Would I benefit by puttting in a SSD drive in my five year old computer?

[choucove]

The Dell Precision line (as well as the similar HP Z-Series Workstations) are great computers, no doubt. I'm die-hard custom built when it comes to performance computer systems for myself and may others, and for my dad's sign business we have custom-built every computer. They all are Core i7 based systems varying from first to fourth generation. And we have had next to no problem with any of them and their performance is great. However, as we will be looking at upgrading computers into the future I too will also be considering professional workstation class systems compared to custom built "consumer" line computers.

Of course, as has been mentioned above several times, there is also a difference in cost!

 

[player]

Even the hard drives in these pro workstations are generally different. They have enterprise grade drives - most consumer grade drives have a MTBF (mean time before failure) rating of well under 500,000 hours, most enterprise class drives have a MTBF rating of over 1,000,000 hours.

500,000 hrs divided by 24 = 2,0833.333 days, divided by 365 = 57 years...

 

[choucove]

MTBF is a terrible measure of lifespan for hard drives. It became industry standard because it makes hard drives appear much more reliable than they actually are.

With MTBF, a manufacturer may take 1,000 identical hard drives and run them doing a basic test. When the first hard drive fails, they take that as the minimum of the average failure lifespan across the hard drives, so they take the number of hours that drive worked and multiply it by the number of hard drives. Not the best method obviously. Also, this doesn't take into account other hard drive failures such as bad sectors. I personally think a better judge of a hard drive's reliability and expected lifespan is the warranty which they place on the drive. If it's only got a 2 year warranty, it probably isn't going to live much longer than that. If it's a 5 year warranty, then it should have a better chance of making it longer and up there to five years or more.

 

[UnlimitedBT]

the ssd drive

I have ssd's in all my computers for a while now. The last on I bought was Dell with I7 intel cpu. It also had small ssd on board. Before I put it to work, I ripped the hdd out along went Win8, installed 160 gb Ssd with+ win7 64 bit and all apps. ,+ better video with dual dvi to drive 2 monitors. IT had 12mb of ram which is ok. We do not store anything on stations, not permanently anyway, everything goes on NAS which is Raided. In any case, as it was discussed, you do not need huge ssd,120- 200 gb is plenty. Put all programs on it and throw addiditinal hdd for storage, better use the money for bettet pc. Ssd will speed up any system but will work better on modern pc's. There was a sale on newegg.com, samsung ssd 120gb $80, 6gb/sec transfer rate drive... win7+adobe cs6 takes 40 gig or so.... - just for reference. Also if you use the pc to Rip files to print,sdd equipped pc rocks assuming that other components are up to the task. Also if you run some kind of proprietary software that limits you to certain pc specs, ther ssd is lifesaver - we have a blueprint printer with plotbase software that must be run on single core pc, win xp, 32bit, there was very little could posdibly be done to make it think faster but we noticed a significant improvement with ssd.

 

[SignManiac]

Update

So I ended up putting in a 500GB SSD. Had a few "hardware" issues with the migration end of it, but it did work with no apparent issues. Only keeping the OS and program files on it so I have 250GB extra space on it. I have about 700GB of data files stored on two internal 1TB drives. One is just a duplicate of the other. My C: drive is backed up on an external drive.

Was it worth it? Absolutely... Boot time increased dramatically. From the opening Windows desktop all my programs open much much faster. Overall I'm very satisfied with the upgrade and glad I did it.

Thanks to everyone who helped with advice. I learned a lot more about the computing side than I really wanted or needed to know. Takes me back in time to the days of C: prompts and 5.5" floppy disks

 

[nashvillesigns]

SSD drive is GOLD

yes. yes and yes.
i installed one in my 2010 mac pro quad core. it came from my 2006 laptop.
holy ship high in transit, this thing is insane.
youtube SSD start up video on macbook, you will understand.
make sure you install a regular drive and set up adobe CS suite to use it for a scratch disk.
you're welcome!

-Mosher

 

[CES020]

I put one in an iMac yesterday. I'm typing from it now. Opening Adobe products is incredible. Photoshop CC takes about 1 second to open. Less than 2 seconds for sure. I really like the fact that it forced me to do the OS on that and then use a HDD for data. Now things are setup the way they should have been long ago.

I did a little testing in Premiere and After Effects and it was substantially faster than the HDD setup.

So far, so good.

 

[SignManiac]

Mine currently can only transfer data at 3GBs. I'm checking to see if my box is capable of using a PCI express SATA III card to get the maximum speeds of 6GB that the drive is capable of. Not sure if the MB is the limit on that or not.

 

[OldPaint]

TOLL YA....hehehehehehe once computers have surpassed the 2-3 gig processor or mulit processors....the cost to gain more speed becomes almost non existent cost to what you gain......aint there. all you gain is the right to say yours is the fastest....for whatever that is worth))))) my wifes computer is an old E MACHINE(which people say are not good ones, i paid $200 for it new)its a 2.gig lowest AMD processor, to which i added a good video card,24" 1080p tv.... and couple gigs of ram.........does all the wife needs. i have a 2.8 gig quad core 4 gig ram, to which iam going to add an SSD.....and it will do exactly what yours did.

 

[lodcomm]

Make sure you have your backup schedule firmly in place for your SSD's - they do have a way of failing almost instantly and often fail in a state where there is little to no chance of data recovery. (unlike a slowly failing Mechanical HDD, where you have a bit of warning before they go totally south)

On OSX systems we use Carbon Copy Cloner to keep a bootable "hot swap" backup of the system and important disks.

On Windows based systems, we use Acronis to make the same kind of "drop in backup".




-t

 

[SignManiac]

I have my backup set to 7:00p.m. everyday. I also have a NAS server backup going all the time. I have backups of backups because I'm super paranoid about a crash. Even considering cloud based backup too. Can't be to careful.

 

[Techman]

google has a cloud backup and if you need lots of space they nick ya for 5 bux more.

 

[lodcomm]

We do the same with the NAS backups of customer data in our data center, and on non-critical drives in our office(s).

For critical disks We essentially make bootable "clone" backups. IN the event of a critical disk failure, It is a simple matter of powering down the sever, swapping out the failed drive with the bootable backup clone, and we are back up and running in about 10 mins or so.

If you have ever experienced, or benchmarked the time required in doing a base OS reinstall & NAS restore of say a even a 500GB disk You will quickly see the wisdom of making "Bootable Clone" type backups of your critical HDD's.

-t

 

[SightLine]

Glad you went for it! I mentioned this back on on page 1.....

On adding a PCIe SATA3 controller- I actually did this on my Precision T7500 for the SSD - I bought a Syba PEX40054 card for this purpose. To upgrade to a SATA3 controller. You need a PCIe x4 or higher 2.0 slot to take advantage of this. PCIe 1.0 slots do not have the bandwidth and would see no real benefit. Your machine does however have second generation 2.0 PCIe slots (I looked up the specs on yours) though so you could do this. I researched cards to do this with and for the price the Syba card is (or was 6 months ago) the best bang for your buck to do this. If you do get one (not matter which) install the card first with everything as is and let Windows boot up. This will allow Windows to detect it and install the drivers for it. Then you can shut down and connect the SSD to it and boot back up. I'm using the Marvell 1.2.0.1037 drivers on mine with excellent results. With this specific driver on the Syba card Crystal Disk Info reports the drive running at SATA 600 with SMART, NCQ, and most importantly TRIM enabled.

Crystal Disk Mark.... Not the greatest results compared to what you would get from a couple of SSD's in RAID or on a motherboard with the native Intel SATA III controller but still far better than the 280 or so I was maxed at with the on board SATA II controller. Well worth the twenty bucks or so the card cost me on eBay....