In lieu of SSD, what is next "best" substitute to speed up system?

[DualMonitors]

Hi All:

Thanks for the excellent Anandtech review of the OCZ and Intel SSD's! It was highly educational and a huge hassle/money saver as we need not make the mistake to learn! Kudos, Anandtech, yet again!

In lieu of the costly SLC SSD's or the Intel SSD's (nearly as costly but a tad less so), what might be the "next best" thing? I was told that I should get a Western Digital WD6400AAKS Hard drive which, apparently, if we ONLY use the outer sectors, will be extremely fast, according to the person who told me about this.

are there other options which will: speed up Vista 32 bit boot up time, as well as, on an over all level, speed up the performance of my system?

fyi: currently, i'm using 2 Seagate 500gb hard drives "the .10 version" and used Acronis to form different drives on those two hard disk drives.

Vista 32 bit Ultimate, 4gb Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 SDRAM, Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard, Intel C2D E6600 Conroe 2.4ghz 775, EVGA 8800 GTS 640mb.

thx all, in advance.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Buy 8GB of RAM. It won't speed up boot time but it'll be the fastest possible 4GBy of disk cache you can buy for $44 or whatever once the system is booted. All you care about is if the applications / data you use at the moment are instantly accessible, and more RAM does that. If the application is reading / writing many many gigabytes back and forth to storage, of course SSD helps that, but a good new model cheap disc drive gives 50-120MBy/second sustained read/write performance, so you have to ask yourself what applications are going to benefit by a lot by getting something much faster than that? Not many. You can double that rate with a RAID. If you're doing stuff for which that is STILL too slow, i.e. continuous data access, I have to wonder if SSD is appropriate anyway -- it'll wear out FAST if you're writing to it that much, so this would basically have to be a READ-ONLY or READ-MOSTLY application of massive sustained data access to merit you being SUPER concerned about speed lacking over what 8GB RAM + 2 decent RAIDed discs will give you...

 

[DualMonitors]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
Buy 8GB of RAM. It won't speed up boot time but it'll be the fastest possible 4GBy of disk cache you can buy for $44 or whatever once the system is booted. All you care about is if the applications / data you use at the moment are instantly accessible, and more RAM does that. If the application is reading / writing many many gigabytes back and forth to storage, of course SSD helps that, but a good new model cheap disc drive gives 50-120MBy/second sustained read/write performance, so you have to ask yourself what applications are going to benefit by a lot by getting something much faster than that? Not many. You can double that rate with a RAID. If you're doing stuff for which that is STILL too slow, i.e. continuous data access, I have to wonder if SSD is appropriate anyway -- it'll wear out FAST if you're writing to it that much, so this would basically have to be a READ-ONLY or READ-MOSTLY application of massive sustained data access to merit you being SUPER concerned about speed lacking over what 8GB RAM + 2 decent RAIDed discs will give you...

==============================================

Huh? i must be missing something. why would you tell me to buy 8gb of ram when i have Vista 32-bit? vista 32 bit only can address 3gb of ram, maybe around 3.2gb or ram, so even 4gb has a wastage of around 1gb!

i must be really dense and not following something.

may i ask if someone can pitch in and explain this to me? s l o w l y, please? thx.

 

[Excelsior]

Uh, just get the extra ram and install 64bit Vista. Any reason you might be against it? Your license is valid for 64bit as well.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Exactly. Since you're obviously looking for an upgrade, I thought it was a fair consideration in your quest for performance. Most non-OEM Vista keys can work with either 32 or 64 so the upgrade is cheap/free for many. DDR2 RAM is so cheap that it is almost silly not to get the maximum if you're worried about performance.

Only down-sides are needing to backup & reinstall to go from 32 -> 64.

And wait about a year at which point THEN you'll be able to get some really fast / fairly large SSD for cheap if you still want to do that. Now isn't the time IMHO (for use as an OS + applications drive).

Originally posted by: Excelsior
Uh, just get the extra ram and install 64bit Vista. Any reason you might be against it? Your license is valid for 64bit as well.

 

[DualMonitors]

thx for the various replies.

considering how much i've heard various friends have miscellaneous issues with their vista 64, i would politely decline in the 32 to 64. they all seem to run into various sorts of incompatibilities, sometimes at odd moments, frequently very inconvenient. most of them eventually threw their hands up and REVERTED BACK to 32!! i'm sure that you guys have had better experience, but i'd politely decline for the moment.

on the other hand, what about getting a really fast hard drive (any recommendations, please?) and only using the outside sector and using it only for the OS "Vista C:" drive? would that work well?

thx in advance.

 

[Phynaz]

Make sure your page file is not on your boot drive.

 

[taltamir]

just installing 64bit vista, even without the extra ram, will make it a lot faster, since a lot of the OS processes would work in 64bit mode and run faster.
Also you can run 64bit software.
I benchmarked 7z compression to be 27% faster using the 64bit version compared to the 32bit version...

AND get 8GB of ram...

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: Excelsior
Uh, just get the extra ram and install 64bit Vista. Any reason you might be against it? Your license is valid for 64bit as well.

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
Exactly. Since you're obviously looking for an upgrade, I thought it was a fair consideration in your quest for performance. Most non-OEM Vista keys can work with either 32 or 64 so the upgrade is cheap/free for many. DDR2 RAM is so cheap that it is almost silly not to get the maximum if you're worried about performance.

I have a Dell E521 with Vista Home Premium. I know you said non-OEM Vista keys, but any chance the upgrade to 64-bit is free for me? How can I tell?

 

[DualMonitors]

Originally posted by: Phynaz
Make sure your page file is not on your boot drive.

that's a good idea and i had thought about it before so it is on my 2nd hard drive (non boot drive) and i took the beginning sector for "page files".

furthermore, i have 4gb of ram so it appears that the 4gb is rarely, if ever, fully used.

that's why it's hard for me to believe that much more ram would do that much more good - i don't even believe that the page files are used that much now with 4gb of ram. i had 2 gb or ram for a short while though at that time, i had a super fast Ready Boost usb thumb drive (that drive is no longer available anymore - the Buffalo thumb drives, one series is super fast but there were some issues with sandisk so they withdrew it from the US market entirely). Now, with 4gb of ram, it really seems like it does not matter whether or not i have the Ready Boost anymore since it rarely, if ever, fully utilized the entire 4gb of ram.

 

[taltamir]

that is because ram used by vista's caching mechanisms is not listed as "used" ram.
Used ram only lists ram being used by active programs at the moment.

Firstly, just putting in more ram will cause programs to use more, because they have "conservation" mechanisms that prevent them from using all that they could (to leave some for other programs). Especially OS components do that. So as you increase ram, the amount of it used will increase without making any other changes. Further. If the ram reaches 100% use then you start paging, at which point performance drops by orders of magnitude. That should never ever be allowed to happen. You can tell it happens because the system comes to a screeching halt.

(in testing 7z compression, if you increase the size of the dictionary enough so that you run out of ram your HDD starts thrasing and the time to finish jumps to thousands of days... and stays there even if you let it run for a couple of hours...)

Even if you have enough ram to never start thrashing the HDD, you can still benefit from extra ram ONLY in windows vista, due to its ability to cache often used programs into unused ram.

 

[RebateMonger]

The best way to improve your boot speed is to use the much-improved "Sleep" mode in Vista and don't bother turning your PC off. It'll save tons of time by bringing your PC back in the same state it was in when you left, and the power usage is VERY little.

 

[QuixoticOne]

I'm a little confused about DELL OEM Vista 32 license keys working with & activating various Vista 64 versions.

a) some people say Dell sent them either initially with purchase of a system with Vista 32 or on special request a Vista 64 install CD for it that they could optionally use. If Dell sends it to / sells it to you for your particular system I'm pretty sure it would activate though they may not officially "support" (as in Dell Tech Support) using Vista 64 on that system. If you can get one free / cheap from Dell for your model of PC, that's a good and pretty certain option.

b) Almost everyone has told me that you CANNOT use the Microsoft "order 64 bit Vista install media" site to get cheap ($10 or so shipped cost) Vista 64 media if you have an OEM key. It asks for your current Vista 32 key in the order process. If you have a retail version it is generally no problem to get. If you have an OEM version it generally seems not to work. A few people, though, say it has worked for them with various OEM keys.. doesn't hurt to try, it won't cost you anything if it doesn't take your order:
http://www.microsoft.com/windo...rdermedia/default.mspx

c) If you can borrow or download or whatever a Vista 64 install CD either retail or OEM you can always just try to use it with your key. If Microsoft lets you activate it either online or on the phone then it must be OK to do since they clearly know your key's validity and hardware configuration versus the OS version at the time of the activation request. Of course have a full drive image backup of your current V32 system first since it MAY NOT WORK. People tell conflicting stories.

Here's a whole thread on the issue of getting Vista 64 if you have OEM Vista 32... Make your own conclusions; there is a LOT of conflicting information there. nerp (iirc) seems to have stated pretty definitively that in his experience existing Vista 32 OEM keys you already have WILL activate a Vista 64 disc installation assuming you can get your hands on any Vista 64 install disc. Ok. I'll believe that until someone says otherwise; most people are just unable to even get a Vista 64 install disc at a reasonable price to even try. I still wonder if it matters what KIND of OEM V32 key you have and if it is a V64 retail disc vs Microsoft made OEM disc vs other OEM (e.g. DELL, HP,...) OEM disc.
YMMV.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=34&threadid=2218025

nerp
Golden Member

No.

There is only one Vista DVD. Just one.

OEM keys can install both x64 and 32 as well as retail on the same dvd. All dvds are the same. I own both retail and OEM keys, both 32 and 64 bit and they're interchangable. I've done it several times.

The only roadblock is MS's stance on sending you a DVD on the 64 bit media order form. THAT requires a retail key.

I found this article interesting about the different versions of Vista out there at the time SP1 came out; you may find it interesting too:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/...iso-image-via-torrent/

Originally posted by: magreen

Originally posted by: Excelsior
Uh, just get the extra ram and install 64bit Vista. Any reason you might be against it? Your license is valid for 64bit as well.

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
Exactly. Since you're obviously looking for an upgrade, I thought it was a fair consideration in your quest for performance. Most non-OEM Vista keys can work with either 32 or 64 so the upgrade is cheap/free for many. DDR2 RAM is so cheap that it is almost silly not to get the maximum if you're worried about performance.

I have a Dell E521 with Vista Home Premium. I know you said non-OEM Vista keys, but any chance the upgrade to 64-bit is free for me? How can I tell?

 

[DualMonitors]

may i kindly ask if the discussion vis-a-vis Vista "keys" and disks ought to be a separate thread from this one which is regarding SSD's?

thank you for your consideration.

 

[taltamir]

what ssd discussion? this thread is titled "In lieu of SSD, what is next "best" substitute to speed up system? " - Which quite clearly states that SSD is NOT an option, and thus asking what IS an option... Well, one such "best substitutes" is a vista 64bit (from 32bit) upgrade.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: DualMonitors
are there other options which will: speed up Vista 32 bit boot up time, as well as, on an over all level, speed up the performance of my system?

ZERO COST: Format HDD, fresh Windows install, disable anything unnecessary, don't install anything that runs in background or on startup (like antivirus).

CHEAPER THAN SLC SSD: Buy a VelociRaptor 150GB, then do a fresh Windows install, disable anything unnecessary, don't install anything that runs in background or on startup (like antivirus).

 

[taltamir]

I'd like to add to what zap said...
Zero cost: switch to 64bit vista. (your license is good for both)
Cheaper then SSD or Velociraptor: add ram.