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Is it worth getting a SSD drive?

Started by cytan, 2009.07.27, 11:11:45

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cytan

Hi guys,
  Is it worth getting a SSD drive for installing ecomstation rather than a really fast drive like a velociraptor? Reading the OCZ SSD drive forums, at least for XP, there's lots of tuning required.
See http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50376

Anyone has comments or experience with ecomstation and JFS installed on a SSD drive?

Thanks!

cytan

CDRWSel

I have the  G.Skill  Falcon 128 Go S-ATA II  as boot drive with JFS and yes, it is a real improvement agains raptor (150GB) 10000 rpm drives which was my previous HD. No tuning needed and very very fast !

note: do not use defrag on this kind of disk and never use it near full size value to allow a good cell optimization by the internal algorythme. The drive is too fast to see any differences between before and after defrag and this may reduce lifetime (MLC has limited cells write count)
Raptor and over HD have limited power on/off count !
           
Bye/2   
Remy

cytan

Quote from: CDRWSel on 2009.07.27, 11:43:37
I have the  G.Skill  Falcon 128 Go S-ATA II  as boot drive with JFS and yes, it is a real improvement agains raptor (150GB) 10000 rpm drives which was my previous HD. No tuning needed and very very fast !

note: do not use defrag on this kind of disk and never use it near full size value to allow a good cell optimization by the internal algorythme. The drive is too fast to see any differences between before and after defrag and this may reduce lifetime (MLC has limited cells write count)
Raptor and over HD have limited power on/off count !
           
Bye/2    
Remy

So  just
format /FS=JFS
and that's it? Wow, much less work than I expected!

Did you partition the drive, or did you keep all 128GB for ecomstation?

cytan

CDRWSel

Yes, I partionned the drive.
a/ bootmanager  (I will test with air-boot 1.06 (bootable JFS support was added since v1.05) to save one partition http://puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net/project/air-boot/AiR-BOOT/v1.06/AiR-BOOTv106_EN.zip )   
b/ boot partition with a confortable size (>= 40GB)
c/ free space for futur use...
d/ recovery partition with dfsee as extra program to create compressed boot partition images "IMZ" saved under this recovery partition.

note: for the installation only, I had to install a classic HD to have the SSD installable partition recognized by the ecomstation install tool. After installation, the second drive could be removed and boot ok.
bye/2
Remy

oli

I should be noted though that some of them are dead slow.

Of the WD ones for instance the fastes one just crawls over the 100mbs mark

And stay away from drives that use a Jmicron controller

CDRWSel

The g-skill is above 230MB in read and above 180MB in write with an access time near 0.1ms !
If you don't use full size of the disk, lifetime should be above above 20 years ! (I hope we are getting new HW generation before 20 years)   ;D     

oli

lifetime is measured in writes, 100 thousand writes for your drive which is in normal computer use less than 20 years, the data retention is also a problem, not really a problem with hard drive replacements like yours but scary when people are keeping their data on USB keys and cards

Samsung is working on memory that lasts longer

cytan

Hi CDRWsel,
   Is your SSD installed on an intel i7? If so, how does ecomstation work on it?

cytan

RobertM

Well, one interesting thing I have not seen covered is what type of machine the SSD is going to be used in. The advantages of SSD are obviously a lot greater with a newer machine with a wider/faster data bus. I am guessing that anything (except horrendously cheap mobos) that supports SATA II/300 should see a better advantage.

Either way, seek times are a big advantage. Certain other things, such as (lack of) head movement are more of an advantage on a JFS partition than on an HPFS partition (due to fragmentation or lack thereof).

SSD's do definitely seem to decrease certain aspects of boot speed under OS/2 and eCS (especially since there are a "ton" of smaller files that need to be read; thus an SSD cuts the time down due to lack of R/W head movement) - but not all. Since Warp/eCS initialize almost everything during boot, there will still be delays in booting (while waiting for various services and hardware to be initialized - ie: things totally irrelevant to the data transfer and access speeds).

I am "guessing" that various applications can also benefit from SSDs, such as MySQL, Apache, DominoGo, etc... but on the other hand, those are also the applications that will shorten the SSD's life expectancy due to an increased amount of writes.

On that note, I suspect that OS/2 in general, would decrease the life of an SSD due to it's nature... for instance, if Warp/eCS is installed on an SSD, it will be writing to it quite a lot (as an example: every time you move, resize or change a folder, as it stores that stuff in the INI files). In that respect, I suspect that an SSD should also make the desktop a little bit more responsive (though perhaps not noticeably so, considering hard drives have come a long way, and their caches should be large enough to buffer such reads/writes).

-Rob


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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cytan

The only reason I wanted to get an SSD is to complement the i7. There are two separate problems as I see it:

(1) Does ecomstation work with i7 and the Asus P6T SE motherboard? (Deluxe is just too much for me)
(2) Loading only the OS and apps onto the SSD drive would really not utilize the entire drive. Ecomstation fully loaded I think takes up less than 8GB of space. All my apps I think would be < 10 GB. Which means 20GB is more than enough. However, the drive which I'm looking at, the Corsair P128, which one of the fastest drives on the market is 128GB! This means that I'll have more than 100GB left. Should I use it for data? Is it safe and reliable?

Comments anyone about P6T and I7 with 3GB of DDR3 memory and Corsair P128.

cytan

CDRWSel

Hi!
No, My I7 system isn't ready now but I plan have at mid or end of next month with silver version on it.
About eCS boot partition, full ecs installation + programs is less than 2GB but I would suggest to have enought free space to take advantage of the integrated algorithm which optimize write utilization of each cell (each cell has a nearly same number of write operation to prevent writing on a same cell all the time). For this reason, I use a boot partition with 40GB. Writing INI files is not a matter due windows is the worst OS for this and the SSD has a great life time unde windows :D  (to increase lifetime above ... may be 20years ! , reduce the swap file or disable it's use (i don't know if this is possible) like it is suggested under windows. To make this easy to do, install enough memory (I7 uses 3 memory card of 1GB or 2GB but remember existing memory limit on 32bit Os).
For me, it looks lke eCS is a good candidate to work with SSD and I was thinking about all these questions before making my choice. I also power off.on my pc several times per day and when I taken the maximum HD (like the raptor) allowed power off/on, the life is much lower than the SSD. Of course, for server only, I would prefer SLC SSD instead of MLC SSD to take advantage of 10 times more estimated write operations. the application having the biggest impact is a web browser like firefox ! (how many write operation are done into the browser temps dir ? Just put this temp dir on a normal HD or use memory as temp path and you should be happy for a very long time ;)
May be it would be possible to load the programs ini file into memory at start and save them at stop time... Humm, this seems to be an idea to work on...       

cytan

I don't think you need to disable the swap file. I have 3GB of memory and OS/2 does not swap at all with all the apps that I run concurrently: OpenOffice, Xfree86, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, z-player, VBOX/2 with 512MB allocated etc.

cytan

Andi

Quote from: RobertM on 2009.07.28, 21:02:46
...
On that note, I suspect that OS/2 in general, would decrease the life of an SSD due to it's nature... for instance, if Warp/eCS is installed on an SSD, it will be writing to it quite a lot (as an example: every time you move, resize or change a folder, as it stores that stuff in the INI files). .....
-Rob
There's a utility which changes the usual OS/2 - eCS behaviour of bypassing the file system cache for ini writes. Then, with the usual lazy write (?) settings, your SSD (CF-Card in my case) will probably last forever (better said - longer than you would like to life with the storage capacity of the current drives).

Another thought, AFAIK OS/2 keeps the inis in memory and writtes it back to .ini at shutdown. I'm not sure how often the .!!! are written, but with my settup (CF-Card and the above mentioned utility which name I forgot) I very rarely see any disk activity. So I'm under the impression, my CF-Card will not be very stressed.

Inputs from more capable people desired...

RobertM

Andi,

I had used that utility (the ini one) in the past, but was kinda leary about trying it lately on my varying releases of eCS and WSeB since they've all had various fixes applied at somewhat random levels - and in the past I'd had problems with PMMERGE.

May look into trying it again later.

-R


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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oli

Quote from: RobertM on 2009.07.28, 21:02:46
Well, one interesting thing I have not seen covered is what type of machine the SSD is going to be used in. The advantages of SSD are obviously a lot greater with a newer machine with a wider/faster data bus. I am guessing that anything (except horrendously cheap mobos) that supports SATA II/300 should see a better advantage.

Not really, most dives have not even reached the 133mbs max rate of and IDE bus, the best drives actually eek out their performance by using huge caches, the G-skill has a whopping 64mb of cache while most hard drives max out at 32, if those SSD drives had a performance that exceeded ATA data rates there would be no need for a cache.