Examples of Productivity increase with SSD use...

Interesting that in the conclusion of this article;
See:
System Builder Marathon: TH's $2000 Hand-Picked Build : The Better Way To Spend $2000?

a major online publisher like Tom's Hardware admits that:
Quote:
"Because we always strive to prove the ultimate value of all three systems in the fairest possible manner, GeForce GTX 480 SLI joins SSD drives in the “too much cost, too little benchmark benefit” class of hardware that’s rarely (if ever) used in the System Builder Marathon series."

Note: bolded text by me.

I've been saying this since first being exposed to SSD's over a year ago.

I've actually gone further and said that benchmarks do not mirror how the SSD performs over time in any type real world usage situation.

Worse, all the benefits of a supposedly faster storage subsystem fails to materialize with any actual productivity increase. (ie. actually completing work/projects significantly faster).

Although SSD's are nominally faster than mechanical HD's, their strengths do not yet allow them to take the 'Best in Class' title when $$$$ are taken into consideration, capacity is taken into consideration and especially when a mechanical HD like the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid is used as a 'baseline' to the SSD real world comparisions.

What SSD's offer to provide is 'snap' (though most do not...) over a mechanical HD (at least not a modern and properly setup and maintained mechanical HD). Actual productivity benefits are few and far between (with SSD's).

The reason?

Work/(productivity) is not done on a storage subsystem - it is performed soley in RAM and driven by the processor. The storage subsystem is only a factor when we can produce continous amounts of 'finished' work to save (such as video) and even then, the current top SSD's (I'm looking at you here SandForce) is not capable of effectively dealing with those type of situations in a manner which shows a sustained and continued productivity benefit over mechanical HD's.


Does anybody have any 'proof' where SSD's helped actually increase their productivity?


(and not a situation where a notebook is simply needed to be booted multiple times per day to use 'lighter' programs... I'll concede that boot up time 'scores' do show (the top) SSD's as clear winners - especially as more and more complex programs are installed on the system and are needed to load at least partially at each boot...


but the productivity comparison that I'm interested in is comparing an optimized mechanical HD system using apps that taxes the system as fully as possible vs. the identical system with an SSD).

Looking forward to an enlightening (and hopefully civilized) discussion.

Thanks.

 

The two biggest real world gains I see with my SSD are the faster boot times (my system boots in about 17 seconds) and the load times in FS9. It would take typically 45 or more seconds to load a flight with a mechanical HDD, now it’s around 10 seconds with SSD. Firefox is another app that shows a real improvement in boot up time with an SSD. I do like how fast everything open with the SSD, and the overall snappy feel.

As far as price to performance ratio for me it is worth it. This part of the argument is really subjective based on individual needs and preferences.

Most people will probably side on the no it’s not worth it, and that’s fine as long as they respect the other side of the argument as well.

That’s my quick 2 cents worth

 

othonda,

thanks for your input.

I do respect your argument fully - I had forgotten how slow Flight Simulator was to load - and you're right - an SSD there is a huge improvement.

I guess any app/utility that relies solely/mostly on read speed will be benefitted with an SSD - but as you said, whether the price was worth the performance will be up to the individual.

I'm still waiting to see (eagerly, I might add) some proof that SSD's add more than 'snappiness' to a system.

What I hope to glean is narrowing down the factors (SSD/platform/apps/???) that contribute to an SSD giving a true 'WOW!' feeling across the board over a mechanical/hybrid HD).

 

For personal use, no it has not benefited myself. Where I can see these actually creating value is in customer service workstations. Where a rep may have to take 10 minutes to reboot it may only take 2 when there is a system issue. Also there a rep accesses multiple program applets hat are constantly loading and unloading from the system etc.

While you say it is only a few seconds saved if you can handle a call in 54 seconds compared to 60 your rep gets to handle essentially 10% more calls daily. This makes for less manpower for volume calling, a more satisfying caller experience, possibly lower hold times along with a host of other bennefits.

For general consumers the SSD has little to no cost bennefits. I will not argue that at all. It is a personal user experience and what you want from your system. Just like I have a 9800m GTS and it is overclocked. I don't need it but happen to have it and actually like it, while rarely used it is always there for me.

I can tell you though I get to enjoy the experience of my SSD much more often than my GPU. Especially wneh cruising the net etc. While agreed alot also is bandwidth dependent the system caches alot of small files and the SSDs are ideal for this. It truly makes a fat pipe to the web really work for you.....

 

The main differences I noticed from the SSD of a desktop I built last year are faster boot times, faster initial application load times and faster install times for all software and firmware. The difference in all of these was very large (a factor of 2 or more) and since this machine gets turned on and off almost every day, this is important.

That said, for a desktop, it doesn't make sense to choose between having a lot of storage and having fast storage unless you really need to have a lot of huge programs installed on the system drive. The desktop I built had the 80GB Intel G2 paired with a 1TB HDD. It was a fairly cheap machine -- roughly $1K (including the display and Windows 7 Professional) with the SSD being one of the more expensive components. I paid $215 for it and got a $21.50 rebate 3 months later which took it down to 2nd most expensive (behind the $200 display).

 

The WOW factor that you talk about for me is real, Let me give you some perspective.

My work machine is an old P4 running at 2.8GHz, with a standard mechanical hard drive. I use this machine everyday for all kinds of apps, Word, Excel, Printed circuit board viewers, Spice simulations, Photoshop, AS400, etc… This computer takes forever to boot and to load some of my more demanding apps. My old laptop the Asus G1 was my primary home computer for 3 ½ years till I got my Sager, and it’s not much faster than my work computer booting or using the same types if apps. I hope to get an upgraded machine next year, but even then I will be hard pressed to get anything even considered mid range let alone high end.

But when I go home and use my Sager Laptop, I always get a big smiling grin of how fast as a complete system it is. Booting and loading, everything just snaps open.

 

I agree with what tilleroftheearth is asking. I, too, would like to see benchmarks that more accurately represent real-world tasks and more information on real-world benefits.

Personally, I haven't seen much benefit of an Intel 80GB G2 over the WD Raptor it replaced in my desktop. As a matter of fact, I've spent more time trying to get it to work "right" that it has become more of a pain in my butt than it's worth. I'm awfully close to ripping it out of there and replacing it with a new 150GB Velociraptor.

That being said, the Vertex 2 in my laptop is insanely fast. I use my laptop for probably 80% of my tasks and gaming, so I guess that's a good thing, and worth it IMHO. However, there's a lot of compromise. For a laptop you have to compromise capacity for speed because of the costs of these SSD's and most laptops 15" and under have only a single HDD bay. I had to compromise my optical drive for a second HDD drive for storage.

Sure it's a personal preference, but I also think the companies can do a much better job at educating the public on the details of their drives instead of shoveling bull down our throats telling us how beneficial it is to spend four to five times that of a traditional hard drive without sharing details (like idle time garbage collection, recommended end user maintenance and OS configuration, etc).

 

Productivity is a loaded term if there ever was one because whilst fast computers can help you to be more productive, it is still possible for you to be highly unproductive even if you have a fast computer. You can for instance waste alot of the resources at your disposal. This is an issue of work habit and expertise so lets elaborate. I've been writing and producing music using computers on and off for about 5 years. In that time I have owned 3x computers.

I started with:
Pentium 4 1.6ghz, 512mb RAM, 80gb hdd

About a year in I replaced that with this:
AMD X2 3800+ (socket 939), 1gb RAM, 160gb hdd

About 3 weeks ago, I finally replaced it with this:
Core i7 740QM, 6gb RAM, 120gb ssd + 500gb hdd

Now, despite doing everything music wise through a computer for 5 years and despite a 12 fold increase in system memory and who knows what increase in cpu speed, I can't say my songs are 12 times more complex or 12 times better or I'm getting 12 times as much done.

I never used to do real time convolution because that was frankly nuts way back when. I always used to use Super Impulse Reverb (SIR) offline because it used to crush my cpu and eat up all my RAM with long impulse responses and that meant I couldn't do much else once I'd maxed out my PC and it was stuttering all over the place. Now, I can run multiple instances of SIR in realtime and my computer is still telling me to bring it on. And so with that extra leeway there is the tendency to become wasteful. Just because you can run 5x instances of SIR when a placeholder will do until rendering time doesn't mean its a good idea or that its an efficient use of cpu resources. The first thing I have to acknowledge is that I have more PC now than I ever really need and that the biggest limiting factor in my own productivity is my own work habit.

But ssds right? The thing I noticed first when I got an ssd was how silent it was. The hdd activity light was going like mad and...no sound. It was actually jarring because I'm used to the whirring sound of the plater and the ticking noise you get whenever you access the disk, whenever you hit your pagefile, whenever you boot up and shut down and open and close apps.

Find a way to eliminate the cpu fan and I'll finally be able record acoustic guitar with both my computer and a mic within arms reach. This way I won't have to worry about throwing away takes because of fan noise in the mic feed and I won't have to walk across the room to hit stop/start/record everytime I botch a take.

I guess I could practice guitar more instead so I botch less takes but then we are back to work habit and expertise.

 

It's called a desktop. Big heatsink with 120mm fan spinning silently.

 

or desktop with watercooling and the rad, reservoir and 120MM fans in a closet or a next room. almost no noise at all, just some minor electronics hum if your ear is right next to the board

 

Check with JJB. I know he's gotten some pretty non-trivial speedups of his image processing when going with an SSD. An SSD is not the answer to all workloads, but it most definitely is to anything that's disk-limited. And the larger the dataset, the more likely that is the case any more.

 

True, but if he is not in a soundproofed room, all that is unnecessary.

 

When you record guitar, a huge part of the sound you get depends on what room you are in and where you are in that room. You need to be able to move around and also have your computer within arms reach or you do what I do currently. Which is walk in and out alot.

 

Could you explain this please.

 

Productivity? I spend a hellava lot less time waiting for things to load on my new laptop. If it saves me even only a few hours worth of work time over a year, it's more than paid for itself.

---

"tiny file access" is the major benefit of an SSD (apart from the borked JMicron ones). What he's saying is because a large number of small files are downloaded when you view "the internet", *bandwidth permitting*, HDD access can slow down the end user's experience of how fast a page loads.

If you copy a single 1Gb file between HDDs they'll work at max read/write speed. If you copy 100000 files totalling 1Gb they'll take at least 10x the time do copy *the same physical number of 0s and 1s*. This is due to the drive head needing to physically move between the different areas of the drive which in computer-time-scale takes FOREVER. A SSD eliminates the delays this induces.

SSDs just crush, maim and destroy mechanical HDDs in benchmarks looking at random small file accesses, this is why they are so much more "snappy". This is why small SSDs as boot drives are a great compromise between their advantages and the overall $/GB. But I'm just bragging as this is what I did

 

Won't the bandwidth of a 7200rpm hdd always be greater than even the fastest residential internet connections (~20-30mb/s)?

 

residential Fios in some areas ( Korea, Japan, and parts of Europe especially ) have no issue being higher than 30mb/s

 

For consumers, SSDs don't give much benefit, though for businesses, I'd say the advantages in productivity are much clearer. The main way it boosts productivity is by minimizing downtime due to their reliability and ruggedness, especially in the field.

 

I didn't even consider the importance of small files when moving my temporary internet files to my 7200RPM HDD. Just moved them back to the SSD and will see if I am able to notice it being "snappier".

In that vein, what do you think of the TEMP files in general and their location?

 

I'm browsing the web now on a 5400rpm hard drive. I can't really say it's slower than my SSD. This may be because I set my cache to memory instead of to the hard drive. I would not recommend buying an SSD to increase your web experience.

SSD do beat HDDs in booting, application loading, file copying, installing and multi tasking. It those areas they can buy you back minutes of your life and in that way could improve your productivity.

In laptops they are also more reliable. In that way they can also improve productivity.

My SSD adds 30 minutes of battery life over a power efficient 5400rpm hard drive. In that way it can also improve my productivity.

They can also decrease my productivity: I've only got 64GB of space, which means I need to move files to my external HDD more often.

 

For a machine used beyond the "basics" (web browsing, e-mail, word processing, watching DVDs), SSDs will show some benefit. Any task that doesn't hit small files often is not going to benefit from an SSD. I like the idea of sticking browser cache files to RAM for volatility, going to have to figure that out for Win7 all over again.

 

I can help you with that one, it's quite easy in Firefox.

 

Unforunately, I've become a Chrome-a-holic. Fortunately, it looks like it's just a simple change to the shortcut with some switches I need to point without having to go nuts on junctions anymore. Now I just need to read up on various ramdrive utilities, but it's probably best not to hijack this thread.

FWIW, here's the format:

Code:

chrome.exe –disk-cache-dir=(CACHE_DIR) –disk-cache-size=(SIZE_IN_BYTES)

No parentheses around those values. The < and > get eaten up in the forums so I made em ( and ).

 

The browser cache is on your hard drive and comprises all the bits and pieces that make up a web page every time you download one (i.e. all the elements, images, sounds etc). Instead of re-downloading all of these things every time you refresh a webpage or navigate away and come back, your browser will hit up its cache to see if you already have it. If you do, it will load these elements from your hard drive instead.

There are several reasons why ssds are very good at handling browser cache. The first is that the read/write patterns associated with looking up and retrieving web page elements from cache are frequent, small and random.

Hdds are not good at frequent small and random read/write requests because its read/write head has to seek constantly. Since this is a mechanical process not electrical (usually by means of a gas powered actuator), hdd seek times have large variance and they are slow. On the order of 100 times slower than an ssd which has no mechanical parts and where retreiving/writing data to one block is just as fast as any other block.

Hdds are good at sequential requests because the read/write head isn't interrupted by having to seek all over the platter and you can even compare benchmarks to get a rough sense of the magnitude of same.

Heres a Western Digital Scorpio Black 500gb:



And heres a (non settled in) OCZ Vertex 2 120gb:





You'll notice that the ssd has better transfer rates across the board but if you look at the sequential rates, the hdd is good. My Vertex 2 has reached what I think is the oft talked about 'settled in state' where I get roughly 75mb/s sequential transfer rates. The ssd and hdd handle large, compressed file copy writes about the same. The ssd reads sequentially about twice as fast.

But the difference in random read/writes is much, much larger. The ssd writes about 30 times faster and in some cases it is even more. In desktop pcs with the right chipset it is not uncommon to see it go up to 50 or 60 times faster. At high queue depths the difference is even bigger (a magnitude of 100 times faster or more). The thing is that you notice things like file copy times because this is something you can easily measure with a stop watch, that you can see has a visible effect. The largely invisible process of browser caching isn't something that is easy for many people to measure or see or track.

The latter half of this post may have gone all theoretical but the basic idea holds. Ssds are suited to very frequent, small, highly random workloads and high queue depths. Its true that server/database kind of work where high queue depths are common and you are dealing with tonnes of simultaneous read/write requests is going to see the most immediate benefits from ssds which I guess is why the initial target market was enterprise.

For home use, certain things that ssds are good at are overkill I agree. On the other hand theres alot about ssds that are suitable for home use but which have nothing to do with speed or throughput. You can make these things much smaller than mechanical hard drives can ever be, so you can fit them into very small computers. They are silent too which is far and away the most noticeable thing about them for me, having owned noisy computers for years.

^^^ Yeah you can use a RAM disk for caching too but when you power down don't you lose everything on the RAM disk given that its, you know, volatile?

 

How do you mean?

 

I mean that the screenshot of the Vertex 2 above was made when the drive was new (shortly after a fresh install of Windows 7).

Now all of the write speeds are much lower. Sequential, large random and small random (high queue depth) write speeds are half of what they were in that screenshot. Why write speeds get throttled isn't fully understood because Sandforce are so...clandestine about how their technology works but it is very common. Theres even a big thread about it on the OCZ forums so I'll see if I can find the link in my browser history. The theory is that Durawrite is doing this and it is part of a (rather convoluted) wear limiting mechanism. Tony over at OCZ has flat out said this but I say 'theory' because honestly, nobody but Sandforce knowns how it really works.

 

For me the SSD means the computer waits for me to act versus the other way around. I can tell the difference between my laptop with an Intel SSD and the work computers we have (mostly with 4200 RPM and some with 5400 RPM hard drives) boot-up times, loading apps etc. I do large Excel database files and large PowerPoint files - Home computer with SSD loads its and ready to go in 5-7 seconds. Work computers 30+ seconds. Over the course of a week saving quite a bit of time. Much like others have mentioned, add that up over a year and it has paid for itself.
Went so far with all my travel requirements to buy a netbook- the old mechanical drive got immediately swapped for a budget SSD. Makes it a worthy travel companion now. And it will now open and process those same large excel files & PPT files in about 15-20 seconds. To me the SSDs are worth every penny in time I can apply to the computer versus waiting for the HDD light to finally stop and the app to respond.

 

@ Hayte, don't want to take this thread off topic but it's not normal to have half of those scores unless you've just written large amounts of data to it. When TRIM is working like it should speeds should pick up quickly. I've posted some fresh and used CDM scores for Sandforce drives in the SSD thread. I think I know what topic you're referring to on the OCZ forum. Many of the posters there are running in RAID without TRIM.

 

I pm'ed you on the points where it goes off topic. On topic, the point was that even with my ssd doing half the sequential and random transfer rates in the picture I posted above, its still as fast as a hdd at sequential writes and vastly quicker at random writes. It is random read/write patterns where ssds diverage so much from hdds and highly random workloads where you see the greatest benefit.

The other great benefit of course is - no moving parts. Which means no mechanical noise, no chance of mechanical failure which makes ssds far more reliable than ssds in the short term. We know what kills NAND flash (program/erase cycles) and so can more accurately predict the useful lifespan of the drive and add a bit more leeway if theres wear leveling involved. That Intel presentation video you posted a while back says all of this (great video btw).

Thats another thing that aids productivity - much lower chance of short term drive failure compared to hdds, no possibility of head crashes, resistance to mechanical shock etc.

It means less likelihood that you have an emergency half way through your typical upgrade/replace cycle. Less hassle and worry to deal with when transporting your laptop etc.

 

IBM did studies on productivity ages ago. They proved conclusively that fast *response* time greatly improved productivity.

Back then, improvements cost multiple 100's of thousands of dollars, and back then, you could buy *new* houses for thousands of dollars.

It's all about a person's 'getting in the groove' and just flowing thru the workload.

SSD's absolutely provide that 'flow'.

 

Amen to that!!! That snappy feeling makes a world of difference rather than the blah of waiting the extra second for things.

IRST 10.0.0.1043 load windows about 2 seconds faster than MSAHCI drivers. It's only 2 seconds, but I can't believe how much faster it "feels".

 

I can honestly say I notice no difference whether I have a stuffed internet cache or I delete it all. I just don't see how an SSD would speed up internet usage. The browser still has to compare the files coming in to the ones in cache before it can spring stuff up on your screen anyway.

 

skid...

A study that was conducted 'ages ago' is not really connected with what is available now.

While I agree 100% that faster response times can increase productivity - we must understand that the study you're referring to was increasing the response times measurable by a stop watch - not micro seconds that we are currently talking about now.

Even if we can save enough micro seconds to make a benefit of a few hours over a year, the high entrance cost of SSD's will not make them economically viable unless the hours saved is by scientists/governments/etc. where an hour might mean a cool million or more.

Do you have a link to that study? I'd be interested in reading it (again).

 

Thanks for all the answers (and for the slightly off topic ones too!).

Just want to recap that in very rare situations do SSD actually provide a true productivity increase.

Like I hinted in my original post: I'm not comparing an SSD to a bloat filled, non optimized O/S running on an non-optimized mechanical HD at 5400 RPM's or worse at 4200 RPM's.

I'm comparing them to properly set up systems that get in the users way as little as possible.

This includes a clean install of the O/S.

An optimally partitioned mechanical HD.

Fully maxing out the RAM the system and apps can make use of.

And finally, a maintenance schedule that keeps the system running at its peak (which includes using PerfectDisk and CCleaner).

With the above as a given, I have yet to see a productivity increase with an SSD (have tried over half a dozen in the last year) in my systems.

The exceptions are:

Faster boot times and FS9 loading times by othonda. Although I have not seen that in my systems when all the programs are fully loaded (about 65GB's worth of apps and utilities).

Phone support reps as suggested by TANWare. Here, I can see how even a second can add up to substantial savings for a company over XX number of users and XXX number of days in a year.

sgogeta4 suggested that their (SSD's) reliability and ruggedness are an indirect productivity boost. But that is still being decided (really only a little over two years 'in the field'...).

Phil offers increased battery life as another indirect productivity improvement with an SSD. Though, with most notebooks, the very slight increase in run time would not be noticeable (Phil is running an SU4100 UMPC system if I'm not mistaken).

So, since my usage does not mirror any of the above usage scenarios (nor many other 'typical' users), and boot times and application load times are normally a one time a day deal for me (I have all my 'default' applications open and waiting to be used within minutes of booting up the system for the day), I guess I can only conclude one thing:

For a (single) workstation user, an SSD offers very little in increased productivity.

Worse, as Phil mentioned, with the restrictive capacities they are currently offered at, they may even hamper overall productivity too.



I would still love to get a direct response to my original post:

"... the productivity comparison that I'm interested in is comparing an optimized mechanical HD system using apps that taxes the system as fully as possible vs. the identical system with an SSD."

Looking forward to more (on topic) responses.

 

Since we know that a cumulation of milliseconds of work every year has little significant overall increase in productivity, perhaps we should look at the morale instead.

Humans are being strained into mulititasking and becoming more and more productive. Our nervous systems are only capale of so much before burning out. What good does 1-2 hours a year of increased productivity gain me? Very little, cuz my employer (were I to be in He11 again) most certainly won't compensate me for my increased output, but will demand it nonetheless.

How many people "go crazy" waiting for system to load, pages to open, programs to start, documents to open? While someone is on the line waiting for you to restart/open/whatever, you get annoyed with the lag. A little snappiness can improve overall outlook and therefore increase the productivity.

How can we measuere snappiness?

 

You've missed the point twice now that I would like to compare to a state of the art setup (mechanical vs. SSD).

Again, I agree that snappiness is not to be underestimated. However, I do not see productivity improvements over a 7K500 or (worse) an XT hybrid with an SSD.

Why? Because especially the XT gives the SSD so little edge in 'snappiness' that even that argument falls flat.

 

You're right. I wasn't really addressing your point.

So, to make sure here. What you already know is that SSD's clearly boot faster than HDD's, and most likely the XT (but maybe not by much here). What you'd like to see is if the SSD can carry out a function faster. Say... video editing in CS5, using the same setup but from a 7200RPM HDD, a SSD, and the XT?

I've got an SSD and a HDD, but no XT. I also don't know of a way to time things like that other than a stopwatch, nor do I use CS5 for that matter.

Is there a test that you can propose you'd like to see productivity differences that some of us can carry out?

 

A thought.

I just recently saw the vid on youtube where 24 SSD's were placed in RAID. They then showed off the system by running a command that launched ALL of the programs in the start menu.

Would that be a guage enough of productivity? I could try working with a 135MB image in CS3, which I use, and see the difference, but still don't have a measuring method for timing.

 

I don't know about all of you, but where I used to work, I would boot up my PC, login, start up all my programs walk away, get a coffee, have some water cooler talk, walk back to my PC, and get working. I don't know if it loaded in 2 minutes instead of five or six or even seven if I would be that much more productive, because it's already loaded by the time I'm back to my desk. It certainly is nice to have stuff load much more quickly, but loading a program is only a small part of what people do every day and hopefully don't need to do it repeatedly otherwise they have other ways to improve productivity.

 

I don’t mean to hijack the thread but I have this though:

It is interesting the most mentioned computer part that is slow or the “bottleneck” in today’s computer’s are the hard drive. It is clear SSD drives are significantly faster than their mechanical counterparts, yet we still have not made significant gains in productivity with these new drives.

With that said is it possible that we will not see any more significant gains until we totally revamp how we interface to our computers. I am talking about the need to be able to control our computers in different ways than a keyboard and a mouse. When we are able to control our computers through thought and/or with the addition of instant voice command, then maybe we can make new significant gains.

For example word opens pretty much instantly with today’s hardware, what really takes up the time is typing up the document. Now if the computer could type up your document through the process of just thinking through the document, I think that would speed things up considerably.

One of the problems I see with this would be how do you counter the problem associated with ADHD. Ops I digress.

So are we rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns on productivity with hardware improvement?

 

Not particularly. If it's the same video I'm thinking of, that was done by an IT guy at an ad agency with the intent to showcase absurd performance. It's not even remotely a realistic setup or usage.

Found it. YouTube - Samsung SSD Awesomeness

Yep. I spend boot up time taking my jacket off, unpacking my bag, and settling in. That's not productive time anyway.

As far as voice goes, few if any people can do effective dictation, and I don't think I could think straight hearing dictation from the cube next to me. I really don't want the computer to take what I'm thinking and throw it on the screen. It's fairly garbled. Even this paragraph has been reorganized a few times for the logic to have better flow. It would take a ton of time editing out extraneous and poorly thought out concepts. For business purposes, scrutinizing every word and number is key. I find more time is spent in editing and formatting a finished product than in actual content creation (without factoring in approvals, confirmations, negotiations, and slow response times).

 

It's not that I was recommending the setup. Since the original poster here wants data leading to the SSD's performance relative to HDD's and hybrid HDD/SSD, I thought it a good idea to help him figure out what we can do to make our own experiements.

So, I don't want to borrow 24 SSD from my nearest and dearest friends. I want to know if he'd accept testing where we setup the OS on HDD and then launch all start menu programs and compare that to the same done with SSD and Momentus XT. How to accurately time it? I don't know. If that's not an acceptable experiment, then what is? What exactly is acceptable to help determine real time increases in performance.

On a side note: I do think that we're reaching a cap on the abilities for people to increase performance, where hardware improvements will surpass our abilities to fully utilize them.

Dictating thoughts would be HILARIOUS. Can you imagine the letter you're trying to "dictate" being totally jumbled with the song that's constantly playing in the back of your mind, and the dirty thoughts that you most likely have about 30+ times a minute. Oh! Can you imaging how workplaces would have to revamp certain policies in regard to that? LMAO

 

It is called IOPS. If your HDD is limited to 600 operations per second sequential with no other overhead then you will only be able to read and compare that many files per second. since access times etc can limit this even much further for random reads HDD's will access only a few small files at a time. Since access times and seek times are lower and IOPS are much higher you can compare alot of small files quickly from the browser cache. As the net pipe gets fatter this becomes even more important.................

 

This whole demo is fairly ludicrous. If you had 24 5,400rpm laptop hard drives in that RAID0 array, you would not be able to distinguish the performance of the system from the one of that SSD array.

 

+1 to Tanware.

To Trottel: If you want to test this, then bring up a web browser. Then, start loading about 4 or 5 applications on your machine. While those applications are still loading, try browsing around to different web pages. Your web browsing will slow down to a crawl, because your hard drive is struggling to keep up with all of the data read/write requests.

The measurement of how many of these read/write requests a drive can handle at once is called IOPS (Input/Outputs per second). A 7200rpm 2.5" mechanical hard drive has an IOPS measurement somewhere around 500-600. An SSD has an IOPS measurement somewhere around 35,000 - 40,000, which is almost 10,000% greater than a mechanical drive. It is the IOPS, and not the transfer rates, that is the real value of an SSD - you can pound the drive with multiple read/write requests all day long, and it will be able to keep up.

The rea

 

Man, I don't know. I used to be so high on SSDs. But I was running an 8 year old system with a Pentium M and a 40GB 4200rpm drive. I got a DM4 with a 7200rpm and i5...and man, everything pretty much opens up right away. FF takes about 2 seconds the first time, then .5or so the following...same goes with itunes/word...whatever. So I don't know how big much better an SSD will be, speed wise. Battery wise...guess it could be helpful.

 

I'd like to know if you all have reached a conclusion/consensus yet? Does all this mean that the increased performance of the SSD is superficial at best?

 

Here is a video I just made. I take my laptop, boot Windows, and start every single application on my laptop all at once by putting shortcuts into my Startup folder. My computer goes from power-on to loading all 27 apps in about 1 minute.
YouTube - Why I love my SSD - Windows 7 boot + loading 27 applications in about 1 minute.

Most mechanical hard drives would still be stuck at the Windows loading screen 1 minute after power-on. The benefit of an SSD is not about load times of individual applications... it's about the ability to load multiple read/write requests at your machine, without it even skipping a beat. This is where the massively high IOPS measurement of an SSD comes in, which is a factor of 100x greater than a mechanical hard drive.

An SSD is a nice-to-have luxury item that is technically not necessary to use your computer. It's like a 24" monitor. Do most people NEED a 24" monitor? No, technically, you can do everything that you need to on a 17" or 19" monitor. But people buy 24" monitors, because the extra screen size is nice, and makes the computer more enjoyable to use... just like an SSD.

 

That's nice, but you need to understand that very few people would have any practical interest in that kind of an exercise. I think the question here is for tangible productivity benefits for the typical tasks that people use their computer for every day. There is little doubt that such benefits exist, but many people, including myself, wonder whther the magnitude of those benefits justifies the considerable cost, in terms of money, and reduced storage space.

Plus, once you count the time people waste worrying about how to configure their system to work well with the SSD, enabling TRIM, etc., etc., wasting hours on issues that they wouldn't have with a hard drive, I am certain that many people would be much better off getting a mechanical HD and be done with it.

And I won't even start going into cases like my M4500 with the Crucial C300, which bluescreens the system after sleep, so I would have to forsake sleep altogether. As a consequence, rather than being able to wake-up my system in a matter of maybe 2 seconds at most, I would have to shutdown and boot the laptop every time, which takes more than ten times as long...

 

You are correct... what I did was extremely impractical. In my video, I stated that what I did was an extreme example, to demonstrate a point.

A more likely use case is this:
I am running one process in the background that is extremely disk-intensive (e.g. unzipping a file, or installing a program). I then run another process that uses the disk, like launching a web browser and browsing to a web page. That launch + browsing activity will be impacted, because a mechanical hard drive would be maxed out from the unzip / install process.

You're right. There are very few cases where from a pure productivity / practicality perspective, that an SSD would be justified.

It is purely a luxury item, just like buying a really big monitor. Or a Porsche. A Honda Accord would be much more practical, have larger passenger and cargo capacity, be much cheaper, and be lower maintenance. But if you want speed, and are willing to pay for the luxury of speed, you buy the Porsche. The SSD is the Porsche of the computer storage world.