Solid State
Thursday 17th May, 2007 09:46 Comments: 10
I want one of these, I think it's dropped in price since I last looked, as I'm sure it was over £400 last time. Transfer rates look okay (perhaps not as high as the WD Raptor can go), but it's the incredibly quick response rate, because there's no seek time, that makes it attractive. Plus the fact you can presumably let it rattle around your bag without having to worry too much about losing data. It's not cheap, but I'd look cool. I really should be saving my money for a house though. Damn my first month without having to pay off the car!
Yamahito - Thursday 17th May, 2007 11:42 You want *one*?
I want two or three!
I want two or three!
They're 2.5" disks, and I only have one laptop, so I could only use one at a time. I'd like a bigger capacity (and preferably 3.5") disk before I look at replacing the one in my main machine. I bet they're pretty quick when a couple of them are striped.
I was thinking of system disks. Extra storage in the machine isn't accessed as often, so noise and speed are both less of an issue.
I have some 2.5->3.5" converter plates, but I'm going to be leaving IDE behind on my next machine upgrade, so no sata is a bigger issue for me.
However, I'm anything but unhappy with my current system drives (2x36GB WD Raptors): at the moment they're striped with a system and a scratch/games drive across them, but if I go for the mac pro, I expect one will end up with windows and one with macOSX. The default drive that comes with the mac will then end up as some sort of X-platform scratch/storage area. Will burn that bridge when I come to it!
I have some 2.5->3.5" converter plates, but I'm going to be leaving IDE behind on my next machine upgrade, so no sata is a bigger issue for me.
However, I'm anything but unhappy with my current system drives (2x36GB WD Raptors): at the moment they're striped with a system and a scratch/games drive across them, but if I go for the mac pro, I expect one will end up with windows and one with macOSX. The default drive that comes with the mac will then end up as some sort of X-platform scratch/storage area. Will burn that bridge when I come to it!
I've always avoided clever RAID stuff for the system drive as it can be a pain to get up and running (although I think I know what I'm doing now) and unless you've got 4 disks, going for a 2 disk stripe is a tiny bit more risk (although you'd get a nice big system disk).
Also, once the system is up and running, it doesn't usually have to access the disk that much, mine spend their time mostly idle. You should be able to set the pagefile to use another drive, and I use Hibernate and Standby so the system usually comes back up within 1-30 seconds, so there's little need for a fast disk unless I'm rebooting. If you want to quickly load a game (despite the fact it's probably a network game slowed down by the person with the worst PC), you could install it on a striped volume on another couple of drives. Sure, you'd have 3 drives instead of 2, but it also means that most of the time you probably only have the one system drive spinning, and with a big enough cache it probably won't even write that often.
I imagine there will be SATA versions out at some point. Even if it's just a bridge, like many of the original SATA disks that were sold.
Also, once the system is up and running, it doesn't usually have to access the disk that much, mine spend their time mostly idle. You should be able to set the pagefile to use another drive, and I use Hibernate and Standby so the system usually comes back up within 1-30 seconds, so there's little need for a fast disk unless I'm rebooting. If you want to quickly load a game (despite the fact it's probably a network game slowed down by the person with the worst PC), you could install it on a striped volume on another couple of drives. Sure, you'd have 3 drives instead of 2, but it also means that most of the time you probably only have the one system drive spinning, and with a big enough cache it probably won't even write that often.
I imagine there will be SATA versions out at some point. Even if it's just a bridge, like many of the original SATA disks that were sold.
If the raid stuff had been Highpoint I would have stayed far, far away, I assure you :)
I went for stripe because (in theory) there's very little on the system disk that's not backed up or just stored elsewhere. Also I thought it might increase sustained disk access speeds for video editing. (at the time I thought I'd be doing a lot more than I've ended up doing)
The page file is on the second partition of the drive, along with things like hiberfil.sys (when there is one: I normally use S3 suspend) and the windows temp directory. But it seems to me that that sort of thing is exactly what you need your fastest disk for :)
I went for stripe because (in theory) there's very little on the system disk that's not backed up or just stored elsewhere. Also I thought it might increase sustained disk access speeds for video editing. (at the time I thought I'd be doing a lot more than I've ended up doing)
The page file is on the second partition of the drive, along with things like hiberfil.sys (when there is one: I normally use S3 suspend) and the windows temp directory. But it seems to me that that sort of thing is exactly what you need your fastest disk for :)
The file hiberfil.sys is always stored in the root of %systemdrive%, so I'd be impressed if you have it on your second partition (unless you've installed Windows on the second partition, which would be a bit odd).
The pagefile is pretty easy to move as it's a system setting (although it's typically better to have it on a second - faster - drive, having it on another partition on the same drive doesn't usually offer much of an advantage, if any), but the Temp folder that's supposed to be used by each user is their profile's Temp folder (as this stops permission problems/people accessing other people's files), so you'd have to change it manually (either through the registry, a tool (TweakUI?), or perhaps even creating a reparse point to a folder on another drive).
If you're doing video editing, I would have thought it'd be quicker to read from one disk and write to the other, doing stripe means you have to read data from both disks and then write in another location on both disks, which might result in a lot of hammering as the heads move back and forth, which might (or might not) outweigh the benefits. If you had 4 disks, I could understand why you might want stripe for the two disks on the system drive and then two disks for storage, and stream/copy data between the two.
With a solid state disk, it probably would be better to go with stripe as you won't get the latencies.
The pagefile is pretty easy to move as it's a system setting (although it's typically better to have it on a second - faster - drive, having it on another partition on the same drive doesn't usually offer much of an advantage, if any), but the Temp folder that's supposed to be used by each user is their profile's Temp folder (as this stops permission problems/people accessing other people's files), so you'd have to change it manually (either through the registry, a tool (TweakUI?), or perhaps even creating a reparse point to a folder on another drive).
If you're doing video editing, I would have thought it'd be quicker to read from one disk and write to the other, doing stripe means you have to read data from both disks and then write in another location on both disks, which might result in a lot of hammering as the heads move back and forth, which might (or might not) outweigh the benefits. If you had 4 disks, I could understand why you might want stripe for the two disks on the system drive and then two disks for storage, and stream/copy data between the two.
With a solid state disk, it probably would be better to go with stripe as you won't get the latencies.
Hm... well, hibernation has been disabled for so long I guess I can forgive myself for forgetting that I couldn't move it ;)
Having them on a second drive isn't designed to improve speed: the advantage for me was more in terms of space management. I care a lot less about that these days.
The windows temp and the profile temp are two different things: you can change both using the environment variables tab in windows, although I wouldn't change the profile temp space unless it was a single user machine (and often not then).
The sustained write speeds were more of an excuse/experiment, to be honest. In reality, 36GB seemed at the time a little too big to be useful as a system drive, and too small for a scratch disk.
Having them on a second drive isn't designed to improve speed: the advantage for me was more in terms of space management. I care a lot less about that these days.
The windows temp and the profile temp are two different things: you can change both using the environment variables tab in windows, although I wouldn't change the profile temp space unless it was a single user machine (and often not then).
The sustained write speeds were more of an excuse/experiment, to be honest. In reality, 36GB seemed at the time a little too big to be useful as a system drive, and too small for a scratch disk.
Hibernation is great, you should enable it :P
I forgot that an easy way is to change the environment variables, I don't tend to fiddle with them aside from when I add a couple of folders to the PATH variable when I install Windows. I don't normally fiddle with the user's Temp location, but it does mean that opening multiple RAR files from one array and extracting the file to another array can take a long time if it's got the bottleneck of extracting to the C drive and then moving it to the second array.
I might have far more disk space than necessary at this rate, the really big recovery isn't going too well, and Mark's away, but I'm hoping I can get him to help out again when he's back from holiday.
I forgot that an easy way is to change the environment variables, I don't tend to fiddle with them aside from when I add a couple of folders to the PATH variable when I install Windows. I don't normally fiddle with the user's Temp location, but it does mean that opening multiple RAR files from one array and extracting the file to another array can take a long time if it's got the bottleneck of extracting to the C drive and then moving it to the second array.
I might have far more disk space than necessary at this rate, the really big recovery isn't going too well, and Mark's away, but I'm hoping I can get him to help out again when he's back from holiday.
Okay, now I really want one of these. Scan have it even cheaper (£306), and I only need a couple more bits and I can hook it up in my main machine (the laptop doesn't really deserve such a disk).
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=558790
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_5420.html
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_5432.html
= £316(ish)
But I shouldn't. I really shouldn't.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=558790
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_5420.html
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_5432.html
= £316(ish)
But I shouldn't. I really shouldn't.