SSD (Solid State Disk). A disc drive without moving parts, implemented with flash
RAM (Random Access Memory) with a DDR-2 or DDR-3 RAM
cache. For high performance, you would attach them via SATA (Serial ATA) or USB-3. Oddly most SSD
drives are only SATA-II. SSDs have the following advantages:
- Faster than traditional hard disks. They have 0 seek and 0 rotational latency. Random reads are 47 times faster. Peak data
reads are 3.5 times faster.
- They don’t slow down if the files are fragmented.
- Use about ¼ the power of traditional hard disks.
- Rugged. No delicate mechanical parts.
- No need to defrag. All spots on the drive are equally accessible.
- Silent.
- Uses significantly less power than hard disks, so in a laptop give increased battery life.
- Windows spends an inordinate amount of time erasing disk sectors. It does not want confidential data from a
previous user becoming available to someone else. SSDs support the TRIM command that lets them procrastinate this
work and do it in the background, focusing their efforts on real work. Some earlier SSD
s did not support TRIM, making
them remarkably slower.
SSDs have
the following disadvantages:
- The big problem is SSD
drives are only designed to handle 1000 to 5,000,000 writes per cell before failing. They are not suitable for violative data. You would
used them for frequently used, but rarely changing, program executables.
- The cost per byte is higher.
- You currently can’t get them in terabyte plus sizes.
What to put on your SSD
You can Google SSD to find various people’s ideas of what you should put on your SSD. You want the files
used most often. Windows does not track that statistic, but it does track time last accessed if you use
rem turn on last-access maintenance
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 0
For more details see fsutil.
It is not obvious to me if I should put the paging file on an SSD or a hard drive and
whether I should devote 32 GB of my SSD to ReadyBoost. These questions can be settled by experiment.
Let us say your SSD
drive is S: You can simply move files to S: and change the
bat files and configuration files to point to them. This is tricky if the files are part of Windows. Windows does not
like you moving its files off C: especially while it is running. Techniques you might use
include:
- Preparing a second temporary Windows boot partition, booting from it, and using it to patch in hard links
in the original partition.
- Patching registry entries on the fly for another user not currently logged on.
- Turning off hibernation. Turning off checkpoints.
- Reinstalling less important apps on some drive other than your SSD.
- Experiment with turning off the paging file altogether if you have a more than 4 GB of real RAM.
- Moving/resizing the page files with the facilities in the control panel.
- Using a utility like the one in Paragon Hard Disk Manager to manage
this for you. (I have not used it myself.)
Move any Windows OS (Operating System) since XP from a regular hard disk to a fast SSD (Solid State Drive) even of a smaller capacity, using
advanced data exclusion capabilities.
If you boot from your SSD, it will be the C: system drive. If you don’t, you probably want to move a
number of the crucial system files to your SSD.
Choosing an SSD
Very small SSDs are called USB Flash drives.
You could use one in addition to your main drive, and put your most commonly used files on it, and put your
scratch files and pagefiles there for a relatively inexpensive huge boost is disk speed.
OCZ drives come in SATA-II and SATA-3 (6 Gb/sec) lines. The SATA-3 lines range
from the bottom of the line Solid-3 (500/450),
Agility-3 (525/475), Vertex-3 (535/480) up to the Vertex-3 Max IOPS (550/500). The prices are all over the map. Often a higher end
model will be cheaper than a slower one. Prices can vary by over a hundred dollars at different stores.
Corsair
Corsair make a several model series. They differ in speed and whether they use 3 or 6 Gb/s
SATA. In
order of ascending price they are:
| Corsair Drive Lines |
|---|
| Line |
Colour |
Notes |
|---|
| Nova |
green |
cheapest |
| Force |
black |
| Force 3 |
baby blue |
| Force GT |
red |
highest performance |
| Performance 3 |
silver |
These are older and not as fast as the new models in the cheaper lines. You probably won’t find
them for sale, except at discount end-of-the-line prices. |
Real World Choices
These links take you to various Amazon online stores that take credit card payments. They do not take PayPal
or payments by mail. Amazon prohibits me from posting prices, (because they so rapidly go out of date) but I have
ordered them cheapest to most expensive.
$8.99 |
recommend electronic⇒SilverStone Adapter Mounting Bracket |
| asin: B002BH3Z8E |
| Lets you mount a 2.5” form factor drive in a 3.5” bay. Some SSD drives include such an adapter bracket; some do not. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
$119.99 |
recommend electronic⇒Corsair 60 GB NOVA SSD |
| asin: B0057A5RA6 |
| 60 Gigabytes. Maximum sequential read speed up to 270 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 240 MB/second. Includes 2.5” and 3.5” brackets. Details. Bargain Nova series. SATA I/3 Gb/sec |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
$149.99 |
recommend electronic⇒Corsair 60 GB FORCE GT SSD |
| asin: B005ACIYXI |
| 60 Gigabytes. Maximum sequential read speed up to 555 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 485 MB/second. Includes 2.5” and 3.5” brackets. Details. SATA III/6 Gb/sec |
|
$213.00 |
recommend electronic⇒Intel 320 Series 80 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s |
| asin: B004T0DNJC |
| This is Intel’s newest line of durable SSDs. They have a reputed 1.2 million hours MTBF. This means you can also use them in write-intensive applications, such as paging disks, or holding the entire system drive. 80 Gigabytes. Maximum sequential read speed up to 270 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 90 MB/s. 2.5” form factor. Specs. The downside is it is only 3.0 Gb/s SATA not 6.0. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
$240.99 |
recommend electronic⇒OCZ Technology 120 GB Solid 3 SSD |
| asin: B004ZBAPA0 |
| Read speed up to 500 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 450 MB/second. This is the low end of the SATA III line. details. SATA III/6Gb/s. |
|
$269.00 |
recommend electronic⇒Intel 320 Series 120 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s |
| asin: B004T0DNQ0 |
| This is Intel’s newest line of durable SSDs. They have a reputed 1.2 million hours MTBF. This means you can also use them in write-intensive applications, such as paging disks, or holding the entire system drive or entire databases. 120 Gigabytes. Maximum sequential read speed up to 270 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 220 MB/s. Specs. The downside is it is only 3.0 Gb/s SATA not 6.0. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
$300.00 |
recommend electronic⇒OCZ Technology 120 GB Vertex 3 SSD |
| asin: B004Q81CKY |
| Read speed up to 535 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 480 MB/second. This is the second from the top of the line. details. SATA III/6Gb/s. |
|
$499.99 |
recommend electronic⇒Corsair 240 GB Force GT SSD |
| asin: B005IZ4IRS |
| 240 Gigabytes. Maximum sequential read speed up to 555 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 525 MB/second. Includes 2.5” to 3.5” adapter bracket. details. SATA III/6Gb/s. |
|
$1,256.00 |
recommend electronic⇒Intel 320 Series 600 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s |
| asin: B004T0DNII |
| This is Intel’s newest line of durable SSDs. They have a reputed 1.2 million hours MTBF. This means you can also use them in write-intensive applications, such as paging disks, or holding the entire system drive or entire databases. 600 Gigabytes. Maximum sequential read speed up to 270 MB/second and maximum sequential write speed up to 220 MB/s. Specs. Surprisingly all this RAM still fits in a 2.5” form factor. The downside is it is only 3.0 Gb/s SATA not 6.0. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
One thing I don’t like about Corsair is their violent product names — Vengeance, Force,
Dominator… I just want my computer to go faster. I don’t want to assassinate or rape anyone.
Software
I have been looking around for software to manage SSDs properly. I would like three things:
- Something to let me put some of the Windows files on SSD
and some of my crucial data
files there too without having to modify any of my applications or patch Windows to notify it of the new
locations. Everything should look to the software just as it was before with everything on hard disk. A virtual
disk driver should insert itself and sometimes redirect requests to the SSD.
- RAM
caching software to keep the most active parts of the SSD in RAM. The OS already does this to some extent. The
caching should be delayed write. I have seen a number of utility that claim to do this, implying Windows 7
screws up somehow.
- SDD caching software that keeps the most active files from hard disk on SSD, managing this transparently.
It might also work at a cluster level.
punctuation 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (all)
©1997-2012 2011-11-05 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
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