The solid state hard drive comes of age
I spend a lot of time at my PC, and I use quite a number of programs in my tasks at keeping WUWT updated. I use browsers, word editors, PDF viewers, paint programs, graphing programs, Google Earth, and an MP3 recorder/editor for my daily radio forecasts. My PC gets a real workout daily.
With so much to do, I’ve noted that I get impatient just waiting on things to load these days. And so after some trepidation and research, I took the plunge and bought myself a solid state hard disk replacement for my Windows 7 HP slimline desktop in hopes it would speed my tasks. I’m happy to report the results significantly exceeded my expectations and I thought WUWT readers could benefit from my experience. Every one of my readers has a computer, so what better post could I make than something that shows them how to be happier using it?
My experience with flash memory has been so-so so far. Some USB flash drives I’ve tried stop working after a while. An SSD I tried a year ago didn’t give very good performance on small file sizes, and the MTBF wasn’t that great, so I sent it back. I’m glad I waited until now.
My research led me to choose the Kingston SSD Now V 100 128GB SSD drive. I only had about 60GB in use out of my 500GB drive, so I could choose a smaller SSD that didn’t cost a fortune. Prices have been plummeting. I looked at drives from Intel, OCZ, Supertalent, and Crucial, and decided the Kingston drive offered the best bang for the buck – plus it comes with a nearly idiot proof program I’m familiar with -Acronis, which re-images your mechanical hard drive to the SSD.
Kingston advertises this as “the ultimate upgrade” on the box, a pretty bold statement.
Here’s the desktop upgrade kit I bought from Amazon (image from the manufacturer):
Installation was pretty simple and went like this:
- Powered down, opened up the case, gave it a good cleaning for dust bunnies.
- Plugged in the SSD drive SATA cable to a spare SATA port on the motherboard.
- Plugged in the power cable for the SSD to a spare Molex power connector from the power supply.
- Left the system open on the table with the SSD sitting to the side on the tabletop, powered it all up.
- I put in the CD ROM provided by Kingston, which the system booted the Acronis OS loader from automatically.
- Followed the dirt simple on-screen instructions. Decided to be brave and choose the “automatic” setting for the Acronis software. Crossed my fingers.
- Waited about 15 minutes, it was done. It offered to make a backup recovery CD for me, which I accepted, that was done in about 5 minutes.
- I powered down, and pulled out my old hard drive. Dang it was warm. No wonder I had to add the second fan to my case.
- I attached the 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter rails to the new Kingston SSD, put it in the drive bay in place of the old hard disk.
- Closed up the case, powered up, kept my fingers crossed.
- To my complete surprise and satisfaction, the Windows 7 desktop booted in 15 seconds! And even better, there was no driver angst, no reboots asked for, nothing. It just worked.
- What was really wild was that the Windows startup sound didn’t have time to finish before the “logged in and ready” sound played. It got truncated. That was a first.
- I opened up Firefox, no wait, zero, none, nada; it was just there.
All of my apps now load nearly instantly. I could not be more pleased. My Dual core Athlon X2 processor is now the weakest link in my Windows experience index:
You know you really have something when your “hard disk” is faster than your 800 MHz DDR2 RAM in the performance index.
I ran HD Tune benchmarks on it…as father Frank used to say on “Everybody Loves Raymond” TV show, HOLY CRAP!
Not quite to the 250 MB/s rating on the box, but I’m betting some of that had to do with my CPU loading, which is now the weakest link.
The drive I replaced, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 had this HD Tune result for performance:
Which is why it now sits on my desktop, forlorn, pretty much useless:
I gotta tell you, the results of this upgrade are spectacular.
- Power up boot time ~18 seconds
- Restart soft boot time ~15 seconds
- Time from Desktop to Sleep Mode ~ 5 seconds
- Time from Sleep mode to running Desktop ~5 seconds
I no longer need the extra case fan, which I’ve unplugged (my wife says it was loud but I can’t hear it, but then again I’m nearly deaf ) since the case runs way cooler now. My CPU core temp also reduced since it no longer has ambient heat from the mechanical drive to deal with in the case.
Minus the mechanical HD and the case fan, total PC power consumption according to my 120VAC “Kill-a-Watt” power meter dropped about 29 watts from where it used to be, because the SSD uses about 6 watts power in operation, and 1 watt standby. That’s 29 watts less heat to dissipate. In a small PC case like I have, it’s significantly cooler.
If you are looking to upgrade your computer, whether it be Windows, Mac, or Linux based, I’m convinced this Kingston SSD is the best investment you can make. Here’s the specs (PDF).
Available in 64GB, 96GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB sizes, these high-performance SSDs are equipped with MLC NAND flash memory chips, a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, a MTBF of 1 million hours and an improved controller offering up to 25 percent better performance that the original SSDNow V series. Not to mention, they’ve also adopted the ‘Always On’ Garbage Collection technology, which Kingston says will cleanse redundant data from the drive to prevent performance degradation and maintains the drive over its life cycle.
If you have a laptop, that Kingston upgrade kit is even more useful, because they give you an external USB case to continue to use your old hard drive in, just costing slightly more than the desktop kit:
I got mine from Amazon.com which has the best deals going that I found. I had it 2 days after ordering. If you have the cash, this upgrade is (IMHO) well worth the time and investment. With a 3 year warranty and a million hour (11.4 years!) Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF), lightning speed, and ultra low power, how could you go wrong? The Acronis disk cloning software will clone your disk no matter if it is Windows, Mac OSX, Or Linux, it just works.
Here’s a video review on the product:
I predict that in about 2 years or less, SSD’s will begin to dominate the market. For now, it’s a great way to double or triple the operational performance of your existing PC. I realize many WUWT readers might not be early technology adoption fans like I am, but this product is really ready for prime-time.
If you are interested in getting one, here’s links to the two upgrade kits at discounted prices:
Some people might need more storage, and in that case you could get one of these to boot the OS from to get the performance, and use the older hard disk for media or offline storage.
Either way, I can’t ever see myself going back to a mechanical hard drive now, I’m spoiled.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If you think they’re great for desktops, they’re ten times better for laptops – because with laptops you have a dozen or two utilities that load along with Windows making all of the funky laptop hardware usable. Boot times (from “pushing the power button” to “logged in and ready for use”) are typically between 1/5 and 1/10 as long after you’re done. I don’t even bother with hibernation mode anymore – shutting down and restarting is actually faster.
I recently upgraded my Asus N10Jc with an SSD and never looked back – the only noise coming from it now is the CPU/GPU cooling fan and that’s almost silent anyway.
Regards.
web link to purchases..
REPLY: That’s only for the bare drive, and if you have no cloning software, and/or drive rail adapters, you can find yourself SOL. See the two links I provide in the story for the kits. – Anthony
Mac Users:
I don’t work for them, but have had a similar experience with the Mac-optimized setups from Macsales.com.
They also have the 3.5″ adaptor and I have a 120 gig unit powering my PowerMac 6cpu 3.33ghz machine. Boot times are sub-15 seconds. Launching Final Cut Pro is two bounces. Motion is a single bounce. Most other apps are sub-1 bounce.
I get over 200fps h.264 encoding with Handbrake from my 1080p ProRes files.
Do yourself a favor and go SSD.
Having been in the industry for many years, I have seen several replacements for hard drives come and go the most memorable being bubble memory. I did read the specs but I am unsure these drives will handle a large number of writes without failure. They may say the drives are more reliable because they will survive impacts better than an old style hard drive. As long as you use that old hard drive for regular backups I see no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of the new technology.
I’ve been considering this as an interim solution for my current computer problems (boots up fairly fast, but lags on certain applications), so thanks for posting this. My long term solution will eventually be Racetrack memory and a replacement for my motherboard to Sandy Bridge or something similar.
I expected to find it cost a bundle, but the price is only a bit over $225. Not bad. Now I just have to figure out how to get someone to buy one for me.
Nothing like the enthusiam of a recent convert. 😉
I went SSD on my laptop a few months back. . .but now the laptop died last week and has been replaced (HP Envy 17) with one with a much larger mechanical HDD. But it will take a second HDD, so perhaps after a bit (enough panic-stricken rushing around over the old laptop dying for the moment, thankyouverymuch) I’ll put the SSD (it’s fine) in the new laptop too.
I’ve been considering going the SSD route, but I’m waiting for better prices (or until that check from Big Oil arrives). I have plenty of data files that would probably still fill the current state of the art SSD capacity, but I suppose one option is to install the OS on a SSD and keep a hard drive for data files. I seem to recall hearing about “hybrid” SSD/hard drives, that combine the two technologies in one package. Not sure if that gives you a significant advantage, though.
Thanks for the informative review. It’s great to get an opinion on tech gear from someone who is a user rather than someone who does reviews regularly. I Will look at this to upgrade my notebook. I am curious as to how much more battery life I will get using the SSD.
REPLY: Well, I plan to upgrade my laptop next, and find that out too! Stay tuned. – Anthony
You might like the fun these guys had with a RAID build out of SSD’s.
Yep, they’re the up-and-coming thing.
Got a 64GB version a year ago for a mini itx system I assembled w/Ubuntu OS. I nearly cried when I saw the boot time. These things are worth the extra cash.
*sigh* Anthony, haven’t you heard? The PC, even the laptop, are DEAD! As dead as the crabs piled up on the shores of the Thanet coast!!
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_17011895?nclick_check=1
Now, how the hell I am supposed to compose a 200 pp. report, with tabs & appendices, on a hand-held mobile device escapes me for the moment, but the kids all tell me not to sweat it!
Nice to see a device that makes something about real PC bottleneck – HDD.
“You know you really have something when your “hard disk” is faster than your 800 MHz DDR2 RAM in the performance index.”
You can’t compare speeds of these two. Sure Microsoft doesn’t.
CPU – MHz, SSD – MBps
Clearly in the thrall of “Big Memory”
Well that’s pretty cool, Anthony. But I still have a soft spot in my heart for my old TI-99. I lost my cherry to it in 1981. 🙂
I think it would be a good idea to put your old drive in as a backup, but set the Windows power settings to spin it down after a few minutes without use. You could then backup any changed files once per day or per hour.
Do SSDs still have the problem that they fail after about 10,000 writes to the same address?
When I updated my gaming rig from a WD VelociRaptor mechanical drive to an SSD, the change was incredible! Zoning in Oblivion was so fast that there was no time to read the text in the cut scenes. Zoning in EQ2 was so fast that I was always the first in my group to zone by seconds.
My next SSD will be the PCIe cards that are coming out as the PCIe slots are directly connected to the system bus, no more SATA latency!
Check em out, PCIe SSDs are twice as fast in read and write as SATA SSDs and priced now about where SATA SSDs were a couple years ago.
Don’t forget to use your old mechanical drive for your page file, no sense contending with application data on the SSD SATA controller.
Thanks for the heads up Anthony.
I managed to track it down in Australia and it’s available via a couple of online stores DStore and Getprice but they want $312 – $351 for it. Kingston Australia want $361.
With the Aussie dollar at pretty well parody price (i.e US$1 = AUD99c) Amazon’s $231 plus postage looks like a pretty good deal.
I went with the OCZ Vertex 2 for the desktop because of reliability and am planning on using the Intel X25-M for the tablet because it only draws about 75 mA idle current, which is, I believe, the lowest idle current available.
My teenage son has a notebook with no mechanical drives whatsoever. It has no CD, no DVD and no hard drive. It runs on a version of Linux that only occupies 3.2 GB of memory including all the application programs.
However, the performance of his flash drive is much less than yours (I am not going to mention the manufacturer but it is not Kingston).
Thanks for a great piece of advice. I plan to upgrade my other computers with Kingston drives.
FYI, for Mac users, Carbon Copy Cloner is a great utility for upgrading your drive.
I’ve looked at these drives and although they perform well the capacities just aren’t high enough for my needs. I need a minimum 750Gb, with 1Tb being the better option for me (I build, run and store VMWare virtual machines and need lots of space). However, having recently had 1 each of Seagate’s 7200.10 and .11 drives fail due to head crashes, I’m tempted.
Good info, thanks Anthoney.
I have an SSD and regular HD on my Linux laptop. I put /tmp, swap, and /home on the regular HD to minimize writes to the SSD. SSD supposedly are good for 10,000 writes. Which is a long time if you use it for the OS and apps. In linux it is easy to put apps on one drive (SSD) and your work/data on the hardrive. Also, make sure the kernel has TRIM for the SSD. Latest Ubuntu does. Also, disable the write cache, that will actually improve performance.
REPLY: That supposed 10K write limit is old news/old tech. Kingston couldn’t offer a 3 year warranty with that limit, they would go broke. – Anthony
I went with an 80 GB SSD for my new i7 quad-core workstation 18 months ago; for just the ”C” drive. That earlier model SSD can’t match the price/performace of the latest Kingston product Anthony installed, but overall pretty much same perceived performance improvement as he reported, and no problems so far. Can’t imagine I’d ever have the patience to go back to the ”old” hard drive technology for the ”C” drive; SSD spoiled me.
But I stayed with RAID1 mirrored 1 TB Western Digital hard drives for my ”D” drive; for cost-capacity reasons. If you have huge amounts of data that’s still pretty attractive. A couple weeks ago Amazon was selling top-quality 1.5 TB WD hard drives for $70 each; that’s hard to beat. . .