after all the speed of the net is hardly up to that of a hard drive and, assuming that pages downloaded go to memory then to hard drive, Should I be thinking Hard drive replacement and would I be better buying either a faster HD or one with bigger cache

If this above is not clear enough....what is best?

1. Fast hard drive

2. Hard drive with bigger cache

3. Trim enabled SSD

With An SSD you will boot quicker and aps will load faster. If you are just web browsing outside of the faster boot time you will not see any difference with SSD.

For HDD you want low access times and as much cache as possible, although again overkill for web browsing (albeit a much cheaper overkill compared to SSD).

There is another option. A hybrid SSD/ HDD. With repeat use of a minimal number of apps you will get close to SSD speeds, but have a lot more storage at the fraction of the cost.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pro...ops/laptop-hdd

An SSD for your OS is really ideal IMO.

Do you leave your computer on 24/7?
Is a lot of space most important?

Nothing can touch the SSD's for access time which is everything from booting Windows super fast to opening programs in the blink of an eye. The sustained reads/writes will be on par with a good RAID 0 and even fall behind the faster drives like the F3's and WD 2TB's or VRaptors.

Here's my setup:

60GB Vertex for Windows 7 and a few programs/games (best performance)
150GB VRaptor for Games/Programs (2nd best performance)
640GB Caviar Black for everything else (still fast for a storage drive)

This gives me ~800 GB of fast storage without the headaches of RAID. I shutdown my computer everytime I don't use it as I can go 3-4 days without using my desktop which is pointless to suck electricity and collect dust inside. So for me, a fast boot and shutdown was essential. That's why I put the OS on a good SSD.

Just for reference, here's how fast my computer boots to Win 7 from BIOS, to desktop, running small batch file (7-8 programs), closing them, and then shutting down. (48 seconds )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bndK-cbokU

I remember one guy on Alex's forum bought an SSD for MJ12. It looks like it worked out well for him.

For MJ12 archiving and HD read/writes I don't know how much of an improvement an SSD will be over a regular 7200rpm disk with 8mb or more of cache. I know for a fact if you have several MJ12 nodes sharing one disk it will get nasty :p: I had 1 real node and 2 virtual nodes sharing one disk a while ago and just using the computer for simple web browsing was torture because of the constant 5-second freezes. I added 2 more HDs and installed each node to its own hard drive and it was smooth sailing :)

1TB 32M cache Spinpoint f3 here is £42 on offer vs about £116 for a Vertex 2 60gig so it sounds like an HD or two might do the trick judging by your experiences Deadly, especially as I would need 2 SSD's (or one bigger one)

I'll save the experiment with ssd's till I build the next daily rig

Good choice.

Regarding gains in MJ12, the HDD's only task is to archive, and as long as you are having no trouble with queues for archiving (queues can occur when the downloading gets uneven so pauses occurs in between) you are not gaining anything with a faster HDD.

Again....Good choice. : )

Surely the hd's first task is to collect the info downloaded from each connection crawled, then when the bucket is complete said info is compressed (a cpu process) then the second task is to re-file on the drive for pending upload, which is its third and final task.

I don't see many instances of queuing so I would expect a faster drive to only benefit crawling by storing the original info faster but then again I suppose if any process runs faster it has to be good.

Yes the archiving is cpu, and i somehow wrote the HDD did that.....not the intention. All i ment was, it writes during the process.....well anyway I think you got it unde control so i'll just congratulate you on a hdd I my self would like... : )

I'm not bying one SDD before they have gotten rid of the child diseases. One thing I have gotten really tired of in the tech business is how they somehow use the users, and send half heartet sh.t on the market. After 20 years of building, i'm always at least 3 generations behind. It's cheap, and it works. : )

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Originally Posted by Frisch

I'm not bying one SDD before they have gotten rid of the child diseases. One thing I have gotten really tired of in the tech business is how they somehow use the users, and send half heartet sh.t on the market. After 20 years of building, i'm always at least 3 generations behind. It's cheap, and it works. : )

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I'm with you on that one. A lot of technology comes out ahead of its time, not properly tested and without optimised drivers or apps that can take advantage of it. By the time everything has caught up the hardware is worthless. On the other side of the coin stuff comes out so quickly that manufacturers’ don’t bother updating hardware as it ages. You can't win ;)

The problems with SSD are predominately controller based. A lot of the companies designing controllers for SSD are relatively small and whilst they bring innovation they have neither the time nor R&D resources to fully test before the product is launched, hence numerous firmware updates to sort problems out in the field rather than the lab.

The other “problem” is that the technology is rapidly evolving and each evolutionary step brings new problems.

That said Intel drives are solid and always have been. They will soon be on their third generation however, which has gone from 50nm to 34nm to 25nm nand in two years.