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.
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I have an old 1.8 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM and 20 GB ATA IDE HDD – and it beats this. Well, it runs Linux, not Windows; but if it can boot Ubuntu in ~15 seconds, probably it could get close to 10 with some slimmer Linux distro.
The only downside of Linux I’m aware of is the lack of a decent pinball game. 🙂
Is that a 2.5-inch SATA? I wonder if it could work in a PS3.
I second Predicador: if boot speed is important to you then move to Linux.
I’ve heard the SSD’s can lose files or not live long enough, but apart from that they are pretty fast.
Thomas says:
January 9, 2011 at 10:09 pm
Does Hadley CRU know about this?
LOL. Very funny.
I remember in 1967 when my Geometry teacher Mr. Jefferies told us about this exciting new technology called floppy drives. Made my knees quiver. Wanted so bad to have my own computer. At the time I was learning Basic on a teletype timesharing system and time stood still as I played with the circuit modeling modules. I would compare the software results with the circuits I was building in the Physics lab. None of the teachers knew what I was doing, but was left alone to play with the yellowcake uranium sample and the mercury in a flask. One of the other assistants was a very cute brunette who had taught herself Tolkien’s Elvish and would write long messages on the brown hand towel rolls with blue poster paint and a brush from art class.
Ah, a misspent youth…
For really neat back up stuff, check out https://www.dropbox.com/
Regards to all.
I used a flash device as boot HD for an optical spectrum analyzer that I designed. It’s very quick indeed. Noting compares to it, but if you want backup reliability I still have some doubts about.
The floating gates of the flash device are still sensitive to high electrostatic discharges.
Just to say, AFAIK flash never passed the mil specification for EM reliability, even if some last generation shielded USB flash drives seem to comply the US MIL-SPEC standards for battlefield use.
About 8 years ago, I had a flash device half deleted due to a strong electromagnetic pulse induced by a three-phase active power compensator which failed.
Anyways, I agree with your prediction that in about 2 years SSD’s will begin to dominate the market, because it depends on the many pros and few cons.
Massimo
Oh finally i can be of use round here as this is my day job, oh wait you’ve already done a good job. I’ll go back to keeping quite in the corner while you bring some of the 21st centuries liars, cheats and miscreants down a peg or ten.
keep up the good tech skillz.
NOOOOOOO !
SSDs are a terrible idea if you are still running Windows XP.
In Windows 7, SSDs work great, but the way the memory is written to and erased (or more correctly not erased), leads the drives to slow down terribly once all the cells are written to. SSD manufacturers came up with way to control this using the operating system – call the TRIM command, which does block erases. Windows XP does not have this in the opreating system. The result is – after a few months, you will notice the computer slow down because the computer sees that the SSD is full, and Windows XP does not handle this well.
Like I said – Windows 7 has the TRIM function, and SSDs work perfectly. But if you still have Windows XP, putting in a SSD is a very bad idea (unless you get a really expensive SLC type instead of the cheaper MLC type)
No of hours in a year = 365 * 24 = 8760
MTBF = 1,000,000 hours
1,000,000/8760 = 114 years
Is that for real?
Jack Simmons>
“For really neat back up stuff, check out https://www.dropbox.com/”
I wouldn’t, if I were you. Their security is hopelessly bad. At most, use it for things where privacy is entirely inessential, and use a unique password bearing no relation to any of your others. They’re going to be another Gawker.
I used a 32Gb SSD a few months ago (they were more expensive then!), and now I have a Windows Server 2008 64 bit Domain Controller that consumes just 17 watts when running. And has no moving parts whatever.
Now that’s a lower-power computer.
Pleased I am.
Thank you for the heads-up.
Uh! Your hard disc is not faster than your RAM – it received a better rating for what it is!
Now WUWT is combining two of my favorite interests! SSDs are indeed coming of age, and the best possible upgrade you can find for almost any computer. As gg comments above, though, they work better with Win 7 (or at least Vista SP1).
Anthony,
1. Congratulations.
2. The cheaper performance upgrade is usually a matter of more RAM. A minmum of 4G with memory hogs like Win7 and gooey-intensive *nix. 8G is easy on a modern desktop machine.
3. Don’t use swap under *nix or pagefile under Windows. You can turn them off if you have plenty of RAM. You’d never want to be paging to swap/pagefile on a regular basis anyway: It sucks dirty swamp-water through a straw.
4. Get an external housing (eSATA if your computer has a plug for it or simply USB) for your “old” HDD and use the Acronis software to do backups on a regular basis. All storage media fails eventually. Detach the HDD when not doing backups and put it in a safe place away from the computer.
5. The writing was on the wall for high-performance HDD when Fusion-IO released their first ioDrive – a PCIe card that’s 10 to 50 times faster than what can go through a single SATA connection. They are still quite expensive, the high-performance ones based on SLC SSD which is more durable; but if you have a database that’s doing terabytes of writes every day, the SSD is much cheaper than an array of HDD with similar throughput rates. And it consumes about 1% of the power. And it is silent and more tolerant of high temperatures.
6. Flash memory technology as non-volatile RAM looks like being integrated into mainboards in a way similar to RAM sticks (there’s a JEDEC working group, IIRC)… if you want some, there’ll be a socket on the mainboard with IO at around a gigabyte a second. Modern hardware and operating systems cope with NUMA (non-uniform memory architecture) fairly well, so the blockiness of IO to flash isn’t a problem.
7. Integration of non-volatile memory closes the circle in computing technology. Computers used to have “core” to store programs and to use as second-level memory. HDDs will take the role of tapes of yore, relinquished to archival and bulk data storage, as well as (somewhat fragile) backups.
Flashback memory. In the mid 70s I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as the guy bringing in the ‘new’ 100 MB disk technology for the PDP-10 timesharing computers. The 100 MB disk drive was the size of a washing machine, and the removeable media was a heavy stack of disks a foot high and 18″ wide. Engineers were amazed that 8 of these could be chained together to get almost one gigabyte, an amount of storage that nobody would ever need. 🙂
For boot-up speed it is much cheaper to open msconfig.exe and remove all boot-time junk.
REPLY: Yes, been there done that, but my main issue is with application loading and images that I work with. – Anthony
“Frank Brus says:
January 9, 2011 at 6:16 pm
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.”
Not sure if anyone has replied, but I have a 120GB SSD in my laptop and the biggest improvement is weight/battery life. I have only a 4-cell battery but still get over 3 hours use on WiFi (with a 14.1″ screen and CD-ROM etc.) A 6-cell battery option is available rated as 5-6 hours, but this increases the weight. Boot-up seems fast, but since I also went from XP to Windows 7, comparison is a bit difficult. Also very quiet since no fan (be careful if you go for a high-end graphics card as these can end up generating a lot of heat which may not be dissipated in a small machine).
At the time I bought this (December ’09) the SSD was a major increase in price, but since I travel a lot with the my notebook, I felt it was justified and still feel that way. I have seen recent articles suggesting even main-stream arrays can get a big boost in performance by putting commonly accessed files onto SSD and then going for larger spinning disks for storage. I think the bottom line is that the larger HDD (500GB and above) can be somewhat slow (in relative terms) – something apparently noted by manufacturers who are adding large chunks of flash RAM to the high end models (cache sizes are now up to 4GB).
Have fun!
Sorry, Anthony – can’t see where you put the key to wind it up…
Just before Christmas, one of the component drives in the RAID array in my 4 year old HP died gracefully. When I went to the Best Buy, I did notice both the SSD and hybrid SSD units. However, since I plan on a new desktop in a year, I opted for two slightly larger conventional drives, costing about $100 total. Using my existing Acronis software, it took about 30 minutes from cracking the case to going back to work. However, if the WIN7 upgrade to my laptop goes well, I will definitely opt for a SSD.
Oddly, the holdup on the WIN7 upgrade is caused by Acronis. The latest version of True Image is the only one which supports WIN7 fully. I have found that it is buggy, and the “new and improved” user interface makes some very basic operations nearly impossible. Acronis has saved my bacon too many times to put myself in a position where I can’t use it.
“… if you have a database that’s doing terabytes of writes every day, the SSD is much cheaper than an array of HDD with similar throughput rates.”
I dunno. Last I heard, the SSDs still started to have reliability problems after around a million writes — which is a lot for an ordinary PC, but only a couple of years or less for a volatile database. Keep those backups handy…
While all the SSD enthusiasm expressed here makes me want to follow suit, I might draw your attention, ladies & gentlemen, to a customer review of Kingston’s SSD laptop version:
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-SSDNow-Notebook-SV100S2N-128GZ/dp/B004BDORMY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&tag=wattsupwithth-20
This guy says he bought 3 of those, with 2 (66,66 pc) conking out beyond repair within a few days.
Has me puzzled.
All you poor fools who give business to Microsloth are paving the way for a disgusting new globalist eugenics plan to “eliminate 80% of the world’s population”.
Bill Gates talks about putting vaccines in mosquitos and reducing world population in the same sentence. Figure it out, people… connect a dot for once… by using these inferior Microsloth products you are not only costing yourself a significant penalty in computer down-time and hassles, but you’re actually funding your own demise! Help destroy the New World Order by boycotting:
• Microsloth
• Google / YouTube
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Yahoo
And most importantly, do not allow Obaaama to pass his new Internet ID. Once this is passed, free speech is gone for good.
I’d always said that adding more mem to the PeeCee was useless as a speedup. Since the advent of 1988’s Commodore Amiga’s fast, reset-proof and memory-chip based “RAD” drive, I predicted flash drives would become the norm and, here we are. A faster drive on the heavily disk-based PeeCee is always going to be faster than adding mem. Well done Anthony.
Some notes on my experience with SSD:
– They are reliable, though I backup as usual.
– They provide a performance boost above and beyond maxing out your RAM. I had 12GB of RAM and would still suffer with “thrashing” slowdowns, or outright hangs for several minutes. Those are gone.
– Boot/login performance is much much better. The minute I can see the desktop, it’s usable. Used to be even if I could manage to launch a program from the start menu right after boot, it’d take 30 seconds before it would actually appear. Now everything is nearly instantaneous (at most a few seconds).
– Don’t listen to the guy telling you to disable your pagefile in Windows. Microsoft experts recommend against this, and I think they know what they are talking about. Just make sure your pagefile is on your SSD – or even better, on a different SSD.