SSD's: there yet, and what is what?

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I think it really depenends on the use case. For home users and most office users SSDs are really a nice to have. If your a pro who uses the computer intensively all day, e.g. a developer, the increase in productivity and morale (less waiting == less frustration) will warrant the higher price for ssds most of the time.

Of course the answer is always "it depends if you are willing to spend to get the speed" but for most people, the numbers do not add up in favour of SSDs.

For me to duplicate my fairly modest 2 1TB drives in RAID 1 (which would cost me £140) with Corsair SSDs I'd need to spend £4472 + cost of a controller to take 8 drives. And they are not the most expensive models.

That's just not viable even for a heavy home/power user to save what amounts to just a few minutes a day for 4-5 times the cost of the whole PC. You can get most of those minutes back just by tuning your system or changing your work practices. Heck, you can put together a pretty good home PC for the price of one single high end 256GB SSD.

Even most businesses are not going to quintuple their PC hardware costs for such small gains unless disc speed is really a massive and critical bottleneck. It's cheaper to have your staff twiddle their thumbs for a couple of minutes a day.

I certainly think that SSDs or something better will be the future (who doesn't want to replace the slowest bottleneck in their PC with something that fast?) but they will have to get a lot bigger and a lot cheaper before that happens.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think it really depenends on the use case. For home users and most office users SSDs are really a nice to have. If your a pro who uses the computer intensively all day, e.g. a developer, the increase in productivity and morale (less waiting == less frustration) will warrant the higher price for ssds most of the time.

If you are a professional, you are foolishly wasting commpany resources for virtually no gain in productivity. I would certainly fire anyone that recommended SSDs at this point in time for most business uses.

Hell, even 15k RPM SSDs aren't exactly cost effective for many business scenarios, but it's still much more cost effect than SSDs with virtually the same speed in most scenarios.

SSDs do excel in a very few corner cases with regards to cost/performance, but it's quite rare.

Anyone that recommends an SSD for business use is just foolish and wasteful, IMO.

Now what a person chooses to use their own personal money on, well some people have more cash to burn than others. So far SSD's have been a waste of money for me. But I'm fascinated with the technology, so I'm willing to budget money each year to experiment with them.

That said, there isn't a single useage scenario for anyone I consult with that would result in a SSD actually being a good idea or recommended unless they have cash to burn...

Its time will come, but that currently isn't now, IMO. Other than for the bleeding edge enthusiast who must have the latest and greatest. Like spending 1,000 USD on a CPU.

Regards,
SB

 

[Sxotty]

Who puts a 15k rpm into a laptop? SSDs shine in laptops and really are worth it there IMO. Mine was unusable for complex modeling (not 3d modeling ) before the SSD.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Who puts a 15k rpm into a laptop? SSDs shine in laptops and really are worth it there IMO. Mine was unusable for complex modeling (not 3d modeling ) before the SSD.

I must admit that laptops are probably the place where SSDs are good at the mo'. With laptops you expect to pay over the odds, get less performance and have a small capacity drive, so it fits right in. On the positive side, you get better battery life due to lower power usage of the SSD, along with the much better performance of the SSD over a laptop hard drive.

However, I've never recommended laptops to replace workstations unless you actually need to work on the move. They cost more and offer less, so like SSDs, they should be chosen as the correct tool to do a specific job, not a general replacement for the superior and cheaper desktop.

 

[Ilfirin]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=20

Installing an 80GB Intel Gen2 SSD provided, by a massive margin, the single largest boost in performance and overall "quality of use" to my desktop than any other upgrade to date (which include a 5870, 8GB DDR3 ram, 2TB RAID0 array for storage and a core i5).

The difference was so substantial, in fact, that my boss decided to buy all the developers at our company SSDs for their dev machines where the increase in productivity literally paid for itself in less than 2 weeks.

At the salary range a lot of developers get these days, 30+ seconds waiting for stuff all the time starts turning into dollars, FAST. Particularly with my co-worker who has just about an infinitesimal attention span where the second he has to wait for anything, he completely forgets everything he's doing, and then he's set back 10-15 minutes. I haven't heard him complain since we got em

 

[eastmen]

Of course the answer is always "it depends if you are willing to spend to get the speed" but for most people, the numbers do not add up in favour of SSDs.

For me to duplicate my fairly modest 2 1TB drives in RAID 1 (which would cost me £140) with Corsair SSDs I'd need to spend £4472 + cost of a controller to take 8 drives. And they are not the most expensive models.

That's just not viable even for a heavy home/power user to save what amounts to just a few minutes a day for 4-5 times the cost of the whole PC. You can get most of those minutes back just by tuning your system or changing your work practices. Heck, you can put together a pretty good home PC for the price of one single high end 256GB SSD.

Even most businesses are not going to quintuple their PC hardware costs for such small gains unless disc speed is really a massive and critical bottleneck. It's cheaper to have your staff twiddle their thumbs for a couple of minutes a day.

I certainly think that SSDs or something better will be the future (who doesn't want to replace the slowest bottleneck in their PC with something that fast?) but they will have to get a lot bigger and a lot cheaper before that happens.

Why can't you have both ?

I keep missing why you can't . Win 7 is 10 gigs. You can fit win 7 and a generous amount of programs on a 30 gig ssd. I have a 60 gig ssd with about 12 gigs free and I have batman , galciv 2 and mirrors edge installed on it.

But then I have a cheap $80 1TB drive in there for my media . So the things I want to open fast and load fast go on my ssd and the things that speed really doesn't matter. IT doesn't matter how fast my mp3s open or how fast fringe loads on netflix. Those are all almost instant to begin with.

As prices go down you can fit more and more on the ssd.

The other important aspect are laptops. My hardrive sitting idle will use over 5watts of power. The ssd will use .05watts of power. Then when both are active my ssd is using about 2watts while the hardrive is close to 10watts. Not only that but the ssd will finish almost everything faster than the hardrive. So in the end i save even more power and have my laptop last even longer over a hardrive in there.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Why can't you have both ?

I keep missing why you can't . Win 7 is 10 gigs. You can fit win 7 and a generous amount of programs on a 30 gig ssd. I have a 60 gig ssd with about 12 gigs free and I have batman , galciv 2 and mirrors edge installed on it.

You can have both if you're willing to pay for both, but then you're moving towards the "money no object" argument. The price per GB is still vastly more on SSDs than hard drives, and you don't get enough of those GB's.

Looking at my personal usage, a 60 GB SSD is not really enough for me (my installed games drive alone is 254 GB), and I need to access other stuff all over. I'd either need to be constantly moving stuff around and reinstalling, or live without the benefits of the SSD. And I'd still be having to power the hard drives in addition to the SSDs.

Sure, I could fill a SSD with the system drive or a few pre-chosen applications, but then I'd not get any benefit if every time I needed to load something it still gets bottlenecked when I need to load data in off an ancillary hard drive or use some other, non-SSD installed app. I could reorganise everything I do and the way I do it, or I could just not do a lot of the stuff I do, but then how is that a benefit to me? I just don't see enough benefit to making all those compromises to go back to a very small (if fast) SSD, that in real world usage doesn't get a chance to use all it's speed if I'm still having to use hard drives too.

Maybe your approach would work if you had a machine dedicated to a few particular tasks, but if you're a general power user, small SSDs aren't really good enough, and they are still far too expensive. £500-600 (half the price the system was to build) for 256 GB is not worth it for most people when they can have a terrabyte for £70. I'd love to have a load of SSDs, but not so much that I would pay that much of a price premium for them, and not if I have to still bottleneck through hard drives anyway.

 

[eastmen]

You can have both if you're willing to pay for both, but then you're moving towards the "money no object" argument. The price per GB is still vastly more on SSDs than hard drives, and you don't get enough of those GB's.

Looking at my personal usage, a 60 GB SSD is not really enough for me (my installed games drive alone is 254 GB), and I need to access other stuff all over. I'd either need to be constantly moving stuff around and reinstalling, or live without the benefits of the SSD. And I'd still be having to power the hard drives in addition to the SSDs.

Sure, I could fill a SSD with the system drive or a few pre-chosen applications, but then I'd not get any benefit if every time I needed to load something it still gets bottlenecked when I need to load data in off an ancillary hard drive or use some other, non-SSD installed app. I could reorganise everything I do and the way I do it, or I could just not do a lot of the stuff I do, but then how is that a benefit to me? I just don't see enough benefit to making all those compromises to go back to a very small hard drive, that in real world usage doesn't get a chance .o use all it's speed if I'm still having to use hard drives too.

Maybe your approach would work if you had a machine dedicated to a few particular tasks, but if you're a general power user, small SSDs aren't really good enough, and they are still far to expensive. £500-600 (half the price the system was to build) for 256 GB is not worth it for most people when they can have a terrabyte for £70.

But look at what most users in offices need. Does the normal user need a 1TB drive ? Why can't they go with a 60 gig ssd or an 80 gig ssd if its office and other small apps thats all thats needed anyway. The rest can be saved to network shares. The speed increases would be amazing though compared to conventional driv es

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

But look at what most users in offices need. Does the normal user need a 1TB drive ? Why can't they go with a 60 gig ssd or an 80 gig ssd if its office and other small apps thats all thats needed anyway. The rest can be saved to network shares. The speed increases would be amazing though compared to conventional driv es

The same argument works against you though - does the "average office" need all that speed at the client? If all you need is about 60 GB, then why spend £200-600 (just checked prices for 64 GB SSDs) when you can get the same capacity for £30? Sure, it's a bit slower, but the average office user doesn't benefit from loading Word in a few seconds or booting in 30 secs instead of 60. Multiply that price difference over many machines, and it's a big difference. And if you're loading stuff over the network, then you bottleneck over your network and at the file server drives, so again, you minimise the benefit of SSDs whilst committing yourself to high costs.

 

[N00b]

If you are a professional, you are foolishly wasting commpany resources for virtually no gain in productivity. I would certainly fire anyone that recommended SSDs at this point in time for most business uses.

Hell, even 15k RPM SSDs aren't exactly cost effective for many business scenarios, but it's still much more cost effect than SSDs with virtually the same speed in most scenarios.

SSDs do excel in a very few corner cases with regards to cost/performance, but it's quite rare.

Anyone that recommends an SSD for business use is just foolish and wasteful, IMO.

Now what a person chooses to use their own personal money on, well some people have more cash to burn than others. So far SSD's have been a waste of money for me. But I'm fascinated with the technology, so I'm willing to budget money each year to experiment with them.

That said, there isn't a single useage scenario for anyone I consult with that would result in a SSD actually being a good idea or recommended unless they have cash to burn...

Its time will come, but that currently isn't now, IMO. Other than for the bleeding edge enthusiast who must have the latest and greatest. Like spending 1,000 USD on a CPU.

Regards,
SB

I don't know what configurations you tested and what your workload is, but my experiences are vastly different.

My main development machine is a Lenovo W700 with 8 GB, one Intel G1 80GB and one Intel G2 160 GB. I previously had two WD Scorpio Black 320 GB, not exactly slow either, and the difference is amazing.

There are a couple of use cases (like working with SVN) where the ssds are so much faster than the legacy hdds it is almost ridiculous. But the real difference is that the system does not slow down as much compared to legacy hdds. It's like a freshly installed system all the time. (Performance will just deteriorate very, very modestly over time)

And why is this important? Slow downs and waiting frustrates people. Concentration wanes, stress level rises, time is wasted, mistakes occur. This can even be contagious.

When I look at the our hourly rates (and those of our freelancers I have to pay), the hardware cost for a SSD becomes quickly neglectible.

PS: Did I mention that I cannot hear my notebook anymore since I have SSDs?

 

[Ilfirin]

The same argument works against you though - does the "average office" need all that speed at the client? If all you need is about 60 GB, then why spend £200-600 (just checked prices for 64 GB SSDs) when you can get the same capacity for £30? Sure, it's a bit slower, but the average office user doesn't benefit from loading Word in a few seconds or booting in 30 secs instead of 60. Multiply that price difference over many machines, and it's a big difference. And if you're loading stuff over the network, then you bottleneck over your network and at the file server drives, so again, you minimise the benefit of SSDs whilst committing yourself to high costs.

How many people do you know exactly that spend their entire day working in Word?

The average office users I see daily thrash the hell out of their drives, constantly jumping from program to program to handle their tasks (which is almost all random reads and writes, where your HDD gets 0-4MB/sec vs 50-100+ on some SSDs, not to mention that, beyond pure bandwidth, the mere number of operations that the disk can handle in a second is of a factor of about 100k over HDDs)

If money's wasted anywhere on these 'average users', IMO, it's in CPU speed. Put two 'average office users' in a room with two masked PCs, one with a P4 w/ an SSD and the other with a core i7 with a 7200RPM HD. I bet you they find the first system as a whole much more responsive and 'quick'. It might fail at the benches, but you'll have a lot less headaches using the machine.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

Shaidar they are way faster than a 10k raptor that is for sure. I work with large files often and it is way faster at opening them up and reading them (intel drives @ 160GB vs. raptor 300gb). And they are only getting better. Regular HDDs have no chance at all
http://hothardware.com/News/Microns-RealSSD-C300-SSD-Is-The-Fastest-Ever/

Raptors aren't even the fastest mechanical drives, proving once again that latency is not the end-all-be-all.

High capacity 7200 RPM drives are where it's at. I'll take a 2TB Hitachi or WD Black 7200 RPM drive over an SSD any day, if I have to pay for it anyway.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

Like... What, exactly?

You know, just for fun I copied the 3,910,853 kb patch.mpq file from my WoW/data folder to the root of my C: drive. It ran at ~120MB/s at the end (initially much higher, but I imagine windows buffered generous amounts in RAM), and I point out again this is copying to and from the same fragmented drive.

That's great performance. I'll have to see what sort of speed my Hitachi 7200 RPM 1000.B 1TB drive achieves under similar conditions.

I also point out that under more ideal conditions performance would be even higher; this is by no means approaching the maximum abilities of my SSD. If I had set up a RAM-drive to copy to I could have reached closer to the max for linear transfers, but I don't know of any good free Win7-compatible ramdrives to try out.

You'd be limited by the speed of the SATA interface (if SATA 3G) or controller (if SATA 6G) at that point. Mechanical drives already approach the same levels of performance for linear data transfer.

...But if you can show a mechanical desktop drive, fragmented after months of use, that does better than 120MB/s........... Well, more power to you, I say.

Depends on the test. I'll be happy to test my 1TB drive this weekend and report the results.

Copying from the SSD to my now rather aged 160GB Hitachi Deskstar drive resulted in ~53MB/s copy speed. Copying on the same HDD gave a paltry 28MB/s.

A 160GB drive is ancient at this point, especially considering the fact that it wouldn't even be a perpendicular drive. Hardly relevant.

Now, I'm the first to admit that consumer HDDs have indeed gotten faster in the interim years since I bought this drive, but over 100-400% faster? Hardly.

Considering the explosion in areal density since the introduction of perpendicular magnetic recording, you'd better believe throughput has increased by that much. Easily.

I believe I have now firmly disproven your postulation that I'm confusing bandwidth and latency (which I never did, but whatever), but if you want to continue maintaining your somewhat misguided belief that mechanical drives hold a candle to a good SSD, well, who am I to stop you? I'm simply too busy cruuuuuizin' along at warp speed on my intel drive to care!

You can believe whatever you like. I'm glad you like your SSD. I'm not trying to spoil your party, but don't be surprised if no one else goes out and spends $5/GB on storage

Thanks, but the discussion has broadened somewhat beyond just photoshop. Besides, as demonstrated in my post above, good SSDs offer superior read and write speeds compared to mechanical drives. Many drives are even faster for sequential reads and writes than my intel drive, even to the point of hitting the real-world physical limits of the SATA2 interface as you may know. And that is something NO mechanical drive has ever managed to approach.

The discussion may have broadened, but that doesn't mitigate the importance of the original question which spurred discussion in the first place. Performance in Photoshop is the primary purpose of the discussion in this thread. It's fine to talk about the advantages an SSD brings to the table, but how many of those have any impact on Photoshop? Little to none, according to the only people in this thread that have actually tested their performance.

 

[Ilfirin]

High capacity 7200 RPM drives are where it's at. I'll take a 2TB Hitachi or WD Black 7200 RPM drive over an SSD any day, if I have to pay for it anyway.

My storage RAID(0) array is made up of two WD Black 7200 RPM drives and just installing the array reduced my system performance dramatically over the straight SSD (with no raid array for storage), at least initially. The biggest problem was that the drives would never be in use and, as such, were always asleep. So when random application randomly 'scan for drives' (which tons of them do for no reason whatsoever, probably without even realizing it), the entire system would halt for 45 seconds while the drives spun up, only to be immediately shut down. The only way to fix this was to have the drives running at full RPMs at all times and, since this machine never gets turned off, the drives' lifetime is probably going to be horribly reduced. Even still, whenever I access anything at all off the RAID array there is an extremely noticeable degradation of speed relative to the SSD. To the point where it's something I actively try and avoid.

It's extremely difficult to properly convey how drastic the difference really is in actual real-life usage. Imagine the scenario that happens when windows first boots - dozens of processes all spin up, all loading off the hard disk from random positions, which in turn load more bits from random places on the disk, and so on until everything is finally loaded and your system is stable. My Black gets around 1MB/sec doing these types of operations and can handle somewhere in the range of 'dozens' IOPS. The SSD hits around 70MB/sec and does 35,000 IOPS. This is why all benchmarks showing "BIOS To system usable time" vs just plain "OS Boot Time" show differences of 30-45+ seconds on the HDD times, and differences of a couple of MS on the SSDs (meaning the SSDs are pretty much completely responsive the second you see your login screen, which you will also get to on average of 7-10x faster). The difference in, most of all, user annoyance is ground breaking.

The differences exponentiate the more you open and close applications.

 

[Tchock]

Seagate's enterprise SSDs are announced.

Smells like Sandforce, or Sandforce-ish, due to the massively impressive write IOPS...

Solidata's spec quote was 50k Read / 35k Write, so Seagate might be capping them off a bit, or using a slightly slower variant of the controller- not sure here.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=20

Installing an 80GB Intel Gen2 SSD provided, by a massive margin, the single largest boost in performance and overall "quality of use" to my desktop than any other upgrade to date (which include a 5870, 8GB DDR3 ram, 2TB RAID0 array for storage and a core i5).

Hardly a relevant comment without any sort of comparison to the previous configuration. Of course an SSD leads to a perceived performance increase. It all comes back to latency.

The difference was so substantial, in fact, that my boss decided to buy all the developers at our company SSDs for their dev machines where the increase in productivity literally paid for itself in less than 2 weeks.

At the salary range a lot of developers get these days, 30+ seconds waiting for stuff all the time starts turning into dollars, FAST. Particularly with my co-worker who has just about an infinitesimal attention span where the second he has to wait for anything, he completely forgets everything he's doing, and then he's set back 10-15 minutes. I haven't heard him complain since we got em

That's the most preposterous exaggeration I've heard in quite some time.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

My storage RAID array is made up of two WD Black 7200 RPM drives and just installing the array reduced my system performance dramatically over the straight SSD (with no raid array for storage), at least initially. The biggest problem was that the drives would never be in use and, as such, were always asleep. So when random application randomly 'scan for drives' (which tons of them do for no reason whatsoever, probably without even realizing it), the entire system would halt for 45 seconds while the drives spun up, only to be immediately shut down. The only way to fix this was to have the drives running at full RPMs at all times and, since this machine never gets turned off, the drives' lifetime is probably going to be horribly reduced. Even still, whenever I access anything at all off the RAID array there is an extremely noticeable degradation of speed relative to the SSD. To the point where it's something I actively try and avoid.

It's extremely difficult to properly convey how drastic the difference really is in actual real-life usage. Imagine the scenario that happens when windows first boots - dozens of processes all spin up, all loading off the hard disk from random positions, which in turn load more bits from random places on the disk, and so on until everything is finally loaded and your system is stable. My Black gets around 1MB/sec doing these types of operations and can handle somewhere in the range of 'dozens' IOPS. The SSD hits around 70MB/sec and does 35,000 IOPS. This is why all benchmarks showing "BIOS To system usable time" vs just plain "OS Boot Time" show differences of 30-45+ seconds on the HDD times, and differences of a couple of MS on the SSDs (meaning the SSDs are pretty much completely responsive the second you see your login screen, which you will also get to on average of 7-10x faster). The difference in, most of all, user annoyance is ground breaking.

The differences exponentiate the more you open and close applications.

Who said anything about RAID? Yeah, I'm sure your crappy software RAID slowed down your system. Duh.

I/O transactions matter to servers. Are we discussing servers or workstations?

 

[ShaidarHaran]

I don't know what configurations you tested and what your workload is, but my experiences are vastly different.

My main development machine is a Lenovo W700 with 8 GB, one Intel G1 80GB and one Intel G2 160 GB. I previously had two WD Scorpio Black 320 GB, not exactly slow either, and the difference is amazing.

There are a couple of use cases (like working with SVN) where the ssds are so much faster than the legacy hdds it is almost ridiculous. But the real difference is that the system does not slow down as much compared to legacy hdds. It's like a freshly installed system all the time. (Performance will just deteriorate very, very modestly over time)

And why is this important? Slow downs and waiting frustrates people. Concentration wanes, stress level rises, time is wasted, mistakes occur. This can even be contagious.

When I look at the our hourly rates (and those of our freelancers I have to pay), the hardware cost for a SSD becomes quickly neglectible.

PS: Did I mention that I cannot hear my notebook anymore since I have SSDs?

Ok, so you're using a laptop. Workstations are generally desktop machines that can actually use fast mechanical drives. Portable workstations are great, but a luxury most businesses don't opt for.

All the SSD proponents in this thread continuously fail to account for the price to performance ratio factor of this discussion. Something that simply cannot be done in business.

No one here thinks SSDs are slower than mechanical drives. The point is the extra speed doesn't justify the extra cost in business.

 

[Ilfirin]

Who said anything about RAID? Yeah, I'm sure your crappy software RAID slowed down your system. Duh.

I/O transactions matter to servers. Are we discussing servers or workstations?

It is hardware RAID, and it's roughly 2x as fast as the standard straight Black, thus further demonstrating how incredibly slow it is relative to a proper intel ssd.

 

[Ilfirin]

I/O transactions matter to servers. Are we discussing servers or workstations?

Ignorance.

Measure your normal desktop system's I/O transactions.