I have absolutely zero experience with an SSD and don't understand the logic of how most people set them up. This is a point where I seem to have a mental block. I just can't seem to understand why putting the OS on the Solid State Drive really improves anything but boot time. I just don't seem to be able to wrap my mind around this.

Once the OS is loaded it is loaded. Of course I understand that there remains a LOT of communication with the OS drive but it just seems logical to me that the best performance would be to put the data and program installs on the SSD. I would think that most people spend more time on their system after it is booted than they do waiting for the boot. It just seems to me that the installs and data being on the SSD would increase performance after the system was booted.

My best guess is that many put too much value to the Windows Experience Index which, of course, would be higher with the OS on an SSD. When I break down and get one of these critters I will also get a stop watch. I'm probably wrong but right now I'd bet dollars to donuts that the OS being on an SSD with data and programs on a regular drive would be slower after a total boot than the other way around. Shoot, this goes all the way back to DOS and early hard drives. You would have DOS booted from floppy and installs on the hard drive because the hard drive was faster than the floppy. Why is it any different now?

I'm sorry but putting the OS on the fastest drive makes zero sense to me. As I indicated it is the performance AFTER the boot that matters to me. Heck, if the boot time was my main concern I could have spent a touch more on my new desktop and have a boot time of about 4 seconds with a regular drive.

I really must be missing something...

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I have been using SSD since I built this computer and would never go back to a spinner. Boot up is very fast but also anytime a program loads is fast too. Outlook opens instantly, games I play load faster and installing Windows Updates is fast.. My original setup was OS on the SSD and when I installed my games I put them on a separate "spinner" hard rive. The then got a deal on a 240 GB SSD and replaced my hard drive with that. OH, yeah I do my system images in about 6 minutes. My setup now is 128 GB SSD that has Windows Installation , Office, and a few program that I want on the C: drive. Second drive is 240 GB SSD that I install my games to. 3 drive is a WD Black Hard drive that I store my images on ( I use Ghost 15 for my imaging). The biggest thing to remember is there is no drive spinup needed to access your stuff.

I fully understand that if the OS, programs and data are all on SSD things are going to be much faster but that is not my question. My question is whether the system would be faster after fully booted if the OS was on an SSD and data and programs on a spinner or the OS on a spinner and everything else on SSD.

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It has to be faster since any system I/O is going to the faster drive. There's an incredible amount of read operations going on behind the scenes. Those ongoing and continuous reads makes everything faster. If the machine did nothing after booting than, of course, there would be no advantage but that's not the case since any operation that accesses the OS is going to be dramatically faster.

Setup something like Sysinternals Process Monitor and watch all the stuff that happens in the background even when you aren't physically doing anything on your machine. If that happens faster than it's likely that when a user actually does something there won't be competition from background processes since they probably already happened. It would also be judicious to place software that you use a lot of the SSS so that their background and direct stuff happens quicker.

If you put only the OS on the SSD and everything else on the spinner - as you suggested - than a user will still benefit due to less competition by all the background stuff which is occurring faster. I imagine that it won't be quite as beneficial with this setup as opposed to a judicious install of software on the SSD but I don't have any hard numbers.

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Best regards,
Manny Carvalho
MS-MVP since 2002

Ahhh yes, SSDs, pure sweetness. Ok, so we all know that they are insanely fast, more so in reading than writing. A couple observations from a non-expert who has used one since November.

First, in my opinion, you can ignore the advice to move "My Documents" and other items to other mechanical drives. That may have helped in the early days of these new SSDs but not anymore. The newer, higher quality, drives will probably last as long as the mechanical drives. PC World just in the past several months did a review of the new SSDs, pick one of those. Mine was not even on their list but I still feel confident about it. The most important thing: ONLY PURCHASE ONE THAT HAS A FIVE YEAR GUARANTEE, heck that is longer than many mechanical drives.

One advantage of the SSD: you no longer have to defrag the darn thing. In fact, Windows 7 and Windows 8 are supposed to detect a SSD, if you install one, and turn off the built-in Windows defragger. But still, if you install a SSD, make sure the defragger was turned off. One thing that I observed, and this is only my observation and nothing that I have read, if you make a back up of your entire hard drive (and you are a fool if you don't), do NOT defrag the back up drive. A file that contains the backup of a SSD drive (Acronis, ShadowDefender, Macrium Reflect, built-in Windows, Paragon, etc) will take FOREVER TO DEFRAG. The defrag program will see what looks like a horribly messed up file and attempt to fix it. In reality the back up file is not messed up at all, it is just the SSD. Yes, at least one defrag company has released a defragger for "defragging" the SSD. I say, bull $#&*. These defrag companies are freaking out about the prospect of going out of business so they will naturally try to convince you to still do defragging.

Hmmm, that is all that I can think of at this time, if I remember more I will chime in later. Fact is, in 5-10 years SSDs are the only drive that you will be able to purchase (until the next new technology arrives ).

Acadia

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The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution. -- Emerson

Interesting talk about SSDs I've thought about what this Asus would be like if I changed to one. I know when I was doing a Crucial scan to get more RAM for it the results also showed up that I could get a SSD as well if I wanted to put one in.

I don't really understand them enough to make a decision about whether I'd be better off with one or stick with the spinner I've got.

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Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com

Thanks for the input folks.

I was just thinking about what configuration would be best. There is a slim chance that I might get myself one for Christmas but it is in competition with a larger HDTV and a camera lens. Price wise the drive would fall in the middle with the lens being the most expensive.

While I'd love to have an SSD I just find it hard to justify a $400.00+ price tag when both my systems are already faster than I need.

One of the reasons I was thinking that putting the OS on a spinner was to do video encoding on the SSD but with the size I'd get I could easily do both on the SSD. I have a 1TB spinner in my desktop right now but could run the system fine on a 540GB SSD. Right now I'm only using 290GB. I DO still have some large installs to do but will also eventually be trimming 114GB off the data partition. Shoot, I could probably run the whole thing on a 250-300GB SSD. It IS a media system, not a work station but media system includes games, video encoding, DVD authoring, etc.. The main advantage that I think I would see would be with the encoding. As it is the media system is quicker than my Asus laptop on this but has a bit of an advantage. The video card detects when encoding is going on and throws the GPU into the mix for quicker processing. Combine that with an SSD and my encoding time would probably drop dramatically.

LOL! Sigh, the joy/agony of decisions when you start to get to the point in a new residence when you have most of what you really need and what you want comes into the mix.

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Jay's question is a good one, and a valid one. Manny, if you have lots of memory, the OS should be mostly in memory, and every access to the OS would simply be to memory, which is as fast as an SSD, no? However, I know that Microsoft loads a certain portion of the OS to the swap file, but I don't know why or what. That portion would be accessing the hard drive, would be accessed on the hard drive. Now it may very well be that it is a part of the OS which is rarely used. I agree with Jay that programs should also be on the SSD to get the real benefit of SSD. Data files, not so sure they need to be. You generally open a data file once, and write it once when you're done. Eh... who cares about that speed. While you're working with the file, for instance photo editing, that file is in memory, the program should be in memory, and the operating system is mostly in memory. It is possible that some people would be bothered by the slower speed of saving the file.

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Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Yes, lots of memory certainly obviates many of the advantages of an SSD. There are still lots of background I/O going on to the hard drive and since the hard drive tend to be the bottleneck then the SSD does help overall. It is most helpful, however, when large amounts of data is being loaded from a drive which is for the most part happening during start up of the OS or an application.

Some of this is also psychological since if a machine or an app starts faster and you can start using it quickly than everything else just feels snappier regardless of whether it is or not. As we all know adding more memory has been the recommendation for many years to make your machine faster even though it didn't actually increase the speed but it certainly feels like it.

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Best regards,
Manny Carvalho
MS-MVP since 2002

It didn't increase the speed of the processor, but it sure increased the performance speed!

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Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Touching back on the video encoding I think that is a definite case where the data being on an SSD would dramatically help. I've just been sitting looking at the front of my desktop watching the drive indicator. Just sitting here with Outlook and IE open I get a brief (probably 0.25-0.50 seconds) flicker of the drive indicator light about every 10 seconds. I assume that accounts for the background OS stuff. I may be way off but it seems to me that changing that 0.33 second average flicker to a 0.1 second average would not do all that much. Back to the encoding... As an example: If my destination and source data files are both on an SSD, (source == 8GB, Destination == 4GB as an example), would not the better usage for the SSD be data?

If course I understand that the best scenario would be to have everything on SSD. Actually I think that Acadia overstates the timespan in which spinners are gone. Of course it will be many years before they are totally gone from the seller's market but I think that they will be well out of the mainstream in 2-3 years at least to the point that new systems will exclusively come with an SSD. I am probably even too long with the 2-3 years. In Acadia's 5-10 years the next 'gizmo', and possibly the following couple after that, will already be here.

(If I may go a bit off topic... hey, it is my thread ) Shoot, what we see as consumers is at least a couple generations behind what can be actually done. As an example I used to follow some tech journals. There was an ongoing series of articles about an actual organic computer memory that, while not reliable, actually worked. It used a protein lattice as a framework and bacteria to generate the memory. All of a sudden everything disappeared, no more info. Personally I think the government grabbed it. This was around 30 years ago, around the same time that a 20 gig-a-baud optical modem was announced. The modem worked but could not be controlled as they had nothing fast enough for switching, could only send in constant bursts. From one issue to the next this also just disappeared. I'm not talking any conspiracy theory or the like here. Even if the government did grab these items it is no different than an auto maker buying the patent for a new engine type and sitting on it. Being an advocate of Occam's razor I must also include the possibility that the two above examples were frauds and the journals just quit publishing. On the other hand, if they were discovered to be frauds, I would have expected the journals to make a retraction. BTW, 30 years ago I also had access to the NASA Lewis Research Center's data computers in Cleveland Ohio via modem. Same two above topics suddenly became impossible to find there even though there had been previous comments (comments were also gone).

I apologize! This post reads like I'm REALLY paranoid and looking for conspiracies. I don't think I'm paranoid and the above examples don't really bother me all that much. It is just an example of world wide politics, our government and business. The above examples happen every day in the business world.

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It's not impossible, the scenarios you suggest, but it is more likely that the technologies just didn't pan out yet, ran into difficult issues that couldn't be overcome. I believe the world is ready for hydrogen fuel cells - but we don't have them yet. Why not? We can't make them economically yet. Someone will figure that out hopefully soon. Meantime, some company called Elio, is coming out (by 2014) with a 3-wheel "car" that gets 84 mpg and sells for $6800. Follow the money.

Damn, they're cute!
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=elio+3+wheel+car&qpvt=elio+3+wheel+car&FORM=IGRE

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Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ge1ZGi1bTQ

I want one.

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Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Actually I think that the retail prototype of the Elio is already out. Have you not seen the three wheel cycles with the two wheels in front? Put a body on one and you have an Elio.

Ya, hydrogen fuel cells are a strong possibility but how do you get through the red tape even when they are practical. Hell, take today's electric cars. Their performance could be dramatically improved with power feedback brakes but, in most states, power braking is not permitted. When a semi rig power brakes you know it as there is a LOT of sound. On the level of a car this sound level would not be there and it is not even the same principle. What I am talking about is the already proven principle of using an electro-magnetic field to brake a car. Any 'techy' knows that there is really no difference between an electric motor and a generator. With a motor you get power out, with a generator you put power in. Take your every day box fan... pull the blades and put on a crank. Spin the crank and the motor, now a generator, would actually put out voltage. Now here is the trick as to why this would be great on the brakes of an electric car. With the brakes actually being a generator the harder you use the brakes the more power they return to the system charging the car's battery every time you touch the brakes. This could pretty easily even be taken further by having the same system power the car. Step on the 'gas pedal' and it feeds power to each or the wheels from the battery. Step on the brakes and it reverses the potential on each wheel putting energy back to the battery. From what I understand this could improve the distance that you could get from a charged battery in an electric car from 33 to 50%. OK... I guess that I should also point out that it would seem that production costs would also be lower as the power and braking units would actually be the same components.

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Now put an electric power system on the thing with the feedback braking I mentioned above and the thing goes 800-1200 miles on that same 8 gallon tank. It is so sad that most states won't allow it. They just don't seem to be able to understand that the same braking is different as to sound levels in an electric car. In a diesel truck rig when you power brake it feeds back through the engine causing all the noise. With an electrical system there is no acoustic feedback like there is with a diesel rig. It just smiles quietly and puts the kinetic energy caused by the change of inertia in braking back to the battery. This is not speculation. It is proven fact.

By the way... I would not mind one myself even though the seating is not very conductive to any kind of romantic date... Hmmm, now that I think about it... what IS a romantic date??? OK, never mind the seating issues.

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At least there shouldn't be the problem of the front lifting as it has 2 wheels at the front. Years ago I had a Reliant Robin and that has the single wheel at the front. I could never get on with it, hubby even put curb stones in the front to try keeping the front down, I didn't keep it long before getting rid of it, it was not the easiest to try driving.

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Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com

Yeah, Joan, front single wheel just wasn't very stable. Jay, the Prius does something like you describe, if not the same thing. It powers up the battery from braking. Still, I'm okay with 84 mpg highway with gas. That's 49 city, btw. I'm okay with that too, since it's about twice what I get now in the city.

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Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Too bad the body isn't removable. If it were you could have a Spider also.
http://tinyurl.com/oj8pb7q

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Cute! But the other is more practical in Portland - where it rains so much.

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Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Those three wheeled motorcycles are very popular here in the mountains. They could easily be modified - not that the motorcycle guys want to - into that car. In fact, I saw one yesterday with the sides coming up so much that it wouldn't take much to cover it with a roof and make it into a car. The people that have them love them even though they aren't cheap.

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Best regards,
Manny Carvalho
MS-MVP since 2002

I've not read all of this thread (I've marked it as one to catch up on)

but personally for me (and I've been looking at the idea of getting one) I would use the SSD for OS/Program files and my SATA drives for all other data.

Otherwise having just the OS on the SSD makes no sense, you will get quick boot times, but standard load times if your apps are install on SATA.

That's just personal opinion though. Thats how I've always thought about SSD Drives, but once I get a chance to read this thread maybe it will change my mind

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Michael
Senior Infrastructure Engineer (Wintel) - Infrastructure Management
Degree: Computer Systems - BSc (Hons)
Certs: CCNA, CCNA:Security, MCP, MCTS, MCSA, MCITP:SA,
MCITP:EMA 2010, MCSE:Server 2008, VTSP5, ITIL V3 Foundation
http://www.michaelriccioni.com