SSD or HDD on network?

[Sir]

Hi all,

 

Have any of you any experience with ssd's as main/ only hdd on your enterprise clients? i am about go lease another round of 100 small forms and am considering 128ssd instead of 500gb standard drives and was wondering if this would/ has presented any problems with anyone. i know network is the main contention with speed logging on etc. but for video editing etc, i was thinking that this may be a good option. Thoughts please.

[Ben-BSH]

I think it would be a great idea, one thing to consider though could be the user profiles?

 

- Will you leave them on the local drive, to speed up logging on (the "preparing your desktop" first run issue would be gone) but then the drives could potentially fill up quite quickly at 128gb depending on exposure to different students.

- obviously deleting the profile at log off will ensure you keep a good amount of drive space, but will that not incur the speed hit of the first run every time a user logs on?

 

Forgive me if i have been stupid and missed something that would give you the best of both. just my 2c

[Danp]

We have about 75 SSDs fitted around school and it is well worth it. Vast improvement on login times, very handy in shared classrooms at end of lesson etc plus.

[danjoslin]

SSD all the way your never go back to HDD

[Arthur]

SSDs! It's a no brainer.

[localzuk]

We've switched staff laptops to SSD here now, and had zero complaints. 128GB seems plenty at the moment for most of our staff too. For the single member of staff who needed more (for video), we bought them an external disk for storing their video on.

[3s-gtech]

We have only fitted SSD to PCs we've been buying for around two years now. Gradually HDDs are going as we either replace the machines or upgrade them - we should be somewhere near 75% SSD soon. No comparison in performance and reliability terms.

[sonofsanta]

oh god yes yes do it it's amazing.

 

We have around half our network, 250 machines, with 128GB SSDs in now instead of HDDs. Our largest install footprint, the hot swap machines with absolutely everything installed, use 90GB of space. User profiles won't ever get to 30GB, or shouldn't at least - in my experience students tend to sit at the same machine every lesson so that limits how many people log on.

 

It doesn't just improve boot speed, it improves the speed of every program you open and the responsiveness of the OS as a whole. We elected to spend the money upgrading older machines rather than throwing out and replacing last summer, and ended up improving 50% more machines for only 25% of the cost if we'd bought all new machines. We won't buy machines without them now.

[Achandler]

What processors are in these machines you are upgrading?

 

I have an SSD at home, and did look at putting some SSDs in our machines to improve speed but when you look at performance manager etc, the CPU is being smashed to pieces anyway, so I wonder if ours aren't worth an SSD after all.

[tekins]

SSD's all the way, like others have said, I wouldn't buy a pc without one these days.

 

Massive improvement to even the oldest machines (Sempron CPU).

[3s-gtech]

CPUs - mix of Core 2 Duo, Sandy/Ivybridge i3, AMD E-450, AMD A8, Phenom II. SSD is worth it even with older stuff - if it has AHCI support, it'll get an SSD here.

[sonofsanta]

Don't cheap out though, good SSDs are a world apart from the cheapest. Samsung 840 EVOs get my vote (and my money) at the moment.

[Achandler]

We have original dual cores (1.2Ghz), which are extremely slow sometimes but the processor is always working away excessively, hence SSDs might not be a solution.

 

Maybe I will buy a couple and test them.

[synaesthesia]

SSD absolutely. No more machines getting knocked over/about and having a slow or non functioning PC as a result. Not from storage anyway. The applications are still run locally usually so it makes a lot of difference there, especially on the big stuff like Solidworks or Adobe CS

[Sir]

Wow, this is great. It's unusual to get such consensus in such a forum. Thanks everyone indeed.

[mrbios]

Don't cheap out though, good SSDs are a world apart from the cheapest. Samsung 840 EVOs get my vote (and my money) at the moment.

 

This is the only thing id disagree with. The nice cheap sandisk drives will do a fine job, you certainly don't need to be spending extra on SSDs for general student/teacher PCs. The biggest benefit is down to the seek time (or lack of rather!) you don't need extra MB/s read and write and the slight optimizations to the controller that the more expensive ones give you because they'll never see that benefit. So long as you avoid OCZ you can't really go wrong with any of the cheap options.

 

EDIT: It is worth noting that intel have the lowest failure rate of any manufacturer mind, but it's cost vs value to determine if it's worth it, the failure rates are pretty damn low from everyone except OCZ anyway.

Edited January 18, 2014 by mrbios

[Arthur]

It is worth noting that Intel have the lowest failure rate of any manufacturer mind

Samsung is even better than Intel now.

 

• Samsung 0.28% (against 0.05%)
  
• Intel 0.63% (against 0.37%)
  
• Kingston 1.00% (N/A)
  
• Corsair 1.88% (against 1.61%)
  
• Crucial 2.26% (against 1.12%)
  
• OCZ 2.27% (against 6.64%)
  

Source: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html

[FragglePete]

Would always buy ssd for any new machines we get in. The thing that caught us out though was we had to increase the GPO timeout limit. The PCs were booting quicker than the network cards could properly initialise so some of the GPO s were not being applied correctly.

 

I'm currently testing ssd as an upgrade for a bunch of existing Dell Optiplex 760 desktops we have, but compared to HDD, its only making a few seconds difference on login times, etc so might save the money.

 

Pete

[sonofsanta]

This is the only thing id disagree with. The nice cheap sandisk drives will do a fine job, you certainly don't need to be spending extra on SSDs for general student/teacher PCs. The biggest benefit is down to the seek time (or lack of rather!) you don't need extra MB/s read and write and the slight optimizations to the controller that the more expensive ones give you because they'll never see that benefit. So long as you avoid OCZ you can't really go wrong with any of the cheap options.

 

IOPS is absolutely the relevant metric, not read/write speed, but we had some Kingston something-or-others in once (by mistake) and subjectively they felt closer to hard drives than SSDs. I'm not recommending the 840 Pros, they really are overkill, but I reckon the 840 EVOs are worth the £10 bump up from the cheapest.

 

(though saying that, eBuyer have the 120GB M500 on cheaper at the moment...)

[stevenlong1985]

I have all the kids laptops with SSD's in them, so much faster and longer battery life!

[gshaw]

Just make sure you get decent sized ones, minimum 128GB if you're using anything hefty like CS6 otherwise they fill up very quickly!

 

Performance wise it's the best upgrade you can do, machines fly with SSD system drives

[mac_shinobi]

IOPS is absolutely the relevant metric, not read/write speed, but we had some Kingston something-or-others in once (by mistake) and subjectively they felt closer to hard drives than SSDs. I'm not recommending the 840 Pros, they really are overkill, but I reckon the 840 EVOs are worth the £10 bump up from the cheapest.

 

(though saying that, eBuyer have the 120GB M500 on cheaper at the moment...)

 

Amazon.co.uk ( Price: £61.31 for 120gb M500 ) --> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT120M500SSD1-2-5-inch-120GB-Internal/dp/B00BQ4F9ZA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390216816&sr=8-1&keywords=M500+ssd+120gb

 

Unless @VeryPC could do a reasonable SSD ( 120gb / maybe 240gb ) at a better price ?

Edited January 20, 2014 by mac_shinobi

[zag]

We've been fully SSD in our school for 2 years now.

 

No problems so far and much quicker machines.

 

As someone else said its a no brainer!

[Driftingashore]

I'm a bit late to this party, but I've just upgraded a test machine (C2D E4500 circa 2007) to a Samsung 840 Evo 120GB SSD, and tested the boot / login times against a machine with an i5 3330 (without SSD), and the E4500 beats the i5 to the login screen by about 20 seconds - despite the machine having only SATA 2, so the SSD isn't even performing to its full potential. It also beats the i5 from login screen to an open browser window by about 30 seconds. I've only tested once, but first impressions are that upgrading will be a much better deal than replacing the PCs outright. Edited February 24, 2014 by Driftingashore

[zag]

I'm a bit late to this party, but I've just upgraded a test machine (C2D E4500 circa 2007) to a Samsung 840 Evo 120GB SSD, and tested the boot / login times against a machine with an i5 3330 (without SSD), and the E4500 beats the i5 to the login screen by about 20 seconds - despite the machine having only SATA 2, so the SSD isn't even performing to its full potential. It also beats the i5 from login screen to an open browser window by about 30 seconds. I've only tested once, but first impressions are that upgrading will be a much better deal than replacing the PCs outright.

 

SATA 3 makes no real world difference when it comes to logon speeds. It only really effects total transfer speed which in reality you will never notice in normal day to day operations.

 

Basically any SSD on any interface is going to make a huge difference. I have a 5 year old PATA SSD here which is just as "real world" quick as some of the newer SATA variants.