1 or 2 SSD?

[Pteradon]

Hello,

 

i'm thinking about buying an Ocz Agility 3.

 

Atm moment im using two WD raptors harddisks,

one for the OS and the other for games.

 

But everytime i see a topic about SSD, the people are always

talking about two SSD, one for the OS and the other example Dcs:A10 and the pagefile.

 

What i like to ask is,

is it really necesary to have two SSD?

[KillaALF]

As long as the one is big enough to hold the OS and selected games I'd say it is not necessary.

[EtherealN]

Necessary? No. Useful? Depends on which SSD's it is. In some cases the reason for having two would be that money concerns (SSD's are still somewhere around 40 times more expensive than HDD's counted per GB) dictate the use of relatively small SSD's, and then having both games and OS on the same disc might simply run out of space.

[HiJack]

I have just one OCZ SSD 120GB as primary disk and that works really well. It holds Windows 7 64 bit, FC2 and DCS A-10C. You need to change some of the OS functions to make the SSD work best but all information about this is found using Google or any other search engine. Start with one SSD and in stead invest in a really good bacup software. I use the latest Norton Ghost and that automatically keeps an updated disk image of the SSD drive at all times. Great!

 

(HJ)

[Malefic Rage]

In terms of performance, with an Agility 3 or similar SSD there would be very little benefit in multiple physical drives unless you wanted to get fancy and put them in a RAID 0 configuration. The random IO performance is so many orders of magnitude higher than a mechanical HDD that it will handle multitasking with ease. I use an original Vertex (Indilinx controller) for my OS, pagefile and A10 with no issues at all. With the exception of the very first generation, SSDs and their OS support are mature and reliable enough to use without many special considerations.

Edited May 20, 2011 by Malefic Rage

[4c Hajduk Veljko]

I use two SSD's in RAID 0 (see my sig). Once you try it you will never want to go back. Windows loads very fast, the slowest part of booting it is darn BIOS. Black Shark loads up very fast too.

[HiJack]

I use two SSD's in RAID 0 (see my sig). Once you try it you will never want to go back. Windows loads very fast, the slowest part of booting it is darn BIOS. Black Shark loads up very fast too.

The one drive install is heawenly much better than a 10.000 spin Raptor disk also (my previous boot disk) but RAID 0 is of course much faster than the single SSD. Would be interesting to se a compared boot time or load time of an app/game on your raid 0 against single SSD (or even a single 10.000 spin RAPTOR).

 

(HJ)

[EtherealN]

Don't focus too much on the raptor drive's spin speed - it uses considerably smaller platters than a "normal" HDD.

 

 

The main "point" of the raptor is rather that the smaller platter reduces seek times across the drive, and the size issue is countered by the faster spin. Also, of course, you need to take density and amount of platters into consideration. Spindle speed is a relatively small player in comparing performance of mechanical drives.

[HiJack]

Nice EtherealN. I'm sadisfied that mine is reading twice as fast. Thats good. Ist there a list for RAID speeds also that shows SSD's? I must test my SSD drive somethimes this weekend :bounce:

 

EDIT: that was done quickly. HD Tune reports 170MB/s awerage and 211MB/s max for my Vertex 120. But I had all my programs running :D

Edited May 20, 2011 by HiJack

[EtherealN]

Testing RAID speeds is very difficult to do properly, and the results will only really be meaningful if your own raid (or prospective raid) is set up with identical stripe sizes and so on. (And assuming that we're talking about RAID-level 0.)

 

But yeah, my personal issue with SSD's isn't that they're "worse" in any real sense. My issue is that they cost 40 times as much for storage space. :P They are good enough that they should be more expensive, of course, but dishing out in the area of 1000 euro for 500 gigabytes of storage space... That's just rediculous when the Caviar Black I have cost 70 euro and has double that space. :P

 

(My WD Caviar Black with many programs running (didn't feel like stopping my streams) just returned 100.6 average and 138.4 max from HDTune, btw. There were tonnes of spikes from the OS and other stuff accessing it though.)

[Pteradon]

Thank you all,

much appreciated.

:thumbup:

[MackTheKnight]

I agree with Ethereal, the prices on SSDs are still quite high. But just to give you an idea of the performance difference, here's a rather telling screen-shot of some benchmarking I did today.

 

On the left, you see my 2 OCZ Agility 120 GB drives in RAID0. These are relatively old now and performance is even better on newer drives. In some cases double...

 

On the right, is my WD WD10EARS, 1 TB mechanical data drive.

 

 

The difference is rather staggering, although it's not really a fair fight since the SSDs are running in RAID 0. Still, it should give some of you an idea of how big of a performance difference there is. :)

 

-Mack

[EtherealN]

The EADS is the greenpower though, isn't it? They're dog slow. :P (Although the 1TB EADS is faster than my old 640 Caviar.)

 

But yeah, basically, it's a case of "is it worth the money"? There's no one answer to that. Some people will have extra cash lying around (like, big tax return incoming and so on) and as such will value the performance increases more than that money. Others won't. But to be honest, the biggest advantage of the SSD's isn't in the throughput (although they sure are awesome for that too - two Intel 510's in RAID-0 will be close to the gigabyte per second) but the random I/O and almost nonexistant seek times.

 

My personal gripe is that while the benefit sure will be awesome, the SSD would become the most expensive component in my computer, and in a RAID-0 it would cost almost as much as the rest of the computer combined. :P But then again I don't want to do a too small setup either - I absolutely hate having to delete stuff. :P

[MackTheKnight]

hehe, yea I hear ya. 120 GB seems to be the happy-medium for price/performance with SSD's right now. I saw some Vertex 2 120 GB on sale at newegg recently for $180.00, but they sold out quickly.

 

Once SSDs become more common the prices will plummet. It's only a matter of time. The 120 GB drives used to be well north of $400.00 but they can be had for $250 now.

 

That said, it'll be some years before we see affordable 1 TB SSD's. :(

 

-Mack

[EtherealN]

Yeah, I'm thinking they'll become acceptable price-wise to me sometime the coming winter, based on the rate at which prices have decreased up until now. Then I'll probably get something similar to two 250GB Intel 510's or something like that. 500 gig system drive is roughly what I need, since ~400 is what I'm using right now and that's with a tonne of games installed that I seldom play. (Many games I only play when I have friends over, for example, but re-installing them every time that happens is just too much of a hazzle :P )

 

It's getting close now though, at least for people in north america. I saw a 96GB Kingston unit at 99 dollars on newegg (though that's after one of those "mail-in rebate", whatever that is), so finally starting to see SSD's at around the dollar per gig shouldn't be too far off. :D