SSD and traditional HD together: drawbacks & advantages?

I am reviewing a good introductory article on Solid State Drives in Maximum PC Feb edition.

They mention if you have lots of data, you can put a traditional mechanical HD as your "D" drive and use the SSD drive as your "C" drive.

Advantages? I guess you save money in not having to pay for a much bigger SSD drive. Disadvantages? Are you not stuck in a bottleneck? Maybe not so much though, since with SATA drives (my mobo is SATA), with the mechanical drive at 3 GB/s and the SSD drive at 6 GB/s, you'll have programs load faster, and a bit slower when said programs access the data, is that right? But how much slower? I hate for the old mechanical HD to become a bottleneck.

Also of interest is that TRIM command (which is redundant somewhat to the built in commands for garbage collection in SSD drives) is not really well supported in Windows 7, but more so in Windows 8. Further, the bigger the SSD capacity the faster, since the SSD controller does not have to erase sectors as much before writing to them with big capacity drives, which have more unwritten sectors than smaller drives, but can erase the data later, and this increases throughput.

I might buy an SSD drive, but if there's a bottleneck as I describe above I might wait until prices fall a bit more and wait until early 2015 when SATA Express interface comes out, which has a faster than present 520 MB/s throughput for SSDs.

RL

Everything is a drawback in the hands of a moron like this
Google Groups troll...

--
RayLopez99 raylopez88 gmail.com wrote:

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Subject: SSD and traditional HD together: drawbacks & advantages?
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I am reviewing a good introductory article on Solid State Drives in Maximum PC Feb edition.

They mention if you have lots of data, you can put a traditional mechanical HD as your "D" drive and use the SSD drive as your "C" drive.

Advantages? I guess you save money in not having to pay for a much bigger SSD drive. Disadvantages? Are you not stuck in a bottleneck? Maybe not so much though, since with SATA drives (my mobo is SATA), with the mechanical drive at 3 GB/s and the SSD drive at 6 GB/s, you'll have programs load faster, and a bit slower when said programs access the data, is that right? But how much slower? I hate for the old mechanical HD to become a bottleneck.

Also of interest is that TRIM command (which is redundant somewhat to the built in commands for garbage collection in SSD drives) is not really well supported in Windows 7, but more so in Windows 8. Further, the bigger the SSD capacity the faster, since the SSD controller does not have to erase sectors as much before writing to them with big capacity drives, which have more unwritten sectors than smaller drives, but can erase the data later, and this increases throughput.

I might buy an SSD drive, but if there's a bottleneck as I describe above I might wait until prices fall a bit more and wait until early 2015 when SATA Express interface comes out, which has a faster than present 520 MB/s throughput for SSDs.

RL

On Thursday, February 13, 2014 12:11:55 PM UTC+8, John Doe wrote:
Everything is a drawback in the hands of a moron like this

Google Groups troll...

Flee! Get out of here you D'OH Homer Simpson moron! Vamos!

You're more stupid than Starbucks Flying was.

RL

On 12/02/2014 10:51 PM, RayLopez99 wrote:
I am reviewing a good introductory article on Solid State Drives in
Maximum PC Feb edition.

They mention if you have lots of data, you can put a traditional
mechanical HD as your "D" drive and use the SSD drive as your "C"
drive.

Sure, I've got something like that setup here, I actually have an SSD
being my C drive, with about 6 other mechanical drives accompanying it.

Advantages? I guess you save money in not having to pay for a much
bigger SSD drive. Disadvantages? Are you not stuck in a bottleneck?
Maybe not so much though, since with SATA drives (my mobo is SATA),
with the mechanical drive at 3 GB/s and the SSD drive at 6 GB/s,
you'll have programs load faster, and a bit slower when said programs
access the data, is that right? But how much slower? I hate for the
old mechanical HD to become a bottleneck.

The vast majority of the disk accessing goes to the operating system
itself, and it's mostly accessing its own files. That creates the major
requirement for the SSD. It's sufficient to simply put the Windows OS
and its programs under the SSD, to notice a huge improvement in
responsiveness.

Also of interest is that TRIM command (which is redundant somewhat to
the built in commands for garbage collection in SSD drives) is not
really well supported in Windows 7, but more so in Windows 8.
Further, the bigger the SSD capacity the faster, since the SSD
controller does not have to erase sectors as much before writing to
them with big capacity drives, which have more unwritten sectors than
smaller drives, but can erase the data later, and this increases
throughput.

Why do you say that Windows 7 doesn't have support for the TRIM command?
It was Windows 7 that introduced support for the TRIM command. It was XP
that didn't have any support for TRIM.

I might buy an SSD drive, but if there's a bottleneck as I describe
above I might wait until prices fall a bit more and wait until early
2015 when SATA Express interface comes out, which has a faster than
present 520 MB/s throughput for SSDs.

There's always going to be something faster or bigger around the corner.

Yousuf Khan

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 19:51:22 -0800 (PST), RayLopez99
wrote:

I
I am reviewing a good introductory article on Solid State Drives in
Maximum PC Feb edition.

They mention if you have lots of data, you can put a traditional
mechanical HD as your "D" drive and use the SSD drive as your "C"
drive.

Advantages? I guess you save money in not having to pay for a much
bigger SSD drive. Disadvantages? Are you not stuck in a bottleneck?
Maybe not so much though, since with SATA drives (my mobo is SATA),
with the mechanical drive at 3 GB/s and the SSD drive at 6 GB/s,
you'll have programs load faster, and a bit slower when said programs
access the data, is that right? But how much slower? I hate for the
old mechanical HD to become a bottleneck.

Also of interest is that TRIM command (which is redundant somewhat to
the built in commands for garbage collection in SSD drives) is not
really well supported in Windows 7, but more so in Windows 8. Further,
the bigger the SSD capacity the faster, since the SSD controller does
not have to erase sectors as much before writing to them with big
capacity drives, which have more unwritten sectors than smaller
drives, but can erase the data later, and this increases throughput.

I might buy an SSD drive, but if there's a bottleneck as I describe
above I might wait until prices fall a bit more and wait until early
2015 when SATA Express interface comes out, which has a faster than
present 520 MB/s throughput for SSDs.

--
Absolute advantage in faster loads, select manipulations (moving and
optimizing data). Some potential disadvantage in standards and firm
interfaces, i.e. - I'm running a SSD boot arbitrator on an older MB,
early Intel dualcore, which wasn't easily accomplished. Pure silicon
zipity-zap data rates trumps all else in sum from _The Idiot's Guide
to SSDs_, once working, setup;- Tweakdom World, W8.1, TRIM, are hmmm's
and humjobs for some rainy day when maybe I get my thumbs out of my
butt and update. Get two in case you've two computers. One's missing
in mine from a Samsung SSD 64G, mostly data free, on a sale for $40US.
(More reason, best I can figure, for more work or something like
that.)

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 23:49:10 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

Why do you say that Windows 7 doesn't have support for the TRIM command?
It was Windows 7 that introduced support for the TRIM command. It was XP
that didn't have any support for TRIM.

Has anyone made a utility for XP that would scan the hard drive and
inform the SSD of what could be dumped?

On Fri, 14 Feb 2014 17:00:15 -0800, Loren Pechtel
wrote:

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 23:49:10 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

Why do you say that Windows 7 doesn't have support for the TRIM command?
It was Windows 7 that introduced support for the TRIM command. It was XP
that didn't have any support for TRIM.

Has anyone made a utility for XP that would scan the hard drive and
inform the SSD of what could be dumped?

There were SSDs before a larger W7 presence today. Manually is one
way, such as a reformat, drive/partition assignments - various
storage forums, I'm sure on a Google search, will recall the methods;-
manufacturers, too, as in the case with my model's inclusion, on a
provided CD, for running Samsung's transposition or approximation of
W7 TRIM within a minimum of XP/SP3 environ. Haven't personally tried
it, given it a spin, eh, yet.

On 14/02/2014 8:00 PM, Loren Pechtel wrote:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 23:49:10 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

Why do you say that Windows 7 doesn't have support for the TRIM command?
It was Windows 7 that introduced support for the TRIM command. It was XP
that didn't have any support for TRIM.

Has anyone made a utility for XP that would scan the hard drive and
inform the SSD of what could be dumped?

Yeah, there were various utilities that were installed under XP to
intercept the OS call and send the TRIM command to the SSD.

But even without the TRIM command, garbage collection still can happen
in an SSD, it just won't be as fast or efficient.

Yousuf Khan

On Wednesday, February 12, 2014 10:51:22 PM UTC-5, RayLopez99 wrote:
They mention if you have lots of data, you can put a traditional mechanical HD as your "D" drive and use the SSD drive as your "C" drive.

Advantages? I guess you save money in not having to pay for a much bigger SSD drive. Disadvantages? Are you not stuck in a bottleneck?

I have a 256gb SSD for my C drive, containing the OS, applications, current steam games, along with dual 3tb HDs in mirrored raid 1 for my D drive.

First off, cost is a huge factor, and why I went with SSD + raid HDs. At current prices, 3tb worth of SSDs in raid 1 (aka, six 1tb SSDs) is close to $4000, compared to just $300 for a pair of raid ready 3tb HDs.

Second, you don't notice the slowdown for the HD, because the music/videos/data that you put on your D drive is not speed dependent.

Data is the easiest to show, as most personal data files are small. Even a 50 mb file can be read off an HD in half a second. Thus, the time wasted to read it from the HD is small enough that it's not noticeable in real use.

Videos, even bluray videos, are designed to be read from optical disks at a mere 7 mb/s, in order to get flawless playback. Uncompressed music off CDs are designed to be read at an even slower 2 mb/s. Since HDs have a read rate of about 100 mb/s, you end up loading videos 10x faster than you can play them, and music is loaded 50x faster than you can play them, as videos/music apps are designed to play and read at the same time. Which is why you don't notice the speed of videos/music playback when stored on your HD.

The only time you ever notice a performance hit is if you do video editing or photoshop editing with many layers.

Remember that videos/music/data is not like the OS or games, which want to randomly read in different parts of the OS/game all the time (which is where SSDs shine). For videos/music/data, your HD ends up just loading in one file, then goes idle, while you finish watching the movie/listening to the music/working on a document, before loading in another file.

I might buy an SSD drive, but if there's a bottleneck as I describe above I might wait until prices fall a bit more and wait until
early 2015 when SATA Express interface comes out, which has a faster than present 520 MB/s throughput for SSDs.

An SSD for your OS/games is one the biggest upgrades you can get for your computer. It's more noticeable than a CPU upgrade or a video card upgrade. Everyone who buys one would never go back, at least not willingly.
--
// T.Hsu

On Wed, 19 Feb 2014 15:20:38 -0800 (PST), wrote:

First off,
cost is a huge factor, and why I went with SSD + raid HDs. At current
prices, 3tb worth of SSDs in raid 1 (aka, six 1tb SSDs) is close to
$4000, compared to just $300 for a pair of raid ready 3tb HDs.

-
I've a theory on that... (check back with me next year)...

Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer)
Internal Solid State Drive is $449 now at Amazon.


* Transformative performance: dramatically faster than a hard
drive
* Nearly instantaneous boot times
* 500 MB/s sequential reads, 400 MB/s sequential writes, 80k
random reads, 80k random writes