SSD question

[rommie]

It seems like it's popular now to use a solid state drive as your C: drive. However, I install almost all of my programs (not games) to c. I also frequently install/uninstall programs, and I hear that a SSD has limited write cycles. Is a SSD a good idea for using programs, as well?

[kayson]

It seems like it's popular now to use a solid state drive as your C: drive. However, I install almost all of my programs (not games) to c. I also frequently install/uninstall programs, and I hear that a SSD has limited write cycles. Is a SSD a good idea for using programs, as well?

Most people install their operating system and programs/games on their SSD. They do have limited write cycles, but the controller are designed with that in mind. Meaning - it will write to every single flash cell in the drive before writing to one twice. So you don't have anything to worry about, and you will see improvements in loading your programs since SSD's have such low access times.

[ChanceCoats123]

^^^ +1. And the nice thing about SSD's is that even though they write data all over the place to avoid twice writing, you don't see a speed degradation like on a platter drive since there is no arm to move.

But I agree with kayson. I'm using a 60gb Vertex for my OS and it's just fine.

[visbits]

Don't let people tell you that SSD have limited write cycles, its a bunch of non sense. You can MAYBE wear a drive out in 5-6 years if you use it as a page file or something silly, I think last I read you are good for 10,000,000 writes per sector? You will never write that much data to your disk even if you are using it for page file only. Most people will keep their SSD for 1-2 years then upgrade as the bigger capacity disk get cheaper. Just like regular hard drives you should keep a backup of your data just in case something does happen.

Regardless I'm tired of all the people trying to preach that you can't use your drive for any thing to write intensive.. Intel and other manufactures didn't design these to not be used people.. I'm running 2 x25-m G1 80gb in raid 0 and have been for the past 11 months without any problems and they get hammered on with read/writes and virtual machines all day. I have only had the "studdering" video problem once and that was with less than 10gb free on the array. At any thing over 15GB free the issue resolves itself. I've done hardly any preventative maintenance to these as well, I don't use the "free space cleaner" thing that everyone preaches either.

HD Tune results for my drives (While Virtual Machines are still running)

http://hostthenpost.org/uploads/e37bdba0f88b28ee69f0a2b51246a385.png

[Evilsizer]

also to add the larger the drive is (ssd) the longer it will last. since its wear leveling will right to never used cells even if older ones have had data deleted. this prolongs the drive life and drive life can nearly double with double the drive space. super talent has drive life rated in 50gb writes per day and shows that drive life nearly doubles with double the drive space.

Example:
take a 30gb for instance and you lots of writing to it per day, you might wear it out in 4yrs. if you got a 60gb it could 8yrs and so one with the doubling of drive space.

[Marshmallow64]

Yea the SSD helps load programs and games much faster.

[kayson]

Don't let people tell you that SSD have limited write cycles, its a bunch of non sense. You can MAYBE wear a drive out in 5-6 years if you use it as a page file or something silly, I think last I read you are good for 10,000,000 writes per sector?

It's actually 10,000 writes per MLC cell (I can dig up a source if you really care). However, even at 10,000, there's no way your drive would fail from excessive writes. Lets say you get a 60GB drive. Due to wear leveling in the controller, you'd have to write ~600TB of data before it died.

[Younglin]

As kayson and visbits said, it is pretty much guaranteed that you will not have drive failure due to to many writes. My commtech teacher has an ssd he uses for external storage and he writes about 15 Gbs to it every day and has had it for about 4 years I think. Still runs just as fast and without any issues. ( If anyone is curious as to why he writes to it so much it's because he uses it to backup students work then deletes it when they no longer need it. He has about 260 students if you combine all his classes so it gets a lot of use.)

[Enablingwolf]

One of the cooler perks SSD offers, since it does not spin. There is no need to defrag the drive.

With a second gen SSD. There is a huge perks barring the price per gig is still on the high side. Running Windows 7 makes it even more so advantageous, moving over to the newer tech.


Last week I jumped on the SSD trend. Grabbed a cheapy 64gig ADATA drive for $129 at MicroCenter. The improvement was immediate. I do not miss the sound of my Raptor grinding away.

Since my install of Windows 7 did not detect my SSD properly. I simply manually disabled scheduled defrag, superfetch and indexing. Then I moved the pagefile off the SSD dirve onto one of the mechanical drives installed.


As of now with the second gen SSD. (read: TRIM) It is about how much your willing to spend to get the improvements for your particular needs.

[kayson]

Then I moved the pagefile off the SSD dirve onto one of the mechanical drives installed.
I see a lot of people doing this, but check this MSDN blog article out:


Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
* Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
* Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx