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Solve : Question about SSD speeds? |
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Answer» I have always wanted to get myself an SSD. Imagine, everything opening up on click, tiny boot times, no freezes, but the price for a full blown 64gb SSD was way more than I could afford so I started looking for smaller sizes and eventually this turned up. A tiny SSD made by KingSpec, supposedly good Chinese firm that specializes in SSD's. The price was great and the size was enough for me to use it for caching and to install some small apps on it. Now here's the question. This is a little fishy to me, SSD being slower than a hard drive. SSD technology is not a magic always-go-faster thing. Cheap SSDs are often slower than even low end hard drives. This is an ultra cheap device at a throwaway price. You get what you pay for. It uses older flash technology (MLC NAND) which is slower than later types. Also being small it will have a small number of chips, which will slow it right down. Quote Could anybody please expand on "sequential" and "sustained" speeds. Sequential and sustained mean the same thing. sequential write or write is measured using one large file whereas random read/writes are measured with may small files. Random is what SSDs are good at, and is what you should look at. Sequential does not matter so much. Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for! As Salmon says, the Kingspec drive is a low-end, old drive. Any SSD newer than that will be faster than any HDD in both sequential and random reads and writes as well as the most important thing, access time. It's the random I/O that makes an SSD feel much faster than a HDD, case in point is basically every single second-gen SSD, as they don't always beat HDDs in sequential speeds (especially writes, and especially on smaller capacity models as they don't have enough NAND to max out their controller) but they utterly trounce HDDs in random access, which gives you the speed boost. Over the last two years SSDs have really dropped in price, to the point where they are a viable alternative to HDDs for most people - obviously, if you need to store a ton of movies, music and other things, a HDD is still a cheaper option, but that kind of data won't benefit from being on a fast drive anyway. 60GB SSDs start at £30 and I have bought 100GB SSDs for £60.My 2010 Shuttle SN78SH7 apparently needs a BIOS update to use SSDs with the onboard controller, and it isn't likely this will happen, so I may have to buy an add-on SATA controller card, but as you say, Calum, the prices are getting really interesting. I must say it seems snappy enough with a 7200 RPM hard drive holding the system partition, but I love buying tech stuff and an SSD would transfer to my next build. Really? How odd, I've never encountered a chipset that wouldn't work at all with an SSD. The add-on cards I try to avoid, as they almost always use a Marvell, Via, or similar chipset which doesn't deliver the performance or RELIABILITY of an onboard controller. When I was building at OcUK, we had no end of calls complaining that we put the SSD on the Intel ICH9/10 chipset rather than the SATA3 capable Marvell add-on, but we did it as the Intel despite being only SATA2 actually provided better speeds and was much, much more reliable. Edit: also, prices seem to have been stable for a while now. I bought my Crucial M4 128GB near the end of 2011 for £90, similar drives are now around £75 which isn't a huge difference - at least not considering that same drive would've been £200+ only a month or two before I paid £90. Quote from: Calum on October 02, 2013, 03:19:01 AM Really? How odd, I've never encountered a chipset that wouldn't work at all with an SSD. It may be a false impression gained from a Jan 2013 forum post I found where the guy said an OCZ Vertex 4 SSD would not work, but I just now found another thread where someone is happily using an Intel SSD (model not stated) on an SN78SH7 with same BIOS version I have (the latest). I think the first guy may have solved his problem, he never went back. OCZ huh...not surprised it wasn't working I've yet to see a chipset that flat out won't work with an SSD, and I've used them on, hm...ICH7, 8, 9 and 10, AMD 7xx, 8xx, 9xx series, Nvidia 6xx and 7xx series, and some others too. Stick with an SSD with a reputable controller (for current models that's Samsung, Crucial, Plextor, LiteOn) and you should be fine Thanks, Calum, I may give it a try. There's a Maplin next door to my work... time to use those vouchers they keep sending me, perhaps. If you fancy just TRYING out an SSD, to see how well it works, I have a few spare smaller drives, wouldn't mind loaning you one to see how it goes. Quote from: Calum on October 02, 2013, 04:14:43 AM If you fancy just trying out an SSD, to see how well it works, I have a few spare smaller drives, wouldn't mind loaning you one to see how it goes. Thanks for the offer. As it happens, there's a guy I work with who said the same thing just now over coffee. I'll report back. It's a Samsung 840 (120 GB). He says if I like it he's sell it for £50. Sounds good, is that the 840 Basic? They're decent drives, and being a modern drive and larger than my spares it'll give you a better idea of the speed. £50 is a decent price too, I usually buy used Crucial M4 128GB drives which are roughly equivalent to the 840 Basic (although the M4's NAND has a theoretically longer lifespan, not that that means anything in the real world) for £55. If it's the pro, that's an excellent price as they're a little faster than the M4, much faster write speeds in particular, and their NAND endurance is on par.He's a complete tech addict, this guy, worse than me, always upgrading, this disk cost him £100 a few months ago he says. He wants to sell me his "old" NAS as well, but I'm quite happy with my 2 TB Seagate Goflex Home.You should see the amount of stuff I accumulate in a few months and then sell off... |
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