Non-SSD Users, What's Your Boot drive?

[BarkingGhostar]

Unless I start anew, I am continuing to use a 2.5 year old Gigabyte motherboard. I originally had a pair of WDC 160GB drives in a mirror RAID (Intel Matrix Storage array), but after a year one of the drives started to fail.

This was a wife's PC until about a year and a half ago when I took it over (she got a 27" iMac) and I threw in a couple of older 500GB WDC drives, but it looks like one of them will fail and they are noisy and slow.

So, I am looking for a small capacity SATA2 drive pair, but I'm staying away from WDC Green drives. What are you using for your bootable(s)? BTW, I am using external USB3 WDC MyBooks for data, backup, etc.

 

[Eug]

In my Windows desktop, I'm just using a single 640 GB HD circa 2010. Works fine, and it's fast enough for this machine, esp. since I have 8 GB RAM in it, and Windows 7 (which caches well).

However, since you have to buy new hardware anyway, I don't understand why you are going to spend money on TWO small HDs for your boot drive. Personally I would just buy a 128 GB SSD in your situation and use the other existing drive as a data drive, and then use your USB 3 drive as a backup for everything.

 

[Cerb]

Just get a WD10EZEX, though I also largely agree with Eug, as well.

 

[Charlie98]

Personally I would just buy a 128 GB SSD in your situation and use the other existing drive as a data drive, and then use your USB 3 drive as a backup for everything.

I would tend to agree with this. How much data are we talking here? My thought (put into practice recently) is to just get a large enough SSD for everything and call it a day. Use the old HDD as media or bulk file storage, back everything up with your external.

Just because you have a SATA2 system doesn't mean you can't use SATA3 parts, you won't benefit from the speed, but you will benefit from the newer technology.

 

[Essence_of_War]

What's the problem with getting an SSD, exactly?

If you only have sata2 ports, although you won't get the full R/W performance of a good SSD, you'll still get significantly improved performance and you'll still benefit dramatically from the (essentially) 0 seek times.

The biggest difference is probably between no-ssd, and any-ssd. I would wager that no one could tell, without benchmarking programs, that you're running an SSD on sata2 ports only.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Sorry folks, I thought this three year old motherboard (its a rev 1) wasn't going to work to take advantage of an SSD benefit.

Also, can this work within an existing mirror setup? If not, that means reinstalling a bunch of apps, and an reactivating them.

By replacing one drive at a time in the existing mirror, I can rebuild onto the new drive and W7 and the apps are clueless as it is transparent to them.

 

[cbn]

Sorry folks, I thought this three year old motherboard (its a rev 1) wasn't going to work to take advantage of an SSD benefit.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-sata-3gbps,3469.html

^^^^ An article where they tested SATA 6 Gbps SSDs on SATA 3 Gbps ports.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

I just slapped one of the new Seagate SSHD's (1TB) into my home file server. It's wicked slow compared to the crummy Vertex 2 50GB I had in there before, but I needed some more space and the case is full of 3.5" drives. Hopefully it will get faster, as advertised, as I use it a more.

 

[Eug]

I just slapped one of the new Seagate SSHD's (1TB) into my home file server. It's wicked slow compared to the crummy Vertex 2 50GB I had in there before, but I needed some more space and the case is full of 3.5" drives. Hopefully it will get faster, as advertised, as I use it a more.

File server?

It's probably gonna stay slow for file serving, unless it's serving the same relatively small files over and over again. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that drive only has 8 GB flash. But I wonder if it won't even be fast serving up small files. Anand suggests these drives are tuned to speed up stuff within the first minute of power-on, which basically means they're tuned to speed up boots. If that's the case, I'm not sure I understand the point of these really, at least for me, since I don't boot that often.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-sata-3gbps,3469.html

^^^^ An article where they tested SATA 6 Gbps SSDs on SATA 3 Gbps ports.

So, are you saying the SSD is transparent to the host controller such that I can simply plug and play, including in an Intel Matrix Array?

 

[Cerb]

So, are you saying the SSD is transparent to the host controller such that I can simply plug and play, including in an Intel Matrix Array?

Yes, if you are using Windows 7 or 8. XP or Vista may need additional tweaking. The hardware will work just like a HDD, and Windows 7 or newer will have different default background service behaviors, and align the install partition, automatically.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

File server?

It's probably gonna stay slow for file serving, unless it's serving the same relatively small files over and over again. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that drive only has 8 GB flash. But I wonder if it won't even be fast serving up small files. Anand suggests these drives are tuned to speed up stuff within the first minute of power-on, which basically means they're tuned to speed up boots. If that's the case, I'm not sure I understand the point of these really, at least for me, since I don't boot that often.

Well, it's just a home file server. The rest of the drives are 5400 RPM too, so I'm not looking for blazing speeds with my media files. Mostly I just want it to be reasonably responsive when I have to reboot and perform the few simple tasks I use the machine for - VNCing in to tinker, perform maintenance, download files, etc.

 

[BFG10K]

When I still ran spindles for my OS I used a Hitachi, WD Black and a VelociRaptor at various times. If you’re using an HDD for an OS drive, use the one with the lowest random access times.

Obviously the Raptor felt the snappiest there given its 6.8ms average score, which is 2 to 3 times lower than the other two.

But really, just buy a small SSD for the OS. Even a 32GB can fit just Windows 7 on it and still have plenty to spare.

 

[Eug]

32 GB is too small, as you can' install anything else on it, which means you can't get the benefit of SSD for your applications.

I'd consider 60 GB bare minimum, but more recommended.

 

[jaqie]

First of all, you can actually image your current OS install to an image file then back onto another single drive of any kind with the free version of macrium reflect which works through windows VSS service - this is the most sure and pain-free way to preserve an OS install onto new drive hardware. Less sure but more quick and easy is booting to a linux LiveCD install which has the hard drive tools in it, something like the install disc for linux mint would be perfect, as it is the full OS on CD which allows you to install it and/or do anything else you can with mint (almost, it's on a cd not a hdd so no installing huge apps to the liveOS while running)... you can image your mirrored OS install onto another drive, if certain technical things are true (no way to tell for sure without trying if that will work on your raid install)...

That having been said, if you insist on an HDD get a 1TB or more and partition like 100GB of it for your OS use, this will keep the seek times to a tiny portion of the drive near the outer edges of the platters, keeping seek times way lower than the drive's average seek advertised, and will also have really nice throughput numbers because of it being on the fastest spinning section of the disk. You can then use the rest for mass storage, but that causes the performance of the OS partition to be sacrificed, so I would only do this if you use it for movies 'n stuff.

Before I got an SSD (ocz agility 3 60gb) I used to do this and the performance was quite nice for an HDD, far more than you would imagine... because the arial density on a 1TB+ drive is so high.

But as others have said, any half decent SSD will blow HDDs away in performance, even with an older sata2 motherboard. Check your bios or manual to see if it supports running in AHCI mode, if it does it's got what's needed to run the SSD well. non AHCI mode isn't quite so nice, but does work, and is still faster than HDDs.

 

[mikeymikec]

1x Seagate 7200.12 500GB.

 

[Eug]

First of all, you can actually image your current OS install to an image file then back onto another single drive of any kind with the free version of macrium reflect which works through windows VSS service - this is the most sure and pain-free way to preserve an OS install onto new drive hardware. Less sure but more quick and easy is booting to a linux LiveCD install which has the hard drive tools in it, something like the install disc for linux mint would be perfect, as it is the full OS on CD which allows you to install it and/or do anything else you can with mint (almost, it's on a cd not a hdd so no installing huge apps to the liveOS while running)... you can image your mirrored OS install onto another drive, if certain technical things are true (no way to tell for sure without trying if that will work on your raid install)...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but both methods would result in an SSD with an incorrect drive alignment.

However, even then, it'd still be blazingly fast in comparison to a single regular platter drive.

You can fix the drive alignment after the fact, but you'd risk screwing up the install.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I'm curious as to how the system would react if I remove one of the HDD's from the array and add the SSD in its place. If the Intel Matrix Array is blind to what is actually plugged in, then it should rebuild the array, and fast compared to HDD rebuilds.

My last concern was in the IMA rebuild process. The original drives were 160GB and the current ones are 500GB. Strangely, the array seemed to expand the filesystem, but this must have been because W7 was configured to use the complete disk.

I wonder what would happen if I now insert something smaller (120/128GB SSD). Time to backup, W7 backup, and experiment.

 

[tweakboy]

When you finally upgrade to SSD, you will see what youve been missing all this time.

 

[jaqie]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but both methods would result in an SSD with an incorrect drive alignment.

However, even then, it'd still be blazingly fast in comparison to a single regular platter drive.

You can fix the drive alignment after the fact, but you'd risk screwing up the install.

There are alignment tools, and that is also what backup is for... it's also why I suggest the reflect method so they will have a complete hard drive image in case something goes wrong immediately. The original disks and data are still there with both methods, too!

 

[lagokc]

Anyone else remember when booting off a live CD meant actually booting off an optical CD-rom?

 

[Eug]

There are alignment tools, and that is also what backup is for... it's also why I suggest the reflect method so they will have a complete hard drive image in case something goes wrong immediately. The original disks and data are still there with both methods, too!

Well, that was my point. The last time I did an after-the-fact alignment, it screwed up my Windows 7 install. I had everything important backed up, but in the end I didn't bother doing the restore, and instead just re-installed Windows 7 so that it was a clean install with an SSD-appropriate alignment.

 

[jaqie]

Anyone else remember when booting off a live CD meant actually booting off an optical CD-rom?

since when does it mean something else?