How much will a SSD help my boot times?

[taltamir]

my work computer boots especially slow as it loads company control and spyware, it takes maybe 3 minutes to boot on the conservative side

there are atleast 10K office workers at this site, if there are 200 working days/year, we are talking something like 100,000 hours/year employee time wasted waiting for bootup

Set the computer's bios to "wake up event: timer" 5 minutes before your workday begins
And its not the bootup they are waiting on, its all that security software... i am willing to bet that this is less than 5% if the workhours that are wasted by that security setup.

 

[OS]

everyone has laptops, and the company policy is they can't be left out, wake on timer isn't practical.
if we had desktops i would just leave it running.

yeah i know most of the slow boot is the security stuff but i'm just saying a long boot up in general can be a massive waste of time/money/productivity especially when compounded over time or across many people.

 

[taltamir]

I am saying that technically its not boot. Its not the bootup process of the BIOS, its not even the OS loading itself, its company spyware initialization.
And company policy of making it all laptops, forbidding it from being left out, etc are preventing practical solutions.

I am not saying it isn't a loss of productivity; I totally agree with you on that. But in the end the company has deemed their spyware & policies more important than that productivity.

 

[exdeath]

Amazing the way new technology is perceived.

What I mean is:

People crazy over SSDs and they all the new rage... when you could have had that kind of instant performance years ago with Cheetah 15K/Raptor 10K RAID0.

Same with LCDs when they first came out... some knew what a LCD-like crisp perfectly sharp square non flickering image was with FD Trinitron a decade before the first desktop LCD, while the majority are only just now amazed and only know LCD > $50 CRT :awe:

 

[exdeath]

my work computer boots especially slow as it loads company control and spyware, it takes maybe 3 minutes to boot on the conservative side

there are atleast 10K office workers at this site, if there are 200 working days/year, we are talking something like 100,000 hours/year employee time wasted waiting for bootup

Only 3 minutes? Brand new laptops on my work site take over 15 mins for the HDD light to not be solid after power on... it's like trying to run a marathon in waste high water if you try to do anything or god forbid need to move large amounts of data in a hurry.

PGP WDE, antivirus, SCCM, other stuff I can't mention, etc...

Current computers but what good do the greatest electronics do when the hard disk performance has not really improved in 50 years. A CPU doubles, it goes from 200 GB/sec to 400 GB/sec. HDD performance doubles, it goes from 20 MB/sec to 40 MB/sec, yay smokin. And god, everyone want's laptops, even the BEST 2.5" laptop hard drives are slow piece of shit slugs.

And SSDs are stop gap at best. Oh we go from 50-100 MB/sec to 200 MB/sec... big deal, still lightyears away from the 20+ GB/sec the main bus can consume and the 100s of gigs of data people pack rat like hoarders... and of course the 100,000 write cycles until death part...

Can't wait for flash memory to not be profitable anymore so STT-MRAM can get some attention. I'd give my left nut for 0 wait state non volitile RAM with indefinite shelf life, that doesn't need power or periodic refreshing to maintan data, is immune from degradation and failure that plague SSD/HDD, RAM that is my 128GB of RAM and 128GB "hard disk" one and the same at the same time and could cause 100% CPU activity moving 100 gigs of files in 5 seconds (likewise with running a huge query or compiling a project). No loading, no booting... just go to RAM where the exe is stored and start executing it instantly in CPU addressible RAM/perm storage.

It's a sad state of affairs when a PC can't even keep up with a network anymore (over gigabit) because of the hard drive... Our technology as a species will remain in the stone age and not go to the next level until this happens. Our primative storage technology is KILLING us and holding back the real revolution our technology could be capable of.

CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR <apps not responding> CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR <cpu 99% idle> CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR <unpainted window stuck on screen for 5 minutes> CRRRRRRRRRRRRR <10 mins later HDD LED burns out after being brighter than a Christmas tree> CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR <can't move...> CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR <app you launched 15 minutes ago still not visible> CRRRRRRRRRRRR <600 days remaining> CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR <omfg antivirus decided to randomly start now of all times god fucking kill me now>

Yeah this happens on quad core laptops with 320 GB 7200 RPM drives and 4+ GB RAM... It's not a problem with choice of hardware, it's the limit of our current and primative technology.

Some of the smaller notebooks have SSDs, but they aren't performance oriented SSDs, they are still just as slow and are only there because a 1.8" mechanical HDD would be even worse... and PGP and such tends to kill SSDs quickly...

Anyone have any luck with a 2.5" VelociRaptor in a notebook internal drive bay? :evil:

Ok I feel much better now.

 

[DominionSeraph]

<snip>

Sounds like you need Windows 98.

 

[Slacker]

omg, having to restart my computer at work is a nightmare. It takes a full 20 minutes from clicking restart to being usable.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Are you seriously considering dumping all that upgrade money into an SSD for a 350$ dell from 2006?

I threw $100 at a 30GB SSD for my old Toshiba laptop (PATA drive). Made a huge difference in boot times and program load time plus it runs cooler and the battery life is much longer. The fan almost never kicks on whereas before it was running almost constantly.

Of course, I have almost no storage but I mainly use this laptop for web browsing and taking on trips for e-mail and such so a couple large thumb drives will easily accomodate the files I want to bring with me.

 

[taltamir]

Amazing the way new technology is perceived.

What I mean is:

People crazy over SSDs and they all the new rage... when you could have had that kind of instant performance years ago with Cheetah 15K/Raptor 10K RAID0.

No, you couldn't.
A typical modern SSD is 2x the sequential read and write of the fastest spindle drives, and more than 100x the random read and write speed (due to access time difference).
RAID0 of raptors or the like will not even come close to that. From what I have seen RAID0 does not even affect random read/writes at all; only doubles sequential writes/reads.

Its not that random reads and random writes are more important then sequential; its just that 100x improvement in a single product is huge and very very noticeable.

 

[Weenoman]

No, you couldn't.
A typical modern SSD is 2x the sequential read and write of the fastest spindle drives, and more than 100x the random read and write speed (due to access time difference).
RAID0 will of raptors or the like will not even come close to that. From what I have seen RAID0 does not even affect random read/writes at all; only doubles sequential writes/reads.

Its not that random reads and random writes are more important then sequential; its just that 100x improvement in a single product is huge and very very noticeable.

And I thought I was gonna be the first to tell him.

 

[ElFenix]

What she said, are you sure you don't mean "sleep"?
Sleep mode (S3 at least) "pauses" computations, keeps everything on ram, and shuts down all other components of the PC. The CPU is off, the GPU is off, their fans are off, the HDD is off... the RAM is on and keeps your data. If there is a power outage the data in the ram is lost.
Windows 7 solves this with hybrid sleep, it creates a hibernate file and then suspends to ram. If power is terminated it will restore from hibernate on next boot as if nothing happened, I tested it to verify it works correctly.

so sleep writes to my SSD as well? sonuva D:

 

[exdeath]

No, you couldn't.
A typical modern SSD is 2x the sequential read and write of the fastest spindle drives, and more than 100x the random read and write speed (due to access time difference).
RAID0 of raptors or the like will not even come close to that. From what I have seen RAID0 does not even affect random read/writes at all; only doubles sequential writes/reads.

Its not that random reads and random writes are more important then sequential; its just that 100x improvement in a single product is huge and very very noticeable.

Ok wise guy let me put it a different way: SSD is far far less of a revolutionary jump in performance for anyone already used to the responsiveness of a Cheetah or Raptor RAID since the first generation of those drives. Most people who rant and rave about SSDs only know what its like compared to their 40 MB/sec 5000000 ms seek time valueware saturated Compaqs.

 

[taltamir]

so sleep writes to my SSD as well? sonuva D:

Eh, its really not a big deal, the lifespan effect of that is inconsequential and the benefits are definitely there; I like hybrid sleep.

But if you disabled hibernate mode then "hybrid sleep" will be disabled too I think.
Even if not, you can explicitly disable hybrid sleep in your power settings option.

 

[taltamir]

Ok wise guy

Uncalled for.

let me put it a different way: SSD is far far less of a revolutionary jump in performance for anyone already used to the responsiveness of a Cheetah or Raptor RAID since the first generation of those drives.

Putting it a different way doesn't make it true. It is still false. I fully understood exactly what you said but you simply happen to be wrong, it might shock and awe you to learn that if someone disagrees with you it does not automatically mean that they misunderstood.

The cheeta (much faster than the raptor): http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_cheetah_15k_5.pdf
Average Read/Write (ms) 3.5/4.0
Raptors claim ~7 (depending on model), regular drives typically as bad as 12ms.
When performing random 4k reads or writes the seek time is the biggest determinant of your speed. Those drives crawl to a halt when doing that. SSDs do not, they do so in a blazing fast manner (except first gen jmicron, those could get as high as 2000 ms seek time which caused the noticable "stutter")
3.5/4 is still not even remotely comparable to a good SSD.
The reason I got my raptor in the first place? it was only 2/3 the seek time of a regular drive. This is what people were raving and ranting about raptors for... for their amazingly fast seek time compared to regular drives

Most people who rant and rave about SSDs only know what its like compared to their 40 MB/sec 5000000 ms seek time Compaqs.

1. I used raptors before I used SSD.
2. You have no idea about what most people are
3. Modern spindle drives get clock at ~120MB/s seqential, faster than a raptor (due to higher density). Even at the prime raptors were only slightly faster in sequential performance.
4. Modern drives claim about 12ms (used to as low as 8ms claimed btw). 5000000 ms = 5000 seconds = 83.3 minutes.
If that was the case then the computer will appear frozen for an hour and 23 minutes every time it tried to access the drive and will never accomplish anything.

But the core of your argument is "everyone who disagrees with me is doing so because they have never used a premium spindle drive", and that is just total BS.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2808/4

Look at this graph man, just LOOK at it.
WD VelociRaptor scores a 0.68MB/s on random reads
The intel G2? 58.5MB/s

Any human would be able to notice a 86x improvement to their speed.
And it would be much higher for a regular spindle drive, like a caviar blue.

Look at the TESTED read latency. The raptors claims 7ms IIRC but they tested at 17.3 ms. the intel G2 claim under 0.1 but tested at 0.2, the OCZ summit (slowest SSD in that test) 0.473.
Naturally not all SSDs are the same, some are worse then others. Jmicron original SSD get tested at ~2000ms which is just pathetic.
But your average good SSD (intel G2, C300, sandforce, inidilinx) gets about 100x the speed of a spindle drive in random performance.

Compaqs

Compaq does not make drives, the company that assembled your computer from readily available parts has absolutely nothing to do with the speed of your HDD. Whether it is a dell, compaq, HP, or apple has no bearing on your speed; and those companies do offer SSDs nowadays.
But it does show your unbridled contempt to others and your belief that everyone is stupider and more ignorant then you. Please do not look down on everyone else, they might surprise you.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Ok wise guy let me put it a different way: SSD is far far less of a revolutionary jump in performance for anyone already used to the responsiveness of a Cheetah or Raptor RAID since the first generation of those drives. Most people who rant and rave about SSDs only know what its like compared to their 40 MB/sec 5000000 ms seek time valueware saturated Compaqs.

I've used Raptors and there is no comparison as far as modern SSD's are concerned. SSD's are much much faster.

 

[Rubycon]

Amazing the way new technology is perceived.

What I mean is:

People crazy over SSDs and they all the new rage... when you could have had that kind of instant performance years ago with Cheetah 15K/Raptor 10K RAID0.

I went from 10 disk 15K RAID0 to 4 disk SSD RAID0 and the difference was night and day. Performance is not instant on either and never will be. You can approach instant but the bar is constantly moving away...

 

[Matt_Stevens]

Had some horrible install issues today with my new system and an Intel 120GB SSD, but no doubt it is faster than any hard drive I have ever owned and faster than the raptors I have experienced on other people's PC's. Of course, I have much to learn and gotta read up on tweaking.

 

[john3850]

What she said, are you sure you don't mean "sleep"?
Sleep mode (S3 at least) "pauses" computations, keeps everything on ram, and shuts down all other components of the PC. The CPU is off, the GPU is off, their fans are off, the HDD is off... the RAM is on and keeps your data. If there is a power outage the data in the ram is lost.
Windows 7 solves this with hybrid sleep, it creates a hibernate file and then suspends to ram. If power is terminated it will restore from hibernate on next boot as if nothing happened, I tested it to verify it works correctly.

Meant sleep thanks

 

[Koing]

My company shuts down all the pc's over the weekend...I never shut down my pc during the week. It's not crashed on me in 3.5months so far?! Can't say the same for notes!

Koing

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

if you're looking to buy a SSD, you'll reap the most form your purchase on a more contemporary system. Depends on accompanying hardware in the system too- my newer laptop with a 'fast boot' option boots win7x64Pro so quickly the 4 orbs don't even touch- the slowest thing is my clicking on the user thumb and putting in the password. The laptop is running i5 e/ 4gb ddr3. I was expecting similar boot cuts on my desktop; c2d w/ 8 gb ddr2. But my dtv-tuner and its associated ir driver make for a hdd-length boot with the ssd. In my case, and in general I agree with the steady state users: it's the readily available data that makes it worthwhile.

If you're running a system with DDR... unless you have 4gb @ 500+MHz, gfx a gen or 2 away, and a dual (physical) core processor @ 2+GHz, and Windows 7... get a newer system and wait to see if your habits outstrip the system in time.

A system with OCZ's RevoDrive ssd can only boot if the motherboard supports pcie bootable... doesn't support TRIM and likely won't for the foreseeable time...

 

[exdeath]

Uncalled for.


Putting it a different way doesn't make it true. It is still false. I fully understood exactly what you said but you simply happen to be wrong, it might shock and awe you to learn that if someone disagrees with you it does not automatically mean that they misunderstood.

The cheeta (much faster than the raptor): http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_cheetah_15k_5.pdf
Average Read/Write (ms) 3.5/4.0
Raptors claim ~7 (depending on model), regular drives typically as bad as 12ms.
When performing random 4k reads or writes the seek time is the biggest determinant of your speed. Those drives crawl to a halt when doing that. SSDs do not, they do so in a blazing fast manner (except first gen jmicron, those could get as high as 2000 ms seek time which caused the noticable "stutter")
3.5/4 is still not even remotely comparable to a good SSD.
The reason I got my raptor in the first place? it was only 2/3 the seek time of a regular drive. This is what people were raving and ranting about raptors for... for their amazingly fast seek time compared to regular drives


1. I used raptors before I used SSD.
2. You have no idea about what most people are
3. Modern spindle drives get clock at ~120MB/s seqential, faster than a raptor (due to higher density). Even at the prime raptors were only slightly faster in sequential performance.
4. Modern drives claim about 12ms (used to as low as 8ms claimed btw). 5000000 ms = 5000 seconds = 83.3 minutes.
If that was the case then the computer will appear frozen for an hour and 23 minutes every time it tried to access the drive and will never accomplish anything.

But the core of your argument is "everyone who disagrees with me is doing so because they have never used a premium spindle drive", and that is just total BS.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2808/4

Look at this graph man, just LOOK at it.
WD VelociRaptor scores a 0.68MB/s on random reads
The intel G2? 58.5MB/s

Any human would be able to notice a 86x improvement to their speed.
And it would be much higher for a regular spindle drive, like a caviar blue.

Look at the TESTED read latency. The raptors claims 7ms IIRC but they tested at 17.3 ms. the intel G2 claim under 0.1 but tested at 0.2, the OCZ summit (slowest SSD in that test) 0.473.
Naturally not all SSDs are the same, some are worse then others. Jmicron original SSD get tested at ~2000ms which is just pathetic.
But your average good SSD (intel G2, C300, sandforce, inidilinx) gets about 100x the speed of a spindle drive in random performance.


Compaq does not make drives, the company that assembled your computer from readily available parts has absolutely nothing to do with the speed of your HDD. Whether it is a dell, compaq, HP, or apple has no bearing on your speed; and those companies do offer SSDs nowadays.
But it does show your unbridled contempt to others and your belief that everyone is stupider and more ignorant then you. Please do not look down on everyone else, they might surprise you.

You did all that for me? :wub:

[ (SSD - Raptor) < (SSD - some random shitty HDD) ] == TRUE

That's all I was saying, and no, it's not false. See the part I bolded? That's you saying so as well. I never said HHD > SSD. I said, in more or less words, that the jump in performance in daily use on a PC is less dramatic coming from the highest level of HDD performance rather than a run of the mill piece of shit.

And seriously? The 5,000,000 ms thing?

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&...=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=a50d8bbb4089c98a

 

[taltamir]

you said you don't get what the ranting and raving is about; that the only people who care about SSD didn't use a raptor or a cheeta.
I went from a raptor to an intel G2, I noticed the 86x improvement. I noticed it so hard that I am "ranting and raving"

 

[exdeath]

My company shuts down all the pc's over the weekend...I never shut down my pc during the week. It's not crashed on me in 3.5months so far?! Can't say the same for notes!

Koing

Notes is the most overweight piece of crap I've ever had the displeasure of working with. If you need the shortest distance between two lines, Notes is 3 laps around the planet visiting every country along the way out of geographical order.

I totally enjoy launching 2 GB worth of virtualized java environment garbage spread around in 6,000 fragmented files and beating my work PC HDD to death with a sledge hammer.... to... read a 562 byte email message :awe:

 

[exdeath]

you said you don't get what the ranting and raving is about; that the only people who care about SSD didn't use a raptor or a cheeta.
I went from a raptor to an intel G2, I noticed the 86x improvement. I noticed it so hard that I am "ranting and raving"

Here is where I'm coming from, I'll use something that the average end user and consumer can understand and relate to: boot time.

Someone has a old laptop that takes 30 mins to fully boot, that is, 30 mins to reasonably expect to be able to do something as simple as right click My Computer and get a context menu in a reasonable amount of time, say, 1 second, rather than nothing happening due to disk IO. Or more simply put, the time for the HDD light to finally go out and stop being lit up brighter than the sun.

They get a new computer with a SSD (not even a performance oriented one, just a bottom rung 1.8" SSD). Machine takes 30 seconds to fully boot. User about to have a heart attack it's such a revelation.

I come home to my oldest PC that is 7 years old with mechanical hard drives and boot up from POST to shell in <= 15 seconds and HDD light goes DEAD the instant the desktop appears. It's DONE. Granted I'm not running anti virus and 100 running processes on startup and so on, but point remains, my example user has never experienced less than 60 seconds boot until SSD and attributes performance to the SSD, yet I had it 7 years ago long before SSDs. Both a combination of environment optimization and hardware yes, but primarily possible because they were the highest performing drives on the planet at the time. At the same time I was using this, the example user had... I don't even want to know, what drives were the cheap ass OEMs using at the time, 40 MB/s Maxtor drives with seek time slower than my current optical drives? (Quantum Bigfoot epitomizes OEMs cheaping out on the most important component in a PC...)

(disclaimer: ok it only FEELS that slow, before you take me seriously and start posting whitepapers of HDDs and DVD drives and prove to me that the slowest HDD are 100x faster seek time than an avg DVD ROM and completely miss my exageration again...).

Get it yet? Yeah SSDs are awesome as hell, no lie there (at least until the cells fry themselves). But they aren't quite the same magnitude of revelation if you didn't have a piece of junk previously and it's the first time you get a decent computer.

Yeah load all the shit my example user has on my PC and it might make my HDD system take 60 seconds to boot instead of 15 while his SSD does it in 30 seconds... both are still a FAR CRY from the 30 mins his old HDD system took for the disk light to finally turn off with the slowest possible HDD the OEM managed to stuff in there to save 4 cents per unit.

See REAL WORLD example, not whitepaper numbers and benchmarks.

 

[exdeath]

Which brings me to the real source of my griping: Why do OEMs ignore HDD performance in the mainstream segment and insist on using the slowest cheapest hard drives they can possibly find when it arguably is the #1 noticeable performance aspect to a non gaming office and web user?