Anyone here running a SSD just for OS?

[garritynet]

Thanks for the info,wish i'd had known that sooner.

The OCZ 30gig Vertex drive uses the Indilinx controller. If it did not, it would not use the same firmware as all the other Vertex drives.

What drivers are you using? I got a huge boost moving away from my AMD drivers.

Which SATA/Chipset drivers are best to use my Vertex?
- Intel chipset IDE mode = Intel driver
- Intel chipset AHCI mode = Microsoft driver
- Intel chipset raid mode = Intel driver
- AMD chipset IDE mode = Microsoft driver
- AMD chipset AHCI mode = Microsoft driver
- AMD chipset raid mode = AMD driver
- NVIDIA chipset IDE mode = Microsoft driver
- NVIDIA chipset AHCI mode = Microsoft driver
- NVIDIA chipset raid mode = NVIDIA driver

 

[garritynet]

The difference between their published specs and real world testing shouldn't be that extreme.

If the OP has done his best to replicate the manfg's specs and is 20% shy, I can see where he'd be disappointed.

I've had a JMicron unit (GSkill Titan) and while it was faster than a mechanical drive it took all those SSD tweaks to keep it's performance acceptable.

The 30gig drive uses the Indilinx controller but it dose have half the cache, only 32mb instead of 64mb. The benchmarks he is looking at might be for the 120gig that is often reviewed. Those benchmarks are also from fresh installs with nothing else running on the system and nothing running in the background. Real world computers are not like that. I have not seen a single review for the 30gig. None the less that speed is fast enough and I was simply stating that he is getting the desired effect from his purchase, just not his benchmarks. I say that hoping that his intention was not simply to benchmark but to speed up his OS.

Edit: I just noticed this. OCZ advertized speeds are for the ATTO and PC Vantage Mark benches. Using the ATTO test I do much closer to their rated speed. I get 220mbs read and 130ish writes when the advertise 230 and 135. Still irrelevant. Still just a benchmark. ***Credit goes to Shabby for pointing this out earlier in the thread***

 

[garritynet]

What I don't get is why everyone wants to speed up Windows. Am I the only one that wants to speed up my applications? For instance, if I got an SSD that was too small to hold everything, then I would put my games on the SSD. For me, I only boot up Windows once a day. When I game, levels load once every few minutes. I want THAT to be fast. Who cares if Windows takes 15 seconds or 50 seconds to boot?

I personally like being able to turn my computer with minimal waiting. Its a small thing but its difficult to give up once you have it. Where I live its hot and humid most of the year. Rather than having one room be extra hot I prefer to simply turn the computer off when I am not using it. Having it start up in just a few seconds is actually pretty awesome for my usage. I could just run the air conditioner all the time and/or use hibernation but being able to just hit the power button, sit down and then instantly be able to log-in is pretty awesome.

I mostly just purchased the small drive because I wanted to "get my feet wet" without paying the full cost of admission. I have since purchased a second 30 gig drive and plan to use it for the rest of my applications and a few games. Stuff like Fallout 3 that take up 12gigs and show little benefit from the SSD will still be located on my HDDs.

 

[james1701]

I picked up a Corsair X64 and use it as a boot drive, and absolutely love it. Its nice not to hear the hd running all the time.

http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/kk293/luv2eather/Computer/attox64.png

http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/kk293/luv2eather/Computer/HDtuneX64.png

http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/kk293/luv2eather/Computer/Win7tasklist.png

I have 59 processes running. The fastest I have ever seen mine reboot is 36 seconds. Most of the time its around 55 seconds, but 20 of that is time to post and the rest is OS load time. Here are my benchmarks with the OS loaded on the drive, and then the amount of stuff I have running.

 

[billyb0b]

i'm running a 120 OCZ Agility and it's a great Indi-based drive with TRIM

 

[jimhsu]

A test I like to do generally is to open all of Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise at the same time. I.e.

start /min msaccess
start /min infopath
start /min excel
start /min groove
start /min ois
start /min mspub
start /min onenote
start /min outlook
start /min powerpnt
start /min winword

That takes 5 seconds or so to run. I take considerably longer closing all the stupid windows afterwards.

 

[Rubycon]

Better than unprocessed fish sticks!

 

[ilkhan]

/me raises his hand.
Win7x64, office, apps, etc run off the SSD. Games are NTFS junctioned to the storage drive (Seagate 7200.12). Works great.

 

[Old Hippie]

Using the ATTO test I do much closer to their rated speed. I get 220mbs read and 130ish writes when the advertise 230 and 135. Still irrelevant. Still just a benchmark.

There ya have it, much better.

It really doesn't matter about the benchmark's speed, just that it's closely attainable by the users.

No one, no where, no how, is gonna be pleased if what they bought doesn't perform how it's advertised.

 

[garritynet]

There ya have it, much better.

It really doesn't matter about the benchmark's speed, just that it's closely attainable by the users.

No one, no where, no how, is gonna be pleased if what they bought doesn't perform how it's advertised.

I know I was debating the issue with you but to be honest I did feel a lot better once I ran that ATTO benchmark, so I guess I gotta admit that you were right

 

[Old Hippie]

I know I was debating the issue with you but to be honest I did feel a lot better once I ran that ATTO benchmark, so I guess I gotta admit that you were right

I was kinda puzzled by you responses because many are purchasing drives based solely on the manfgs speed tests and if the unit(s) can't attain those speeds it would be false advertising.

AAR, I'm glad you got it settled.

The next thing you need to do is to get it close to Ruby's specs.

 

[Zap]

The 30gig drive uses the Indilinx controller but it dose have half the cache, only 32mb instead of 64mb. The benchmarks he is looking at might be for the 120gig that is often reviewed.

That's a good point. Additionally, bandwidth may be cut because of fewer chips used. Don't know if it is like this in the Indilinx based drives, but with the Intel based drives there is a performance hit with the smaller 40GB version.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=4

With only half the NAND flash of an 80GB X25-M (only five NAND devices on board), its sequential write speeds are cut in half - Kingston rates the drive at 40MB/s. Random performance suffers a bit, but sequential write performance sees the biggest hit.

 

[lopri]

What I don't get is why everyone wants to speed up Windows. Am I the only one that wants to speed up my applications? For instance, if I got an SSD that was too small to hold everything, then I would put my games on the SSD. For me, I only boot up Windows once a day. When I game, levels load once every few minutes. I want THAT to be fast. Who cares if Windows takes 15 seconds or 50 seconds to boot?

My thoughts exactly. I don't remember when I boot my systems last time. (Sometime last week, I think)

 

[jimhsu]

My thoughts exactly. I don't remember when I boot my systems last time. (Sometime last week, I think)

It's not bootup time per se. The fact is that everything you interact with, you do with Windows. Opening the start menu? A couple dozen reads there (shortcuts, icons, recent files). Typing "pow" in the start menu search? A couple dozen reads as your system goes and looks around in the index. Pressing enter? Several hundred reads, dozens of writes, and over a thousands registry lookups as your system launches powerpoint.

A SSD takes 0.1 ms for each of those reads.
A hard disk takes about 10 ms.

That's the difference.

If you were to simply open up procmon.exe, you'll typically be bombarded with thousands of entries a second. Of course the majority of those aren't reads, but of the few dozen that are, the 10 ms access time adds up.

The alternative solution is to cache all of Windows into memory so that there are only nanosecond load delays for any elements. Now windows does cache a lot into memory already, but not nearly enough.

PS NVM, I severely underestimated for powerpoint. One launch of POWERPNT.EXE generates over 150000(!) entries. 99% are garbage, but that's still 1500. Shows you just how "bloated" modern software is.

 

[Compddd]

I'm waiting for the Intel Gen3 drives, hoping for 300GB, thats the size of my velociraptor and it's worked well for me

 

[manimal]

I got one of those ps100s from frys for 60 bucks as well. I tested it and lost the results somewhere but a caviar black is faster at almost everything.....

I did put it in my netbook since that thing gets thrown around like a chicago bears offensive lineman....runs great in there and is silent.

 

[cubeless]

I got one of those ps100s from frys for 60 bucks as well. I tested it and lost the results somewhere but a caviar black is faster at almost everything.....

I did put it in my netbook since that thing gets thrown around like a chicago bears offensive lineman....runs great in there and is silent.

ditto... cheap, and slow for a ssd, but no more headcrashes...

 

[wgoldfarb]

I am running an intel 80GB G2 for the OS, programs, and the occasional game (for specific "problem" games... most games I keep on spindle drive).

taltamir: I am still playing around trying to figure out what to place where. I have an Intel 80GB G2. I have all my OS and Apps on the SSD and my data on the spindle drive, but some things are not so obvious. Do you keep your pagefile on the SSD? Also, many programs keep data files on each user's "AppData" directory, which by default is on the OS drive -- the SSD. A good example of this is Outlook's PST file. Do you keep all those data files in the AppData directory, or did you move them to your spindle drive?

TIA!

 

[Fox5]

If booting is your main or only concern, I suggest using standby. No SSD will beat that and it comes for free!

If only standby always worked correctly....

I'm having a hell of time with my media center atm.

 

[railman]

I am running a strictly OS ssd system and it is fantastic. Keep in mind this is not for everyone and requries that one be a moderate to advanced user to accomplish but it is worth it. I set mine up for speed of OS boot times and application load times with an eye toward maintaining optimum performance over time. Here's the setup:

1 60GB OCZ SSD for OS (Win 7 x64)
1 60GB OCZ SSD for Applications (except MS Office)
1 60GB OCZ SSD for Scratch disk
2 1TB WD Caviar Blacks (1 partitioned for user profiles and certain apps - rest for storage and 1 for mass storage alone.

If there seems to be some interest in this from the members here I will post more details about how to do this.

 

[chansuresh]

If there seems to be some interest in this from the members here I will post more details about how to do this.

Railman - I am interested in your setup details. Where did you put the MS Office and Why? Also what user profiles / apps did you put on the WD HDD? What is the logic for separting the OS and Apps and User profiles?

Please comment if my proposed strategy for a new core i7 / W7 pc makes sense. I play no games, only video / photo editing and general home office use shared between me, wife, kids. I do regular imaging of OS/Apps using Norton Ghost and selective backup of data files. I understand that for SSDs apart from leaving free space 20% and Sector alignment (W7 clean install does this automatically) and TRIM, the partitions are logical and have no effect on performance. Hence the setup below is simply optimized for dual-boot, ease of organization and backup. I found a good article on dual-boot but it is not written for SSD here that shows how to share apps and program files between Ubuntu and W7 http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-harmony

I would appreciate any feedback with logic/reasons on my proposed setup.

SSD OCZ Agility 120gb w/TRIM support - 3 partitions
- 40gb for Windows7 & Core Windows Applications
- 15gb for Ubuntu
- 35gb for Storage / Data (Some frequently used files + High speed requirements like video/photo being worked for editing)
- 30gb unformatted free space (used for SSD performance optimization)
HDD - WD 1.5 TB - partitions from outer disk (faster) to inner disk (slower) arrangement
- 1000gb Storage / Media (Finished work video, photo, audio, media files
- 500gb Storage / Data (normal files, archives)

 

[Zap]

What is the logic for separting the OS and Apps and User profiles?

My thought about this is separating things allows for more speed because no matter how fast the SSD is, performance isn't infinite. Let's say Windows is doing something and you want to run an application. If it was on a separate HDD, performance would be faster. I believe this is why people use separate hard drives for a "scratch disk" for Photoshop.

 

[railman]

chansuresh,

I will put something together for you ASAP. I have just gotten home from an all night, 12 hour tour at work and need to get some rest. Will try to post something for you this evening it at all possible. Please check back.

Your proposed system would work OK I suppose. Explain how the 30gb free space would optimize performance? I would think that your setup would need to have trim run at least once per week or more depending on your usage, do you leave your PC on 24/7 and in idle mode when not in use?

railman

 

[Rubycon]

So my website is gone.

That is the explanation of the seemingly random, blank posts above. I'll try to re-host the images if anyone is interested.

 

[Old Hippie]

So my website is gone.

That is the explanation of the seemingly random, blank posts above. I'll try to re-host the images if anyone is interested.

The pics I'm interest in weren't on your site anyway.

I find the combo of beauty and brains irresistible and you have both in spades.

Merry Christmas Ruby!