SSD Drives Revisited

[choucove]

The topic of cost/performance and feasibility of using solid state drives in a graphics production workstation has been tossed around here quite a bit in the past. I wanted to hit back on this topic and see if anyone's thoughts on this matter might be changing as the prices of these devices drop quickly.

I have been using two OCZ Vertex drives in my main desktop for a year now, and immediately noticed a performance gain just from using these SSD drives instead of traditional 7,200rpm SATA drives. But the price is quite a shocker.

Do you think in a business, with multiple computers being purchased, that it would be worth attempting to even put a single SSD drive in the computer instead of a traditional hard drive? In our situation at least, all job files and company files are saved onto the server so there is no need for a lot of local storage space, but do you believe that a single 120 GB SSD would still offer enough space today (and into the next several years) for all the applications and temporary files that would be used on these design computers? Would it even be worth the amount of price premium that these drives bring (such as 120 GB mentioned above ranging in the $400 price point.)

Just curious as to all of your thoughts on this as well!

 

[SignManiac]

120 GB is way too small for my needs.

 

[choucove]

120 GB is way too small for my needs.

The capacity is something of worry for me, as well, but I think that 120 GB might be just enough for their needs really.

With my desktop I have two 120 GB SSD drives as I said, and currently only have 70 GB of space used. That is Windows 7 Ultimate, Adobe Photoshop/Dreamweaver/Premiere/etc. CS4, several games including Assassin's Creed and Crysis, and a host of a few other applications.

On their desktops currently, while running Windows XP, our designers have between 25 GB and 50 GB total used space. And that is with Windows XP Pro, FlexiSign Pro v8.1, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator CS4, fonts, emails, and a couple other much smaller applications.

So, would 120 GB still cut it with these kinds of storage usage within a Windows 7 environment? Again, all the job files and customer files are saved on the server, nothing is saved locally except as temporary files.

 

[jasonx]

I've got two 60GB Vertex SSD in raid 0 and that's my working computer for files etc. I archive everything off to the NAS when I'm finished with it and my capacity is fine.

 

[wes70]

I could easily get by with 120 GB. For comparison, with all other components being equal, is there that much of a performance gain using a single SSD over a Sata drive?

 

[choucove]

I could easily get by with 120 GB. For comparison, with all other components being equal, is there that much of a performance gain using a single SSD over a Sata drive?

That depends upon what performance you are trying to compare. If you are talking about being able to crunch big numbers in rendering an image or mathematical computation, then no. But where a SSD offers far more performance gains in is working with large files.

For example, copying a 5GB folder from one place on a standard SATA drive to another place on that same drive can take a little while, up to a couple minutes. With a SSD this time can be cut in half. The same performance can be seen when opening and saving very large graphics files, as well as when applying filters with applications such as Adobe Photoshop as the temporary files will be read and written to much faster than a standard SATA drive.

 

[smdgrfx]

I bought my first SSD last August. 120gb OCZ vertex. Running XP 32 bit on my rip station. I keep my files on an external drive and backup to my server. I also have a 500gb Seagate drive as a scratch drive. The speed is amazing. My rip time on files was cut by 60-80% on large files. A 500mb file would take about 10 minutes to rip, now it takes 2.5 minutes. This is on a Q9550 @ 3.6ghz with 4gb of 1066 ram. Smaller files - under 100mbs - rip so fast it's almost unbelievable. Programs open in the blink of an eye. I also have an i7 rig with a 128gb Patriot Torqx. That machine is even faster!!! The entry price is high, but completely worth it to me. How much is your time worth. I'm currently looking at buying another to replace a raid 0 setup in another machine. Newegg has the OCZ Vertex 120gb for $289 after rebate until the 17th of March. Get it while it's good.

P.S. Once you go SSD, everything else seems so slow...

 

[jiarby]

The price to performance ratio made me use a couple 10k raptors in a stripe set.

2x 300gb raptors costs $400

A 256gb SSD costs $750

I'll bet that your productivity is NOT affected by how slow your HDD is spinning.

 

[choucove]

We are just at that in-between situation. While the SSD drives will offer a noticeable performance increase for handling large files in production, will that extra minute or two difference in a couple large files really make a difference for the cost in the long run?

Perhaps if the overall budget for your systems is enough to allow the remaining system to be of high enough quality and performance, then SSD additions might not be a bad idea. I just know in our case the cost of the SSD storage system would mean sacrifices in other areas of the system that just don't make it worth it.

 

[J Hill Designs]

@ $65 per hour shop rate thats $1 per minute (roughly) - 6 hours later you paid for your drive...ya? 2-3 minutes per day saved, thats half a year

 

[smdgrfx]

and prices are falling back down right now. OCZ is about to introduce a faster Vertex 2, so I would guess their prices may drop in the near future. I have been seeing 120/128gb drives for right around $300 the last couple of weeks. Kingston has a 128gb for $250 right now. Not as fast as the OCZ, Patriot, or Intel, but it is faster than any mechanical drive.

 

[choucove]

and prices are falling back down right now. OCZ is about to introduce a faster Vertex 2, so I would guess their prices may drop in the near future. I have been seeing 120/128gb drives for right around $300 the last couple of weeks. Kingston has a 128gb for $250 right now. Not as fast as the OCZ, Patriot, or Intel, but it is faster than any mechanical drive.

I have been keeping an eye on these over the last month as well, and noticed quite a dramatic price drop as well in many of these drives. I know a lot of this has to do with preparing newer generation drives. As the price of these drives drop, they come closer and closer to becoming a feasible option for more and more people.

 

[ActualGrafix]

The price to performance ratio made me use a couple 10k raptors in a stripe set.

2x 300gb raptors costs $400

A 256gb SSD costs $750

I'll bet that your productivity is NOT affected by how slow your HDD is spinning.

im rockin a similar setup. 2 raptors in a raid 0, quad core 3.4, 4 gig o ram no lag in anything i do..... with way more than enough storage. ssd just isnt worth it yet. id wait another year when they go down in price by about 1/2.

 

[choucove]

One of the problems I fear will plague the SSD market is its prices because, unfortunately, sellers have noticed that people are willing to pay an arm and a leg for this advanced technology because it does make a difference. I may be very wrong about this, but the way it seems to me over the past year of watching their products and prices, companies like OCZ, Intel, and Corsair are producing "budget" SSDs that are relatively cheap, yes, but they also only offer base performance (still a decent boost over hard drives, but only half the performance of their mainstream or upper products) and ad very small capacities. However, their performance lines have not changed that much in price in a year's time. Instead, I fear what will happen is cheaper basic SSDs will appear in the lower priced regions, while the "older" generation (the current Indilix based SATAII drives) will be replaced by the newer generation (sandforce based SATA3 drives) which will take the high crown of pricing again, yet the old drives will still remain near the same price they were before.

 

[Dice]

Prices on the performance SSD's are coming down. Kingston just released some. Reads at 200mb/s writes at 160mb/s

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139137

They will keep getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper.

These days its best to have an SSD in your Design PC, but keep work on a RAID 5 network server with a Gigabit network. Magneto Drives will still be the standard when it comes to pure storage capacity for at least the next 2 years. SSD's are taking over as Desktop and Laptop drives, but it will be a long time before they can catch up on Price per Gigabyte.

 

[choucove]

Prices on the performance SSD's are coming down. Kingston just released some. Reads at 200mb/s writes at 160mb/s

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139137

They will keep getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper.

These days its best to have an SSD in your Design PC, but keep work on a RAID 5 network server with a Gigabit network. Magneto Drives will still be the standard when it comes to pure storage capacity for at least the next 2 years. SSD's are taking over as Desktop and Laptop drives, but it will be a long time before they can catch up on Price per Gigabyte.

Absolutely correct, you just can't really justify a SSD setup for your mass data storage really. If you really need more speed off of your data RAID array than just a standard magnetic drive can offer you, then you should look into a RAID 10 setup. Even with four 1 TB drives it would be much cheaper than a RAID 1 setup of two 128 GB SDD drives.

When it comes to myself, I'm sold on SSDs. I put in two in my desktop computer and find it hard to go back to standard disks from that. I will be purchasing a new HP ProBook notebook soon and plan to put an SSD in that system as well.

 

[smdgrfx]

When it comes to myself, I'm sold on SSDs. I put in two in my desktop computer and find it hard to go back to standard disks from that. I will be purchasing a new HP ProBook notebook soon and plan to put an SSD in that system as well.

Ditto! I put SSD drives in two of my machines and can't wait to replace the others. I go home and almost get frustrated at my Raid 0 setup on my wife's computer. I'm getting a new tablet PC in the near future so I've been keeping my eye on prices of SSD's. That will be the first thing I do. Replace the drive with SSD. I'm running a 128gb Patriot Torqx on one machine and a 120gb OCZ Vertex on another machine. I've been very happy so far. They've been in use since last year August with no problems. I am noticing the MLC drives from OCZ have dramatically dropped in price. The 120gb MLC Turbo Vertex drive is now $350 at Newegg. Very tempting. But the Vertex 2 is coming out soon, so I'm anxious to see what happens with that.

The price is steep, but for me the performance is worth it. Jaw dropping. My Rip times have been shaved significantly. I like the speed of just restarting the computer and programs opening and closing like the computer is brand new with fresh install. I'm telling you, seat of the paints - the machines just feel so much faster. And when working with large files, everything just moves along so much faster in the design phase. I bet I'm saving 30 minutes a day.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

It is funny, we are constantly testing these drives and are still a bit weary of them for long-term, professional systems. Don't get em wrong, they can be a great replacement for a single 5,400 or 7,200 RPM drive (especially in a laptop). But when you start comparing them to RAID "0" #s on actual systems, they don't really shine as bright.

When comparing a SSD to a RAID "0" array, we get nearly identical performance numbers in most popular design software (including Photoshop). In some testing, the SSDs performed at lower levels than RAID "0" arrays.

The disadvantage of SSDs also pose potential problems.

The cost per GB stinks with SSDs. You can get much greater capacity (more GB) with a RAID "0" array of 7,200 or 10,000 RPM drives at a similar cost.

TRIM becomes a major problem with most RAID controllers (Most high-end boards recommend you enable and use an on-board RAID controller for even a single drive to ensure you are taking advantage of AHCI and leave the potential for RAID configuration in the future without a clean install). If you don't know what TRIM is and you are thinking about using an SSD, it would be advantageous to look it up.

 

[ddarlak]

casey,

what about SSD's in RAID 0? don't you think that would be insane fast?

as far as lenght of use, i tend to reevaluate my system every 18 months anyway....

 

[SignBurst PCs]

casey,

what about SSD's in RAID 0? don't you think that would be insane fast?

as far as lenght of use, i tend to reevaluate my system every 18 months anyway....

It is really fast, but you have to be sure that your RAID controller can handle that kind of throughput or you will be bottlenecked.

Also, the lack of TRIM pass-through is an issue.