SSD drives in education

[mac_shinobi]

Also i know alot of people keep talking about the difference between SATA2 and SATA3 etc but you really won't notice the difference at all in school, save the money and buy the SATA2 drives...they're still 100x faster than HDDs

If it is an older machine than no doubt it is either SATA 1 or 2 so no point in using a SATA 3 Drive as it won't be able to use the extra speed so as per @mrbios comment I agree, get a SATA 2 SSD and will be a lot faster than a normal spindle type hdd assuming the bios settings are correct and are set to use AHCI / SATA and not IDE / Compatability mode etc

[zag]

So if you're using Pentium Ds, P4s etc then don't bother, replace the PC unless it really is for nothing more than office use.

Not sure i'd agree with that. we have mostly Pentium Ds in our school but upgraded to SSDs about a year ago to extend their lives.

There is no difference in using them in the real world vs. a Core i5 in the newer machines.

To the end user they are the same machine basically. The SSDs are that good they make the processor speed virtually irrelevant.

[sonofsanta]

To the end user they are the same machine basically. The SSDs are that good they make the processor speed virtually irrelevant.

SSDs are the first component to ever decouple power from speed, as far as I can work out. It used to be that the only way to speed a computer up was to get a better processor or throw more RAM at it, where speed was a byproduct of the additional power. Fitting an SSD now won't make any difference to the calculating power of your computer, but it will make it a hell of a lot faster.

With the price drops this year, everyone should be fitting SSDs now, certainly in personal computers. And having just gone through tender for the summer jobs, I can say with some delight that getting decent sized SSDs in your school machines is entirely viable as well now

[mrbios]

Not sure i'd agree with that. we have mostly Pentium Ds in our school but upgraded to SSDs about a year ago to extend their lives.

There is no difference in using them in the real world vs. a Core i5 in the newer machines.

To the end user they are the same machine basically. The SSDs are that good they make the processor speed virtually irrelevant.

Then perhaps you have some better quality motherboards than us, we put SSDs in a bunch of our Pentium Ds and they're still pretty slow, old 945G foxconn motherboards with 2GB ram. That said these motherboards were massive mistake, capacitors started leaking on most of them after just 3 years use....though i claim no responsibility for that **** up.

[gshaw]

Foxconn boards are awful, had the displeasure of having a batch of Evesham PCs arrive with them a couple of years back (was expecting MSI) and their reliability record was awful. Boards just randomly overheating and packing up... onboard VGA blown, random BSODs etc. We bought a set of 10 boards as spares just after Evesham went under and went through the lot within a year or so! After that I stick solely with Intel OEM boards unless the machine is Lenovo \ HP business-grade kit.

[mrbios]

Foxconn boards are awful, had the displeasure of having a batch of Evesham PCs arrive with them a couple of years back (was expecting MSI) and their reliability record was awful. Boards just randomly overheating and packing up... onboard VGA blown, random BSODs etc. We bought a set of 10 boards as spares just after Evesham went under and went through the lot within a year or so! After that I stick solely with Intel OEM boards unless the machine is Lenovo \ HP business-grade kit.

My thoughts exactly, can't say i'd ever use them again (tbh i wouldn't have used them in the first place given the choice) Using mainly Asus boards now, some gigabyte ones and some ASRock ones, but mainly Asus. I avoid MSI though as I've had 3 of them catch fire in the past 6 years (1 personal, 2 school) seems a bit odd that they were all MSI......one went in spectacular fashion, the fire started around the USB headers at the bottom of the board and left over a 3rd of the board unrecognisable.

EDIT: did have one gigabyte board create a very short flash and 1 second long flame around the mosfets but that went straight out.

[Arthur]

Foxconn boards are awful... After that I stick solely with Intel OEM boards

Foxconn make Intel's motherboards too. You will also find that Intel still use cheap electrolytic capacitors on a lot of their motherboards.

Compare the DH67CL to Asus' P8H77-M LE for example. Both are similar prices, yet the latter uses 100% solid-state capacitors.

[googlemad]

I'm looking forward to finding out the reaction from Students / Staff when they try our 2 new IT suites in September...

Stone i5 2320 Boot with Crucial 64GB M4 SSD - YouTube

(The Please Wait bit is obviously down to network policies etc so cut the video off there)

[localzuk]

I'm looking forward to finding out the reaction from Students / Staff when they try our 2 new IT suites in September...

Stone i5 2320 Boot with Crucial 64GB M4 SSD - YouTube

(The Please Wait bit is obviously down to network policies etc so cut the video off there)

The slowest bit with our SSD driven laptops is the BIOS loading part!

[SYNACK]

The slowest bit with our SSD driven laptops is the BIOS loading part!

EFI FTW, unfourtunatly the tech has been a lot slow to filter down, lots of the ASUS boards have it though and it lets you use GPT drives which can be greater than 2TB per partition and much faster boot times.

[dsk]

SSD vs HDD video @ my place

I went down this route. I made a small video just for the sake of it. Core2Duo e6300 with 1GB of ram

Machine on the left SSD (cheapest Kingston we could find about a year ago now)
Machine on the right HDD (default 7200rpm drive)

Now have core i5 machines with Samsung 830 ssd in our Admin areas and Crucial M4s in our Sixth Form library. Things like boot, apps, photoshop are very responsive!

[Rozzer]

I have started with SSD roll outs but only with new computers. You can really see the difference in the running of the machines!

Ross

[sonofsanta]

Just waiting for some Stone engineers to come out and fit the DVD drives that were meant to be installed on the factory floor before I can properly test our new machines (i3 2120, 8Gb DDR3-1600, Crucial m4 128Gb) but we managed to have one of them go from "in a box in the gym" to "sitting on the desk playing Radio 6" within the hour, which makes me delighted about both SSDs and Fog.

We have a handful of other machines about with SSDs as well, including some just outside our office in a little lobby by the big colour printer so I've been doing most of my testing this summer on those... so I was most taken aback when I started testing on a HDD machine and it took an hour and a half for CS5 Web Design Premium to install. I've been used to 15 minutes!

[localzuk]

We've now got around 130 machines with SSDs. The kids in the primary school won't know what hit them when they get back - their i3 + SSD machines replace 8 year old celerons and P4s...

[3s-gtech]

Our major Summer rollout is now ongoing, everything new on-site will have an SSD in it, so nearly every teacher PC plus an IT suite of 60 PCs have Crucial M4s (plus all the new Lenovo X130e student laptops). They are nice machines to use (Lenovo M58P from ICT Direct with 8GB RAM and ATI 4550 where needed), and haven't cost the earth. POST takes far longer than booting!