Recommended SSD for Sage System drive

[wayner]

After seeing another thread with discussion on How to improve Sage performance one of the leading tips seems to be to move to a SSD.

Any suggestions on exactly what drive? I would think that I would want at least a 50GB drive for my system - does that make sense? Are any of these suitable? I am guessing that I want one of the fast drivers with a read/write speed of 285/275MB/s rather than something that is just 100MB/s r/w?

OCZ (OCZSSD2-2VTX50G) Vertex 2 SATA II 2.5" 50GB Solid State Drive, Read: 285MB/s, Write: 275MB/s

OCZ (OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G) Vertex 2 SATA II 2.5" 60GB Solid State Drive, Read: 285MB/s, Write: 275MB/s

OCZ (OCZSSD2-2AGTE60G) Agility 2 SATA II 2.5" 60GB Solid State Drive, Read: 285MB/s, Write: 275MB/s

Kingston 64GB SSDNow V100 SATA2, 2.5" Solid State Drive (SV100S2/64GZ) (according to Kingston's web site this is just 250/145 r/w)

Patriot Extreme Flash, 60GB Inferno SSD Drive 2.5" SATA, Read 285MB/s, Write 275MB/s (PI60GS25SSDR)

These are all in a mid price range and cost around $100 (at Canada Computers)

[razrsharpe]

i love the ocz vertex's so i would get one of those... Also the vertex 3's are supposed to come out sometime in the near future and they claim 500 MBps reads... may be worth it to wait...

[civerson4]

I am using an Intel X-25M. Works great. Not on your list--but might be worth considering.

[Fuzzy]

Intel X-25M's are great for the price. You don't need amazing speed from a sagetv system drive, as it really isn't accessed all that much (asuming you've got enough RAM), so I wouldn't spend a fortune on it.

[Savage1701]

Any of those with a high R/W rating is using a SandForce controller. They get this by compression. If you are using your SSD as a boot drive, that's all good. But you need to move your pagefile, IE and FF caches, temp files, etc. to a mechanical drive or you will incinerate your SSD. MLC flash, especially the new 25nm flash, can't take more than about 3000 write cycles. You can read from it forever.

Win 7 will automatically align the drive geometry, so you are all good there. I have used Barefoot and SandForce drives, and am embarrassed to admit I used J-Micron based drives. Toshiba and Samsung make great controllers, as does Intel.

I think the other posters are right - Just loading Sage/booting the system drive won't matter much which drive you choose.

Try not to record to it. You will cook it in no time. You may not have had any intention of doing that anyway.

Also, SandForce controllers will fall to about 130MB/s sustained writes on heavily compressed DV files (us Sagers), photos, and audio files. In effect, those glowing numbers are faked, because the controller returns a test as being done when it has really just mathematically cached it out. It's sort of the worst of the worst - a "ghost synthetic". They will, however, read anything like greased lightning. That's not faked.

As long as you don't get some first-generation J-Micron piece of junk, you will be fine. I don't think you could even get one if you tried, at this point.

FWIW, I use a 7200RPMM laptop drive, and have had great luck with Seagate's Hybrid Momentus XP drives. They have 100,000 cycle 4GB SLC flash that reads what you use most - booting and Sage, and loads them lightning fast. Think about that as well, because you get a failover if that flash that is almost exclusively read from, should ever fail. You still have a decent 250-500GB 7200RPM notebook hard drive to boot from.

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

But you need to move your pagefile, IE and FF caches, temp files, etc. to a mechanical drive or you will incinerate your SSD.

Pure FUD on a modern SSD, even on memory cells using a 25nm process.

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
* Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
* Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

*emphasis added

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2...rives-and.aspx

[bialio]

I went with the Crucial C300 (link) and have been very happy. Good size/price ratio for me at least. Leaves me 40 GB for OS, 5 GB for FanART, 15 GB for Images.

btl.

* IMages being partition images to re-image back to a known state.....

[Bagal]

I've got a couple of the Vertex 2E's and have been very happy with their performance, if you do go for the Vertex, make sure you get the 60GB version over the 50GB as they're exactly the same drive, with the same amount of memory (something like 70GB) but the 60GB gives you more of that memory to use.

The reason for this is due to how the drives work with compression, basically the drives have more memory inside them than advertised with the excess being used for the compression algorithm (I can't remember the specifics), the reason for the 60GB version is because they don't believe a consumer needs such a high excess for the compression to work well.

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Pure FUD on a modern SSD, even on memory cells using a 25nm process.


*emphasis added

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2...rives-and.aspx

Don't know what FUD is. Go to the OCZ forums if you want to see a bunch of legitimately angry enthusiasts where 25nm flash is concerned and its dirty little secrets. I really would not believe MSFT about stuff like this. Fancy controllers are not going to take you to the life expectancy of 100,000 cycle SLC or give you a million hours MTBF, one of the most useless stats their is for drive life. If it did, enterprise customers would abandon SLC like crazy. The only way around it is to cram a ton of extra flash under the hood and not allow the user access to it or tell them it is there - forced overprovisioning. Again, if you don't believe me, check the OCZ forums. The new 25nm drives are even more overprovisioned than their 34nm predecessors. Still don't believe me? Check spot prices on 34nm vs. 25nm. 34nm is way more expensive now.

I've run laptops with single drive bays that have 2GB RAM under Vista and must use pagefiles. They burned up Barefoot and Samsung Gen 2 controllers. Thank goodness they were under warranty. My Win 7 64-bit system has its temps and PF's on a mechanical. I ran/run SSD Life on all those systems. It told me about exactly when each drive would fail that had no secondary drive for the PF and caches and temps. It projects my Win 7 drive to be good for another 7 years.

On the other hand, I have had great luck with crappy, but aligned, SSD's lasting for years now on seldom-fiddled-with servers.

[jptheripper]

not to fuel however,

FUD:
defn #1: Fear Uncertainty Doubt. Basically false "facts" spread via internet
defn #2: F****d Up Data. Same thing.

[Brent]

I put a Intel X-25M in my HTPC Server OS drive last month. So far... love it!

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

Don't know what FUD is. Go to the OCZ forums if you want to see a bunch of legitimately angry enthusiasts where 25nm flash is concerned and its dirty little secrets. I really would not believe MSFT about stuff like this. Fancy controllers are not going to take you to the life expectancy of 100,000 cycle SLC or give you a million hours MTBF, one of the most useless stats their is for drive life. If it did, enterprise customers would abandon SLC like crazy. The only way around it is to cram a ton of extra flash under the hood and not allow the user access to it or tell them it is there - forced overprovisioning. Again, if you don't believe me, check the OCZ forums. The new 25nm drives are even more overprovisioned than their 34nm predecessors. Still don't believe me? Check spot prices on 34nm vs. 25nm. 34nm is way more expensive now.

I've run laptops with single drive bays that have 2GB RAM under Vista and must use pagefiles. They burned up Barefoot and Samsung Gen 2 controllers. Thank goodness they were under warranty. My Win 7 64-bit system has its temps and PF's on a mechanical. I ran/run SSD Life on all those systems. It told me about exactly when each drive would fail that had no secondary drive for the PF and caches and temps. It projects my Win 7 drive to be good for another 7 years.

On the other hand, I have had great luck with crappy, but aligned, SSD's lasting for years now on seldom-fiddled-with servers.

Post like this that take what people "say" on forums and scare of other users frustrate me to no end. Saying that a SSD is going to fail if you don't take pagefile off your drive is utter FUD. Many of this issues that you point are are non existant in SSD's today. They woudln't be used in mass production laptops if they weren't (not to mention all the desktops that come with it now). You would have mast histeria if these were failing left in right.

SSD's are 100000000 times worse than standard drives. You read it here first people go spread the word it must be fact .

[tmiranda]

WHen I get some time I plan on migrating my Sage server from XP on a PATA drive to Win7 on an OCZ 64GB SSD. I'm willing to risk it

[bialio]

Even better would be to install Sage on a RAM disk. Just think how fast it would be

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

Don't know what FUD is. Go to the OCZ forums if you want to see a bunch of legitimately angry enthusiasts where 25nm flash is concerned and its dirty little secrets. I really would not believe MSFT about stuff like this. Fancy controllers are not going to take you to the life expectancy of 100,000 cycle SLC or give you a million hours MTBF, one of the most useless stats their is for drive life. If it did, enterprise customers would abandon SLC like crazy. The only way around it is to cram a ton of extra flash under the hood and not allow the user access to it or tell them it is there - forced overprovisioning. Again, if you don't believe me, check the OCZ forums. The new 25nm drives are even more overprovisioned than their 34nm predecessors. Still don't believe me? Check spot prices on 34nm vs. 25nm. 34nm is way more expensive now.

I've run laptops with single drive bays that have 2GB RAM under Vista and must use pagefiles. They burned up Barefoot and Samsung Gen 2 controllers. Thank goodness they were under warranty. My Win 7 64-bit system has its temps and PF's on a mechanical. I ran/run SSD Life on all those systems. It told me about exactly when each drive would fail that had no secondary drive for the PF and caches and temps. It projects my Win 7 drive to be good for another 7 years.

On the other hand, I have had great luck with crappy, but aligned, SSD's lasting for years now on seldom-fiddled-with servers.

Angry forum rants don't count; there are plenty of those to go around. Without hard facts and repeatable test results there is no evidence, just anecdotal conclusions which are worthless. NO manufacturer (OCZ included) would release a drive today where the page file would wreck it. If they did they would have to suck it up, admit a design flaw, and issue a recall just like Intel did with Sandy Bridge. I stand by my original assertion moving pagefiles off of SSDs is nothing but FUD and will remain so until the MANUFACTURER recommends it.

If you don't believe MS, fine, find evidence that disproves their claims and get published. Just not believing them because you don't like them, etc is just spreading more FUD. OMG M$ said it, it must be EVIL!!!!11!1!!!1111

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

Post like this that take what people "say" on forums and scare of other users frustrate me to no end. Saying that a SSD is going to fail if you don't take pagefile off your drive is utter FUD. Many of this issues that you point are are non existant in SSD's today. They woudln't be used in mass production laptops if they weren't (not to mention all the desktops that come with it now). You would have mast histeria if these were failing left in right.

SSD's are 100000000 times worse than standard drives. You read it here first people go spread the word it must be fact .

Oh noes I guess I should go get me a Quantum Bigfoot for my OS drive, those things were BEASTS!

Originally Posted by bialio

Even better would be to install Sage on a RAM disk. Just think how fast it would be

Heh, fast but dangerous.... Wiz.bin backups every 30 min?

[jnmfox]

If you have a SATA III (6 Gbps) port get:
Crucial C300:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148361
Or Intel 510:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167042
Or wait for the SSDs based on the SF-2000 controllers (Vertex 3) that are expected to be released in mid/late March.

If you have a SATA II (3 Gbps) port get:
Intel G2 drive for reliability:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167031

Or a SF-1200 based drive (Corsair Force, OCZ Vertex 2/Agility 2):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233130
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233124
As has been mentioned these drives use compression get their high read/write speeds. If you are using it for a boot drive with your OS and few programs this is probably your best bet. But if you are storing a lot of uncompressible data on it (mp3s, video files) then go with something else.

There isn’t a huge difference in real world performance between last years drives (Intel G2, Vertex 2, C300) each has its own strengths and weakness.

A lot of good info can be found here:
http://www.anandtech.com/tag/storage
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD

[wayner]

My usage will just be for the OS and Sage as well as any related files such as Fanart. All media files will be on other hard drives in the Sage PC which is running Win7 Pro.

[ericscottf]

I'm a big fan of the vertex series.
Running a vertex 1 turbo for sage, with winxp for over a year.
No media on the SSD (why would anyone bother? So you can watch it at 100x speed?), but pagefile and browser caches are on the drive.

I did the math awhile ago and came to the conclusion that with writing a gig a day (you're probably writing less) to a small MLC drive, the drive would last 10 years before the writes started to fail (this is assuming the drive can rotate cells that have files on them that aren't ever changed, large OS and program files, etc -- which i've never gotten a good answer on)

short answer: Get an SSD and back things up to an external drive daily. Burn a dvd of your important stuff at least once a month and give it to someone you trust. Even if the SSD doesn't wear out on you, you still have to plan for things like malware, power supply failure (which could, though i've never seen it, take out any drive), house fires, etc.

I don't understand why people badmouth SSDs. it's got to be the best emerging tech i've seen since... well, i don't know. multi-core comes close, but if i had to pick only one...

[davephan]

I'm using a Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) on my general purpose workstation. The reviews for the SSD are very good. The SSD sped up the computer's functionality a lot. It is well worth the money to upgrade to an SSD for the programs / boot drive. I edit video files with the SSD. Video editing is much faster. I plan to upgrade my SageTV computer to an SSD in the future.

Here's a link to the SSD:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148348


Dave

[jerryt]

Pretty clear which SSD's are the winners

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?k...EE&w=100&h=550