Speeding up Windows with a SSD

[tagging on your post Smarty, Woddles is in my killfile.]

If you have enough physical ram so it never uses the swap file in
normal use, as opposed to at boot time, an SSD will have almost
no effect, particularly if you load what you normally use at boot
time and just switch between the various apps, as opposed to
loading them when you want to use them.

Woddles is talking ******** again.

What files are usually put on the SSD?
Two groups, the swap file, and the apps that are run often if you
are silly enough to keep closing them when you stop using them.

You would have to be mad to waste SSD space on the swapfile. Use a
separate spinning disk for that as Smarty suggested. It's also what I
do.

I am concerned that Windows might write to one area
of the SSD so many times that it might wear out that part
of the drive quickly. Is that something that might happen?
Yes, it can happen, particularly with the swap file.

Which is why it's crazy to put swap on the SSD.

To the OP: the controllers in SSDs don't store data in a linear
fashion. They deliberately distribute data around the available space
to minimise the likelihood of one location or area being repetitively
written to. This is transparent to the OS.

Even ones that tell you to shove your head up a dead bear's arse ?

Think Woddles has been doing that again.

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In article , Daniel Prince
writes

How much would a SSD typically speed up a Windows system?

Like others have said, it depends on your usage. I cloned an XP
installation from a 70Gb 10k WD Raptor to a Crucial 128GB SSD. Windows
used to take 40s to boot to a usable desktop; with the SSD it is less
than 10s.

Apps launch near as dammit instantaneously.

I currently use Windows XP Home. Would a SSD work better with
Windows 7?

Yes. W7 supports a feature called TRIM and also aligns partitions
correctly. Google is your friend.

What files are usually put on the SSD?

The OS and apps. Put the swapfile and your data on a spinning drive.

IMO. YMMV, etc.

What is the minimum size of
SSD that I would need to significantly speed up Windows?

I have a 128GB SSD. There's 75GB free and I have a lot of apps
installed. Could have got by with a 64GB SSD but am thinking ahead to
the bloat that is W7.

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used to take 40s to boot to a usable desktop
Depends on how fast cpu / ram / mboard chipset / hdd ( RAID is
faster but costlier, bulkier, heavier, use more electricity & produce
more heat ) / controller are, & how small registry is. Cheapest
way to start fast is to wake from hibernation.

SSD's arent really very much faster then convienctional drives, seek
times are quick but transfer rate is still the same. A truely faster
type is ram based harddrives. Hyperdrive 5 is a ram based "not ram like"
such as SSD. It was pricey but worth it, my other system components are
up to par so after removing the harddrive limitations my system from
hitting the power button for full system ready is about 5 seconds.
Limited capacity but im a gamer so a convientional (raptor drive) is use
for secondary files.

Karasawa wrote:

SSD's arent really very much faster then convienctional drives, seek
times are quick but transfer rate is still the same. A truely faster type
is ram based harddrives. Hyperdrive 5 is a ram based "not ram like"
such as SSD. It was pricey but worth it, my other system components
are up to par so after removing the harddrive limitations my system
from hitting the power button for full system ready is about 5 seconds.

You can get that with hibernate for no cost.

And suspend to ram is instant.

Limited capacity but im a gamer so a convientional (raptor drive) is use for secondary files.

In article , Karasawa Karasawa.4kbdko
@no.email.invalid writes

SSD's arent really very much faster then convienctional drives, seek
times are quick but transfer rate is still the same.

Bull****.

Real-world example, measured using HDTune:

Avg xfer rate Access time Boot time

SSD: 125MB/s 0.1ms 10s
2TB HD: 98MB/s 11.6ms 40s

And this is for SATA2 devices on a SATA1 interface. If the SSD above
were attached to a SATA2 interface, the average transfer rate would
nearly double. The SSD is maxing out the SATA1 interface in this case,
the hard drive is nowhere near.

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Mike Tomlinson wrote:
In article , Karasawa Karasawa.4kbdko
@no.email.invalid writes

SSD's arent really very much faster then convienctional drives, seek
times are quick but transfer rate is still the same.

Bull****.

Real-world example, measured using HDTune:

Avg xfer rate Access time Boot time

SSD: 125MB/s 0.1ms 10s
2TB HD: 98MB/s 11.6ms 40s

And this is for SATA2 devices on a SATA1 interface. If the SSD above
were attached to a SATA2 interface, the average transfer rate would
nearly double. The SSD is maxing out the SATA1 interface in this case,
the hard drive is nowhere near.

Actually not BS, but not true either. The answer, like so often,
it that it depends on the SSD in question. There are SSDs in
the market that have lower linear transfer rates than some HDDs,
especially on writes. Also with economy in mind, RAID 0
for HDDs may be quite feasible with SSD RAID 0 prohibitively
expensive at the same time.

But the real advantage of SSDs (besides better robustness,
and hopefully a data life expectency that is not too much
worse than HDDs), is the access time. That one is vastly
better in all SSDs you can buy.

In effect, everything relies on your usage mix. For example,
boot times are often mostly hardware-detection times and
disk speed does only play a minor role (anybody remeber
ReadyBoost and its non-effect?) Waking up from hibernation
_should_ be mostly linear read. Swapping can be a large number
of small accesses, so access time can dominate.

My personel experience is that for booting, an SSD is pretty
much a waste of money, unless you have specific requirements
that make boot times important in the first place and prevent
you from using sleep or hibernation. On the other hand, for
applications it can make a lot of difference. I have one app
that used to be about twice as fast when run from SSD for
operations that break the workflow (you have to wait) and happen
relatively often. Lately, the designers made an update that
moved quite a bit of data to the server-side and now my
SSD does nothing anymore for that operation, as even a
HDD finished significantly before the online-exchange
is done.

Bottom-line: There are no simple answers. There are no
silver bullets. Look at the new technology, understand
its characteristics and, most importantly, understand what
your own requirements and performance needs are. In many
cases that will require experimentation and careful,
honest evaluation of the observations made.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
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In article , Arno
writes

Actually not BS, but not true either. The answer, like so often,
it that it depends on the SSD in question.

As with anything else.

In effect, everything relies on your usage mix. For example,
boot times are often mostly hardware-detection times and
disk speed does only play a minor role

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

In the timings above I define 'boot time' as the period in between
hearing the 'successful POST' bleep and getting a desktop mouse cursor
that can be used. A reduction from 40s to 10s is impressive in my book.

My personel experience is that for booting, an SSD is pretty
much a waste of money, unless you have specific requirements
that make boot times important in the first place and prevent
you from using sleep or hibernation. On the other hand, for
applications it can make a lot of difference.

Absolutely agreed. I bought an SSD to launch apps quickly. The reduced
boot time is a bonus (not that I reboot often anyway).

Look at the new technology, understand
its characteristics and, most importantly, understand what
your own requirements and performance needs are.

Indeed. Wanting fast boot and app launch times, I chose the SSD with
the fastest read speed I could obtain at the time (230MB/s). Write
speeds are more pedestrian, but that wasn't a factor for me.
Application data is stored on a spinning disk, as is the swapfile.

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Mike Tomlinson wrote
In article , Karasawa
Karasawa.4kbdko @no.email.invalid writes

SSD's arent really very much faster then convienctional drives, seek
times are quick but transfer rate is still the same.

Bull****.

Nope, you just proved what he said is correct.

Real-world example, measured using HDTune:

Avg xfer rate Access time Boot time

SSD: 125MB/s 0.1ms 10s
2TB HD: 98MB/s 11.6ms 40s

And this is for SATA2 devices on a SATA1 interface. If the SSD above were
attached to a SATA2 interface, the average transfer rate would nearly double.

Nope, because it's limited by what the device can do.

The SSD is maxing out the SATA1 interface in this
case, the hard drive is nowhere near.

And it wouldn't make that much difference with SATA2.

In message Mike Tomlinson
was claimed to have wrote:

In article , Karasawa Karasawa.4kbdko
writes

SSD's arent really very much faster then convienctional drives, seek
times are quick but transfer rate is still the same.

Bull****.

Real-world example, measured using HDTune:

Avg xfer rate Access time Boot time

SSD: 125MB/s 0.1ms 10s
2TB HD: 98MB/s 11.6ms 40s

And this is for SATA2 devices on a SATA1 interface. If the SSD above
were attached to a SATA2 interface, the average transfer rate would
nearly double. The SSD is maxing out the SATA1 interface in this case,
the hard drive is nowhere near.

Not only that, but seek times are typically more important than raw
transfer rates anyway, unless you happen to be reading/writing large
contiguous files.