TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
I've heard an ad from a computer hobby store that claims that if you upgrade your computer with ab SSD that it will increase The speed of your computer 10-fold. Is there any validity to this claim?!?!?
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Some validity
It depends on where the bottleneck is. Adding a SSD will speed up disk operations including operating system paging caused when you don't have enough memory. However, if the bottleneck is an old slow cpu then a SSD won't get that big an increase. Personally, I think the biggest bang for your buck is adding additional memory first and a SSD second. Additional memory will reduce disk accesses causes by insufficient resources. Also, "very" old computers can't take complete advantage of the additional speed from a SSD. This will also not speed up issues with a slow network. Here's a comparison that points to a possible 70% improvement from just installing a SSD.
https://www.compuram.de/blog/en/ram-upgrade-andor-ssd-drive-...
"Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart
Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams." Mary Ellen Kelly
To a certain extent
Yes and no, Your mileage may vary, etc etc.
I doubt that you would get a 10x increase unless your system is very badly set up. 70% sounds more reasonable, but 2x or 4x is possible depending on what you are doing with it.
The prime advantage of the SSD is that there are no moveable parts inside. That means that the CPU does not have to wait until a sector comes around before it can read or write it, nor does it have to move heads to seek to different tracks. Essentially, the memory inside a SSD is more like normal RAM than disk memory. Any part can be read more or less instantly.
The advantages come if you have for example a database which gets heavily used. I have a mythtv system which has a MySQL database and this is updated all the time as TV programs are recorded, building up a seek table so that one can skip backwards and forwards when playing back. The DB also holds 14-21 days of schedules and gets updated daily. An SSD is ideal for this kind of work.
The disadvantages can be small, but there is a big caveat. Since this is writeable memory, writes can be slower and there are limits to how many times any particular cell can be written before they degrade. The software inside the SSD is clever enough to spread the writes all over the memory but it still looks like a traditional "disk" to the interface. Evetually, however, all those writes add up and the SSD will just fail abruptly.
If you are really lucky or are paying attention to the diagnostics - who runs those? - then you might be able to get your data off in time before it all dies. With a traditional HDD, unless something catastrophic has happened, you can usually get most of your data off even though it is screaming ERROR at you. You know how I know that.
Horses for courses, etc. Most SSDs these days are large enough that the normal laptop user will have something else fail before the SSD goes. Personally, I use my own SSDs for holding the OS because that makes booting up quick and little changes on that disk from day to day. My data is all on certified spinning disks. I don't need my data that quick.
Remember to do regular backups!
Penny
Diagnostics
Not only do I not run diagnostics, I don't even know how to run diagnostics. Any hints would be welcomed, please.
Thanks.
Disk diagnostics
On Linux there is a package called smartmontools. I have no idea if this exists for other platforms or even if there are equivalents, sorry.
smartmontools has a command 'smartctl' which can read the device information from the electronics on the disk, assuming the disk has a standard interface. It can read most stuff but if it knows the model then it can tell you a lot more. It can, for example, report the number of read errors and reassigned bad sectors; the temperature; the number of power-ups and how many hours the disk has been running. Lots of arcane stuff.
I do use it occasionally, but usually only after I have discovered a disk problem by some other means. Life is too short and getting shorter.
Penny
Exaggerated Claims
Claiming a ten-fold increase in PC speed by switching to an SSD is pure hyperbole... or at worst an outright lie. SSDs will access data faster than traditional platter HDs because their are no moving parts... so almost no seek time to begin transferring the data from the SSD to active memory. There's a downside, though. SSDs can only be written to so many times before they stop being able to make changes to a particular byte of data storage. There are algorithms used by the drive itself to spread those writes out over the whole drive over time, but the end result is inevitable when your SSD is used as Virtual Memory... SSD crashes and eventual data loss. They're also very sensitive to ESD... electrostatic discharge. I've had SSDs die with no hope of data retrieval from a random static discharge, even when proper ESD protocols were being followed.
A good quality 7200 RPM WD Gold HD (Enterprise class) will be fast enough for any end user, are cheaper than an SSD, have greater storage capacity, and have MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) over 2 million hours... which means the likelihood of getting a HD failure drop dramatically. I recommend them over SSDs for a person's main boot drive. Put in a RAID configuration and you nearly double data transfer rates. The only really good use for an SSD is for installing games on that need hyper-fast access times and random seek times. (alternately, if you don't mind having to replace them every few years, use an SSD as ONLY your Page File drive with nothing else stored on it... so you get really fast Virtual Memory and when the drive eventually takes a dive you lose nothing)
Just my perspective as someone who has built a PC or 30... ;^)
Hugs,
Roberta
EVeryone has given some great info
Although I have to agree with Roberta most of all.
The biggest and possibly only thing you will notice with an SSD for your boot drive is the computer will start up much faster. And that is IF there isn't other issues causing your computer to be slow.
Everyone spouts off about how fast SSD's are but no one talks about how UNRELIABLE they are. SSD's fail with little to no warning!
I along with many IT techs use smaller SSD drives of around 128GB as a C drive for the operating system only. And other mechanical drives for storage. This way when (not if) that SSD fails and you must replace it, you do not lose any important data.
On my home system, I have software installed that clones my SSD drive to a mechanical drive, so that I have a back up to pull back to the replacement SSD when the one i currently have dies.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
As an IT consultant, I hit
As an IT consultant, I hit 'slow computers' constantly.
1) if you have a 5400 RPM drive, which is almost all 2.5" drives, and a number of the 3.5" "big" drives for things like NVR's, you will benefit from an SSD far more than if you have a 7800RPM 'standard' desktop drive.
2) If your hard drive is SMR, rather than CMR, it will ALSO be very slow. (I won't get into the differences, or the use cases)
My experience has been this. No matter what the CPU, as long as the operating system is at least Windows 7 (or linux), you will have a noticeable performance increase. I have quad core atom processors running Windows 7 32 bit where their boot speed doubled by going from laptop drive to SSD. That's without changing the memory at all.
Here's the reason, from actual observation. In the first 5 minutes after power on, almost _all_ activity is something hammering the hard drive. I just worked on a Lenovo i7 with 8 GB of ram. Extremely slow. High ram usage. (only 1 gig free. DWM doing weird crap as well). However, it's the hard drive being pegged at 100% that's really killing the system. In my experience, dropping an SSD in there will eliminate the thrashing, because the back and forth will speed up. That will end up dropping the memory usage as well, because the processes won't be waiting, queuing up data to be written.
Adding memory _does_ help. At the same time as replacing the hard drive with an SSD, I'll be doubling the memory to 16 GB. (or more) I suspect I will see it only using that same 7 GB of RAM once I'm done.
Database use - this is a mixed blessing. Yes, you'll get your reports and data throughput VERY quickly ( I did this at a customer years ago. Took their reports from an hour and a half down to 12 minutes) - but you'll be risking catastrophic failure of the drive, especially on a busy database system. That means daily backups aren't an option, but a requirement. The customer decided to do yearly replacements, even with the cost of the drives, was worth the performance increase.
Daily use - This is where you'll get the max benefit, and realistically, the drives today will probably outlast the rest of the hardware I had three failing drives at a customer, but they were all from the same batch, and they still lasted two years. (And were replaced under warranty)
So, for me? If you have a minimum of 4 GB of ram on Windows 10, try the SSD. You'll want at least 8 GB of ram as well, but the SSD will help.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
In real terms
All WD Gold drives are CMR 7200 RPM drives and show little performance difference versus SSDs... but have a significant reliability difference and are half the price. Right now a WD 4TB Gold is running about $170, whereas a Samsung 4TB SSD runs about $450... with almost no noticeable performance difference. For that price you can get a WD Gold 18TB drive... 4.5x the storage space with far better reliability.
In real terms, the slight edge SSDs have over good quality mechanical drives are invisible to the average user. A WD5000LPLX 500GB Internal Hard Drive is almost half the cost of a SSD with the same form factor and little of any noticeable change in performance... (CMR 7,200 RPM) but are much more robust. SSDs are over-hyped. Yes, for certain applications, they are better... but the reality is that most end users won't ever actually see that difference, so long as they get a good quality mechanical drive with far better reliability.
Just my take.
Roberta
Edit: Here's a simple Price per TB graph showing the difference in real terms of the cost of SSD versus Rust (i.e. traditional platter HDs) Prices are per Amazon as of a few minutes ago.
I don't work with SSD's over
I don't work with SSD's over 2 TB in size, and that's rare. 1 TB is usually the max. You're using an edge use case to compare price per GB. If you'd put in a 1 or 2 TB SSD, I could take that more seriously. You went far beyond the comparable price point.
The problem with SMR drives is that the manufacturers aren't telling. They've been randomly switching CMR drives out with SMR without labeling or informing anyone. I've been stung by this, as have innumerable people out there with RAID arrays.
The OTHER problem with 7800 RPM drives? Except in very expensive cases, they don't come in 2.5" form factor for laptops and micro form factor desktop units. So your use case fails there. Some of those machines now only come ready with M.2 format SSD's. (NVME nowadays)
Again, I work in real world situations, not in the pure theoretical, and I use SSD's to upgrade systems all the time. Not because of handwavium, but because for the people I work with, they need the speed more than anything else, their on-pc data either doesn't exist, or is backed up, and they usually are working off of a server. They work. Even the poorest SSD (now) reacts faster at the small end than the fastest spinning disk drive. Under heavy loads? Not so much. If you're shoving multi-gig files back and forth all day, SSD's probably aren't for you - but you probably ALSO know what you're doing. If you're a home user, or an office worker, using regular daily programs? You'll see the difference.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Not quite
The WD5000LPLX is certified both 7200 RPM and CMR. I know... I have 3 of them. Yes, WD and a few others have been caught sneaking SMR drives in with their CMR offerings... the 1 TB version of the WD5000LPLX is SMR... but that's clearly stated in the white paper for the drive. Sure, the average user isn't going to catch that, but their IT should.
It's also not pushing an "edge case" as you claim to show the full range of HD price points. Price per TB is what you're really paying for and the only way to do an apples-to-apples comparison of cost. Otherwise the cheapest 250 GB drives always come out as the least expensive HD... but you have to consider just how much storage you're going to get for the money you're spending. I also indicated SSDs as low as 500 GB on a price per TB basis... and the best price point right now is the 4TB SSD. Anything smaller and you're paying more per TB. In either case, the data overlaps for both SSD and Rust for 0.5 - 4 TB drives, so it's a direct comparison. Including more data to show the full range of price points for platters doesn't eliminate that fact.
I get it. You like SSDs. That's fine. I've seen far too many of them crap out after less than a year of average usage to ever trust them with any sort of data I want to keep, though. When an SSD dies, data recovery usually isn't even an option. Saying that a user has backups or just uses off-site server data kinda makes my point for me. You can't trust SSDs to keep ANY data because they can take a dive on you at a moment's notice and without any warning... so backups and off-site data storage become mandatory instead of a good precaution.
One last nail in the SSD coffin: their high rate of failure also jacks their Total Cost of Ownership up even higher. A WD Gold or WD5000LPLX has an MTBF of 1-2 million hours. Even at constant usage that's one drive failure every 100-200 usage years. OK, they'll probably fail before that, but it does mean that you can easily go 5-10 years with the same hardware... whereas you'll be buying a new SSD every few years, multiplying the cost. Having to buy 2-3 SSDs to get the same life expectation of one good Rust drive... at 2x the cost for the same data storage capacity means your TCO is actually 5x higher for a drive that gets at most a 50% performance edge... which can vanish altogether in a RAID 0 configuration.
Again, there aren't "edge cases" or "pure theoretical" situations... these are real people spending real money and with real data they don't want to lose... which is the entire point of having a HD to begin with... to retain data.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Roberta
SSD failure rates
I've had far more failures with conventional HDD's than with SSD's. I stopped buying 'rotating rust' 2.5in drives in 2012 because of the failure rates.
I have some desktop 4TB HDD's but these are only used for long term archives.
YMMV naturally.
Samantha
Oh, and I can remember the hours I spent rebuilding my laptop when I was working in Saudi. I dropped it onto a tile floor. Everything was fine apart from the HDD. Thankfully the market had all the software I needed at bargain rates. Conventional HDD's are fragile things.
Hi really you should let us
Hi really you should let us know are you using a desktop or a laptop? And knowing your operating system and RAM would be helpful.
While SSD can speed loading, once you are on a website, you won't see much, if any speed improvements
What do you want to speed up? Startup time? If so there are several free bits of software that can help clear out junk. I often find peoples laptops full of programs the don't want or need because they clicked YES, whenthey shouldn't have..
RAM would help speed if your system only has 2 gig. If you are running a low spec system something like Linux mint would work wonders.
You can try these by booting from a USB, without any risk.
Leeanna