Solid State Drives (SSD) Anyone???

[3dsignco]

Has anyone around here messed with some of the New Solid State Drives.

I'm looking at building a new Xeon XP64 System and am thinking about putting 2 64gig striped SSDs as scratch disks dedicated to Photohop and Signlab for Ripping.
Since these are basically just Large RAM Drives I am thinking they would be Much faster then standard SATA 2 and no moving parts. My only concern would be a Sata2 bottleneck if they would utilize the full capacity of these disks. (Speedwise).

I have been playing around with some 32gig Jump Drives as scratch disks for Photoshop and it worked pretty well By redirecting Photoshop to utilize them instead of the Hard drives. I did notice a little Drag/Hang from the USB 2.0 Bottleneck. But was pleasantly surprised with the results for just playing around.


My main thinking for this is even with 16gig of ram on Winxp 64 Photoshop CS3 still caps out at 3 megs of memory then switches to the scratch disk. They will be changing this on CS4 but I heard it will be for Vista 64 Only and I do not see Vista getting anywhere close to my business for a few more years untill they get it stable or the next OS after that.

Just curious about anyone else's Thoughts about this.

 

[Techman]

first.. Be aware that vista is only gonna be around for another year. Then the newer nightmare will come out.

 

[BrianKE]

Check out the comparison here http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/flash/Products_FlashSSD.html (keep in mind this is basically an ad for the SSD devices so take the figures with a grain of salt).

As for the SSD being bottlenecked by SATA that should not be a problem for a long time to come. SATA3 (the second generation of SATA) was designed to handle 300 MB/s and as this review shows, SSD is only capable of 100 MB/s read and slower on writing.

 

[animenick65]

I haven't seen any good data to get me to pay the high premium for them. They don't save much in the way of power and really don't offer much speed improvements, especially in 2.5" drives. The only thing they offer right now is durability. If you've ever seen the inside of a platter based HDD then you know how fragile they are.

Eventually everything will move over to some sort of solid state, hopefully this includes the CD and HD movie industry. Using exposed discs to hold all that important data isn't the way to go.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

SSD is getting closer, but I still think you will be better off with a RAID O array of SAS drives (or the new velociraptor SATA drives from WD). Some of our larger design files are using upwards of 300GB of scratch. That will cost ya a pretty penny in SSD.

You can get some impressive numbers out of a multi disk RAID 0. Being that the scratch disk shouldn't hold anything other than a temp file for PS, then there really isn't much worry about data loss, should you have any problem witht he array.

 

[choucove]

From what I have heard, SSD can offer a truly unbeatable access time, and really good reading speeds to access data from the drive. However, some drives are known for terribly slow write speeds, much slower than your standard 7,200 rpm SATA hard drive.

There are a very select couple of brands of SSD that perform good on read and write speeds, but they are very hard to find and very expensive. Expect to pay over $600 per drive for a 32 GB version of these drives, and up to $1,000 or more for the 64 GB version.

All in all, just like everyone else has said, for your money SSD just isn't quite into the affordable market where it will become "just right" to use for high speed applications. For less money, you can get more performance now from using a RAID 0 array of two Seagate Cheetah 15,000 rpm SAS hard drives. Eventually, the price for the best SSD drives with good read and write speeds will begin to drop into the price range of other types of enterprise disks such as SAS, then they may be a more serious choice.

 

[Jeremy092288]

first.. Be aware that vista is only gonna be around for another year. Then the newer nightmare will come out.

What does this mean?

 

[SignBurst PCs]

What does this mean?

Bill Gates was recently (last couple months) quoted saying something about a new operating system being offered in the next year or so. Microsoft has officially clarified that to be a beta of Windows 7.

Vista will be around for a long time to come (04/10/2012) from Microsoft's official support timeline. (click here)

Windows 7 (next version on Windows) will probably be available in beta (testing) form in the next 18 months.

There is no timeframe being released (at least from what I seen from Microsoft) about an official release date for a final or RTM version of Windows 7. How could they? It will be released in beta, then it will be scrutinized and tweaked several times, then it will be released. My guess is that we are a good 2 years (or more) from seeing that happen.

Then when it is released, it probably won't be widely accepted until the first "service pack" (which took a year in Vista).

So, in my opinion, we are at least 3 years from seeing Windows 7 as an acceptable operating system. That is all "best-case" as far as I am concerned. Beta testing is a huge variable and can take a lot longer than expected (as we saw in Vista).

 

[3dsignco]

Thanks for the Inputs.. I didn't realize that the write times were that slow.. I was thinking it was the pipeline to the memory that was the problem not the memory itself.

Was just trying to create a workaround for software issues that we all face. But I'll leave that for people that are smarter.

My line of thinking was correct just that the equipment isn't there yet.

Ohh the memories.
What's funny is that RAM Disks (SSDs) are nothing new. I still have an old Ram converter in a box someplace from the 486 days that you could put in 4 extra sticks of memory and plug in the old daisy chain and use it as Ram Disk. Boy the memories 32meg 72 pin RAM $1500 a stick. I have 4 sticks for sale if anyone wants. Its stored with the seagate optical drive and 5" floppy.

 

[CrownSignSystems]

Performance to price ratio isn't good enough to justify SSD yet....stick with raid 0 arrays of normal hd's for now...save your pennies