SSD drives in education

[zag]

I thought the random would be higher as well?

 

Nope! Its exactly the same speed for every SSD. 0.1ms or something like that.

 

I have an old PATA samsumg 16gb SSD that loads photoshop in exactly the same time as my 600GB Intel SSD in my new machine.

 

Check it out. I bought it in early 2008 I believe Has a sustained transfer rate of 20mb/s or something but in the real world its exactly the same as the new drives.

 

Edited May 11, 2012 by zag

[sonofsanta]

I never quite got why people buy computers in a school with 300gb drives in, doesnt make sense to me for client machines.

 

If you look at eBuyer you can't even get them smaller than 250gb now, iirc. The price difference at the bottom end is minimal, an a 320Gb drive should outperform a 250Gb drive simply due to data density - albeit it's a pretty small difference.

 

Nope! Its exactly the same speed for every SSD. 0.1ms or something like that.

 

I have an old PATA samsumg 16gb SSD that loads photoshop in exactly the same time as my 600GB Intel SSD in my new machine.

 

Check it out. I bought it in early 2008 I believe Has a sustained transfer rate of 20mb/s or something but in the real world its exactly the same as the new drives.

 

Check it out, I dun learned something new today. Does that mean I get to go home early for the weekend now?

[Flatpackhamster]

Really?

 

Yes, really. But never mind, so long as you're happy.

[sidewinder]

I've asked for a quote for PCs including SSDs and they have specified OCZ drives. Should I insist on Intel or Crucial or go with what they recommend?

On one hand I'm thinking that if I get failures then it is their job to replace them anyway, but then I still don't want failures because it means downtime for a computer.

[CyberNerd]

Mixed feelings about OCZ - we had one batch that has been fine, no problems at all. Another batch with 25% failures.

[zag]

I've asked for a quote for PCs including SSDs and they have specified OCZ drives. Should I insist on Intel or Crucial or go with what they recommend?

On one hand I'm thinking that if I get failures then it is their job to replace them anyway, but then I still don't want failures because it means downtime for a computer.

 

Insist on Intel, the price difference should be minimal.

 

We have over 250 now installed and never had a failure.

[Arthur]

Should I insist on Intel or Crucial or go with what they recommend?

Intel would be my first choice too, although Crucial M4's are also fine. I definitely wouldn't get OCZ drives.

 

We have Intel 320 Series SSDs in our Art PCs with zero failures so far.

[difinity]

I've asked for a quote for PCs including SSDs and they have specified OCZ drives. Should I insist on Intel or Crucial or go with what they recommend?

On one hand I'm thinking that if I get failures then it is their job to replace them anyway, but then I still don't want failures because it means downtime for a computer.

 

Intel. Not Crucial or OCZ, this is from experience.

[zag]

Intel would be my first choice too, although Crucial M4's are also fine. I definitely wouldn't get OCZ drives.

 

That link sums it up really well

 

SSD Return Rates

- Intel 0.1% (as against 0.3%)

- Crucial 0.8% (as against 1.9%)

- Corsair 2.9% (as against 2.7%)

- OCZ 4.2% (as against 3.5%)

 

Intel confirms its position at the top with a very impressive rate. It is followed by Crucial, which has improved its rate significantly but it has to be said that the M225 previously affected things quite a bit – on the C300s alone its rate was 1%. Corsair’s and especially OCZ’s returns are up however and OCZ is still clearly bringing up the rear. 8 SSDs have rates of over 5%:

 

Try finding a hard disk with a 0.1% failure rate!!

Edited May 22, 2012 by zag

[localzuk]

Interestingly, many hard drives have failure rates higher than OCZ's SSD failure rate...

[mac_shinobi]

When I was looking at SSD's I was looking at either Intel or OWC ( memoryc.com do the OWC SSD's )

[sted]

got to be said its the best upgrade i ever put in my old laptop (easrly core 2 due) went from approx 3 min boot time to about 1 (cloned across so same image etc).

 

Anyone tried one in a netbook as im fed up of people complaining they are slow (which they are to be fair but what do you expect from something that cheap?)

 

as to wether its worth putting them in an old p4 to extend their liofe why not you can always when you retire them move the ssd to the next worse machines that dont have ssds. Performance wise i went from an intel 945 chipset laptop to a new one (cant remember chipset but its an i7) and windows hdd rating diddnt change hugely 7.2 - 7.7 iirc better but not exactly as huge as going from a hdd to an ssd in the first place.

 

Also how do ssds cope with xp i just cant bring myself to win7 a netbooks that are xp it takes too long

[SYNACK]

Performance wise i went from an intel 945 chipset laptop to a new one (cant remember chipset but its an i7) and windows hdd rating diddnt change hugely 7.2 - 7.7 iirc better but not exactly as huge as going from a hdd to an ssd in the first place.

 

Also how do ssds cope with xp i just cant bring myself to win7 a netbooks that are xp it takes too long

 

I think the performance scores are not linnier meaning that the closer you get to the top end the bigger the gap.

 

I would not put XP on a standard SSD as it is rather primative and does not support TRIM so would bog down rather quickly with usage. I run 7 ultimate on an Atom CPU just fine with desktop drives so it should be quick enough on an SSD. The CPUs themselves have a decent amount of cache and support modern extentions making it work fine.

[CHR1S]

Not read every post but I wanted to add my 2p worth -

 

Gaming PC - i5, OCZ Vertex 3 120Gb

Laptop - C2D (a pretty decent one, cant remember what) 500Gb SATA drive

 

I can power both on at the same time, boot into Win 7, load steam, load Skyrim and start playing before the laptop hits the logon screen on the laptop.

Things load so fast you don't have time to read splash screens (again Skyrim as an example) and PS rendering and Sony Vegas video editing are hugely faster.

 

You can pick up the above SSD for sub £100 and would be a fool not to... its THAT much of an improvement!

[dave.81]

After reading this thread i bought a Crucial M4 and installed it into one of the 3 year old pc's in an IT suite. Comparing the 2 machines there is not enough of a speed increase to justify the cost. Boot/login/logoff are quicker, maybe a second or 2 than the SATA machine. Opening of office applications i could barely see a difference, actually on some test the SATA was quicker. At the moment i am yet to be impressed.

[cpjitservices]

Do I have this wrong please do correct me if so - whilst SSD's are all well and good but dont they have a certain amount of writes on them before you need to replace it ?

[jamesfed]

Do I have this wrong please do correct me if so - whilst SSD's are all well and good but dont they have a certain amount of writes on them before you need to replace it ?

 

Its at such a high value these days that unless you are trying to run databases off consumer drives there shouldn't ever be an issue.

 

Looking at the lifetime on my old Vertx 2 I have 84% remaning, on the same ammount of writes on my new Vertex 3 I haven't even used a single resurve block yet.

 

Thats under heavy IT tech style use with a few VMs now and again

[CHR1S]

Is it SATA 2? What OS? Is it set up correctly?

[sonofsanta]

Is it SATA 2? What OS? Is it set up correctly?

 

In particular, are your partitions properly aligned?

[zag]

Do I have this wrong please do correct me if so - whilst SSD's are all well and good but dont they have a certain amount of writes on them before you need to replace it ?

 

They last something like 30 years with normal use.

[zag]

After reading this thread i bought a Crucial M4 and installed it into one of the 3 year old pc's in an IT suite. Comparing the 2 machines there is not enough of a speed increase to justify the cost. Boot/login/logoff are quicker, maybe a second or 2 than the SATA machine. Opening of office applications i could barely see a difference, actually on some test the SATA was quicker. At the moment i am yet to be impressed.

 

Never used Crucial drives before but opening applications is about 300% quicker on our ICT room desktops. I did some tests with adobe photoshop when we first installed them.

 

Boot should also be about 25 seconds compared to over a minute on our old machines. And shutdown instant with an SSD as opposed to about 15 seconds before the upgrade.

[Arthur]

Opening of office applications I could barely see a difference, actually on some test the SATA was quicker.

Something must be wrong because I recently installed a 64GB Crucial M4 in a six year old Dell Latitude 131L running XP and the difference in speed was immediately noticeable despite being severely bottlenecked by the SATA to PATA adapter I used.

 

Have you installed the latest chipset drivers from Intel or AMD?

 

http://i.imgur.com/zE8H5.png http://i.imgur.com/1leFo.png

[SYNACK]

To be fair some of those older chipsets had real problems with SSDs as they drove them in exactly the wrong way but even so it should have been quicker, for the three weeks it would last till the chipset cooked it.

[mac_shinobi]

To be fair some of those older chipsets had real problems with SSDs as they drove them in exactly the wrong way but even so it should have been quicker, for the three weeks it would last till the chipset cooked it.

 

That or the mode the drive was set to in the bios would of slowed it down ie IDE Compatability mode in comparison to using AHCI or SATA Mode. Also ensuring the OS was installed with AHCI SATA Drivers aka Latest Chipset drivers or possibly Intel Matrix Storage or device drivers ??

[synaesthesia]

@zag You're right - they do have a limited write amount. No different to any other similar device including RAM though. It's not a set amount, it's no different to the MTBF rating on hard drives.

Assuming you're not XP'ing with them and TRIM is working properly, you are not likely to see a failure in it's lifetime.

@dave.81 - being very blunt, as above, something is very wrong. The difference between HDD and SSD is huge on any properly configured system. And that doesn't take much (nothing) if you're using Win7.

P35/38 chipsets have major problems with SSDs but most can be fixed with (unofficial) bios updates to update them to the ICH10/10R southbridge which is fine. (problem lies with ICH9/9R)