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.
The biggest nod in favour of SSDs for me is that they run cooler and with a fraction of the watts needed for a “traditional” HD. This makes them appealing for use in sailboats (a personal interest) where they can be the storage on mini-ITX or pico-ITX motherboards that can be essentially “black boxed” down to the size of a paperback or so and stowed, fanless, inside the navigation station, safe from weather and from the corrosive effects of salt air, which the usual case fans in laptops or desktops merely makes worse. The low power draw is also desirable considering that a sailboat underway must make every amp and watt from sun, wind or alternator.
They are (or should be) more resistant to shocks as well, and a sailboat in heavy weather can vibrate, twist and thump in all the major axes, making the running of an OS from a HD problematic. PCs on sailboats are used in place of chart plotters and for running SSB radio communications, obtaining weather charts, etc., as well as the usual file keeping a floating office would require. The computing needs are low…a typical 2005 business laptop could handle everything, so even the better sort of netbook would suffice today. I rigged a USB “puck” style GPS to my Asus netbook a few days ago and downloaded some NOAA nav charts…voila! I now have a one-kilo, $300 plotter that does mail, YouTube, browsing and OpenOffice. (“Dedicated” plotters run $1000-$5000, by contrast). And I can keep every chart NOAA has on a $15 flash drive.
SSDs are an intriguing advance and certainly worthy of consideration both today and down the road. Whether they will be as durable and cheap as HDs, I don’t know. For certain machines and a large number of situations, they don’t have to be, as people will want in certain form factors a decent screen and longevity over rapid file transfer and huge storage capacities. Data will in many situations be “outsourced” and will not necessarily reside in the device.
Bernd>
“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.”
The first half of that is a common myth. Windows handles page files pretty well, and has done since at least XP. If it doesn’t need to page out to disk, it won’t. The second half is true, but then again, if you need to page to disk, it’s faster than not being able to do so.
In general, what Windows actually does is page out stuff that isn’t used, which for most users is most of the Windows overhead. If it doesn’t need to be accessed, it never gets paged back in.
Pretty pricey though. I can get 2 TB for less than the 220 USD that would cost me. Have you ever thought of upgrading to a real OS instead and dumping Windoze?
Could it be fitted inside a laptop in the place of the HD?
Caveats:
Windows 7 is recommended. Vista needs some system features turned off otherwise it’ll wear out the SSD early due to a limited number of write cycles. In particular demand paging and disk defragmentation need to be turned off as these result in excessive writes to the disk.
Get about twice the maximum amount of storage you expect to need. SSD’s main advantage is there no latency due to head stepping i.e. positioning the read/write head on the proper track and then waiting for the platter to spin to the right location. The downside of an SSD is erase time which is glacial. To get around the abysmal erase time instead of writing new data over old data the SSD must write the new data to an already erased and ready-to-write region. A background task runs that goes along and erases stale data to keep a constant supply of ready-to-write regions. If the SSD is starved for space i.e. this becomes more difficult.
Windows 7 will automatically turn off demand paging for an SSD. Demand paging manages RAM such that when RAM space is running short it keeps track of what RAM resident stuff is being hit a lot and which isn’t then swaps the least frequently used RAM data out to disk to make room for more active data. With demand paging turned off it becomes very important to have lots of RAM in the system so as to avoid out-of-RAM situations.
With those caveats in mind then it’s just a matter of cost-performance benefits. SSD is 5x – 10x more expensive than magnetic disk and you need more of it to ensure you don’t get premature failures and performance hits from not enough pre-erased regions available during intense activity.
Just as a side note I designed hardware and software for the first hard disk cache for the IBM PC over 25 years ago and over 30 years ago the first RAM-disk for a personal computer. Those were the good old days when a lone wolf like me could do big things on a shoestring budget in a small lab.
Ah, nothing beats the feeling when you get something cool and new that works better than you expected it to!
Tripod says:
January 9, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Anthony, The Amazon site has one very negative customer report each for a desktop and a laptop. Look forward to your hearing how your SSD performs long term.
P.S. Could fitting SSDs save the planet from imminent destruction?
I think Tom’s Hardware did a project like this about 6 months ago.
What they did is use the SSD as a home for the operating system (windows 7).
You want to keep ever changing data off of the SSD because they (flash memory) have
a limited number of write cycles. Also do not use the SSD for the virtual memory cache as the performance will deteriorate over time.
My striped Fujitsu 15K RPM, SAS RAID smokes this and has a much better MTBF :p
Does CO2 affect it?….
You are turning into a real geek there dude! Next you will load up Ubuntu and make the switch 🙂
REPLY: I already run Ubuntu and Slackware on other projects, but prefer Win7 for my blogging machine at home due to wide compatibility with almost everything in the the wild – Anthony
Sounds like a neat bit of kit, but oh dear, look at the Amazon review for the 2.5″ laptop version!
“By
Biztekguy – See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SATA II 3GB/s 2.5 Inch Notebook Bundle SV100S2N/128GZ (Electronics)
SSD drives promised to be the answer for my sales team, who wanted an instant-on solution for their laptops. The drives also gave me greater confidence than the I had with mechanical drives. So I bought three of these Kingston drives.
The imaging kit made the transfer a breeze and the new drives were up and running in less than an hour.
Within two weeks of installation, two of the drives failed catastrophically with no warning. In each case, the users merely shut down and rebooted. Upon reboot, there was no hard drive found. I’m not going to wait for the third one to fail. I’m replacing it with another brand.
Kingston tech support and warranty repair proudly noted that their drives only fail 1% of the time. In the IT world, that is unacceptably high. My experience of 66.6% is a disaster.
”
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-SSDNow-Notebook-SV100S2N-128GZ/product-reviews/B004BDORMY/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Prior comment mentioned using Acronis True Image Home (TIH) with Win7. I used to be an Acronis user too, BUT: When I went to RAID1 mirrored discs for my ”D” drive after install SSD ”C” drive, on checking with Acronis tech support was told that TIH does NOT support RAID1. Bummer. . . OTOH, I’ve found that bundled Win7 backup is ”good enough” for my purposes; supports all the backups I need to do.
I have my SSD ready to install, along with a switch to 64 bit Windows-7. I restricted mytself to just a 64 Gig SSD; enough for Windows, Norton-360, and PhotoShop.
Back in the days of Word Perfect, and 5 1/4 inch 360 K floppy disks, I had seven megs of “above board” RAM, and my system was set up to load WP or whatever else I was using into RAM, and run it from there. The only thing you could use “above board” RAM for anyway, was a phantom drive. Lotus 1-2-3 screwed all that up with their silly copy protection, so I couldn’t copy Lotus 123 fromt he floppies to the ramdrive; so I ditched lotus for a competitor that let me do that.
About the Kingston SSD low reliability experienced by the Amazon reviewer, I guess it’s due to the “Enhanced Write Filter” like algorithm used to extend the MTBF of those devices.
AFAIK, to avoid frequent writes to the flash memory, which would lead to a premature departure of the flash, the write operations are diverted to an embedded RAM buffer and discharged in flash periodically.
If you remove the power supply while one of that data transfer is not performed and the data are still into the ram buffer, the flash disk could be corrupted and the disk could need a new formatting.
Massimo
I have two 500 Gb drives in exactly that situation . . mind you I also have a failed 1Tb disc drive that has failed in the same manner for the same reason ( we have lots of power cuts here ).
Dave Springer says:
January 10, 2011 at 7:32 am
Just as a side note I designed hardware and software for the first hard disk cache for the IBM PC over 25 years ago . . .
When IBM announced their new PC, we ordered one; I think in October of ‘81. It took until March of the following year before it arrived and was up and running. We added a small harddrive (Miniscribe of Longmont, CO) later and with instellation the cost of that, alone, was $500. That was about the same as the PC XT. The MiniScribe story is interesting (fraud!); see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe
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 was under that impression as well, and was going to ask. But googled it instead. I was pleasantly surprised to read that those early SSDs are gone and the new ones have significantly much higher write endurances. So much so that some are actually suggesting they be used in Database servers (I would not go that far).
So for a personal laptop – just do 2 things. buy one and use it! And backup!
Looks over his shoulder, at his ZX 81 with 16 K of ram (don’t mind the rampack wobble), it still works after almost 30 years.
I bought one as a Christmas gift this year for my daughter who is (like her Dad) a serious PC gamer. I think these will be adopted more widely as their use grows and prices drop. Those that will be the early adopters are PC gamers. Being “first to frag” is worth any price to a hardcore gamer.
@ur momisugly Waffle – you mention using both AVG AND Avast! at the same time. These are both AntiVirus programmes and it’s never recommended to have more that one, as they will be constantly arguing. In any case AVG sucks – a friends older PC was virtually unusable with it installed, despite all the normal clean up procedures. I removed it and substituted Avast! and the difference was amazing.
TomB you bring up an interesting point. As Anthony indicated, the prices on a per gb basis are already comparable. The only reason (I think) they have not taken over the low end is that at the low end, HDD are still a bit cheaper. But should ever these things win the day, then that is another selling point on the low end systems! It seems like no one needs a 500gb drive (you can always get a USB one) for the primary drive. So a 128gb primary on a netbook (even a tablet) at $100 (future) and that makes a great low end selling point! (low, but high performace!).
Anthony, you say your going to upgrade your laptop too. May I suggest that you look at the Zallman options. THey don’t have kits like you got, but for the laptop you shouldn’t need it (and for desktops you can by the things you need separately.).
There is nothing wrong with that Kingston, but the new Zallman’s are spectacular for the price. 280 Mb read, and 273 Write. and the price is quite good. Only a smidge better than that Kingston, but price wise worth it.
Been running SSDs for a couple of years now, the technology is running fast with upgrades.
guys, stop your home-brew advise on the pagefile. DO NOT turn it off. The reason is because a lot of software expects it to be there either way, so turning it off is asking for trouble. That is why MS and other actual experts tell you so. Go read up about it at the scource if in doubt.
Also, W7 is not a memory hog, Vista was. With your typical office and day-to-day apps open, you rarely need more than 1GB, as you can easily monitor in your task manager. W7 does not hog memory, it only keeps stuff in RAM until it is actually needed by other apps (and Linux did this all the way). You don’t need 4 GB with a 32Bit OS; and I don’t see any of the applications required to maintain this website to be in need of that. Again, if in doubt, check your task manager.
Oh BTW to those that talk about failure over time. You will note that, for example Anthony’s drive, the drive size will be 128 Gb been when formated you get significantly less than that. The controller sets aside a portion for re-mapping bad sectors.
It is correct that XP does not support Trim, but most manufacturers have a program that you can schedule to perform the same type of functionality.
SSD’s on an XP machine are not a death knell, you just need to make some settings adjustments.
I just built a new system with 32G SSD(under $80) 3 days ago . I put ubuntu on the SSD with /home and swap on the 1TB hard disk and a tweak to limit keeping track of file access times. I’m very pleased.