Posted: 6/27/2011 1:52:17 PM EDT
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Lately, I've been lamenting how slow my ol' box is. Takes forever to load maps in World of Tanks. So long, I finally get in after the battle has already started. Sometimes as much as a minute after! Takes several minutes to boot to the desktop and be usable (I think the AV software caused some delay in allowing programs to start up).
The box is not TOO old - I built it in early 07 using a nice ASUS MB and a dual core Opteron. Overclocked it to around 3.6GHz, IIRC. Gone through a few video boards, but the one I have now is nothing special. I'm planning an upgrade in August. Probably go with an ASUS MB, a Phenom II 6 core CPU and 4 or 8 GB RAM. I decided to go ahead and get an SSD now, since I can still use it, and I can still derive some benefit from it. I ordered a Crucial 64GB SSD from our favorite tech vendor, NewEgg.com and got it in on Saturday. Slapped XP on it, installed AVG to be protected... and.. HOLY. PHUCK. IT. IS. PHAST!!! Boots to the desktop in about 15 seconds after the POST/BIOS sequence completes (this board is slow, that takes usually around 30 seconds). I can fire up apps very quickly. FireFox used to take a good 30-60 seconds to load up all of my tabs and be useable. Now it's up in under 5 seconds. World of Tanks loads maps so fast, I'm usually one of the first 3 or 4 people in, and I have to wait for the 30 second countdown to start before the battle starts. MAJOR MAJOR improvement there! Switching between the game and other apps (Ventrilo for voice comms, and browser for other stuff) is damn near instant. This box only has 2GB RAM, so it's probably swapping from time to time. The pagefile on the SSD definitely improves system response overall. Bottom line: SSDs ROCK! |
| I had a Patriot and then a Corsair. They both lasted about three weeks and bricked, ran like bats out of hell though. Too much trouble for me, my velociraptor may be slow, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work slowly every time! Hope it works out better for you! |
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I had a Patriot and then a Corsair. They both lasted about three weeks and bricked, ran like bats out of hell though. Too much trouble for me, my velociraptor may be slow, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work slowly every time! Hope it works out better for you! I read all the reviews before I chose the Crucial. There was a Kingston model at the same price, and you'd expect a name brand would be good, right? Bad reviews on the Kingston, saying it failed very quickly if you didn't update the firmware, and it draws about 5x the power of the average SSD. The reviews for the Crucial model I bought were all pretty good. I'm about to update the firmware now, just to be on the safe side. |
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First, you need to turn off swap and enable trim support. The SSD can only be written to so many times to a block before it goes bad. If the computer is writing to swap constantly, your will dramatically reduce the life of your SSD. You also need to enable trim support and do some other tweaks. |
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I had a Patriot and then a Corsair. They both lasted about three weeks and bricked, ran like bats out of hell though. Too much trouble for me, my velociraptor may be slow, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work slowly every time! Hope it works out better for you! Yeah, I bought 3 OCZ units a while back, two of the three bricked within days. I started buying Intels instead, they run faster, and none of them have given me a moment's trouble. Velociraptors have been pretty darn good, other than one bad shipment that I received about a year ago, all that I have bought are still running - even the first-generation 36 gig units. Anyway, with an Intel 320, my laptop makes it from BIOS to desktop in < 10 seconds. And it's running on a lowly T2300 CPU. My desktop with an I7, 16 gigs, and an Intel 320 SSD makes me think of the decades I've spent waiting for slow machines, and cringe... |
| Matthew, great minds think alike...I guess. I ordered the plextor 64 gig version last week for the same reasons as you. I'm looking at upgrading to Win 7 from Vista and planned on putting WOT on the drive as well; just to get the load times down. I'm not missing the count down, but I'd like things to be faster! |
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Matthew, great minds think alike...I guess. I ordered the plextor 64 gig version last week for the same reasons as you. I'm looking at upgrading to Win 7 from Vista and planned on putting WOT on the drive as well; just to get the load times down. I'm not missing the count down, but I'd like things to be faster! It's amazing how fast it is. I couldn't load Himmelsdorf before the round started, unless I had just played it. Once, I got into Himmelsdorf to find an enemy M5 Stuart RIGHT BEHIND ME. 1 second later he fired into my 3601's ass and lit me on fire. So there I was, coming into the game, hit and on fire within 2 seconds. Now I'm in probably at least 10 seconds before the 30 second countdown starts. I can also alt+tab to my desktop or Ventrilo when needed and it's STUPID fast. Quoted:
First, you need to turn off swap and enable trim support. The SSD can only be written to so many times to a block before it goes bad. If the computer is writing to swap constantly, your will dramatically reduce the life of your SSD. You also need to enable trim support and do some other tweaks. As for TRIM support, I'm running XP on this box, and as far as I can tell, there is no TRIM support in XP. Most of what I can find about the topic is dated 2009. However, this will only be a small factor for me. Come late August, I will be upgrading my system board, CPU and RAM, and will switch to Windows 7 x64, which will support TRIM. I am well aware of the read/write lifetime of SSDs, but most of the warnings you see are just FUD. I'd expect without the OS supporting something like TRIM, and leaving the drive to its own devices (pretty much all modern SSDs have firmware schemes that will remap physical blocks and logical blocks to do 'wear leveling'. Hell, one article I found from 2007 figures an average SSD from that time would last upward of 50 years. So again, I'm not worried about wearing out the drive in the couple months that I'll be on XP. 
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| Sorry to hear about all the "bricking", but I got some Corsair SSDs. You think 1 is fast, try RAID0 for a boot disk! PHUCK ME @ LUDICROUS SPEED! (Hey, it was the second half of my enlistment bonus, I had to blow it on something!) I definitely like not having to wait for Windows to load, and when it's up programs open like yesterday. Seriously, when I go to click on Vizio 2010 it opens just before my cursor reaches the icon! (<- exaggeration but it's really f**king fast loading programs, and I always keep the boot services like "Office Launcher" disabled) |
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I've thought about doing a couple in RAID 0... my current system board does have a SATA RAID controller, but it's not very fast at all.
Gonna have to see what I upgrade to in August. The improvement in speed is so phenomenal as it is, it's almost like a new computer. |
I have a n OCZ in my Lenovo, pretty much like a SR-71. 
I have smaller ones in other machines. Knock on wood no problems with any. I have a Raid 10 Barracuda 7200, it went batshit after a few month have 1 of 4 discs not same firmware, was ez to remedy enough but risky. Damn fast for spinners. Installed a hybrid SSD/HHD (Seagate Momentus 500GB) in my desktop to run VM C:<->D: for better streaming. Very fast with 8GB Ram and AMD Quad Phenom. Always use upgrade firmware before installing OS, etc, and if running RAID, do yourself a favor and run exactly the same size and model, will make life much more reliable. Hope this helps and thank for at Trim/Swap pointers. |
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I had a similar experience setting up a friend's nettop with a 30 GB SSD using Ubuntu 10.04. The slowest part of booting was the hardware playing with itself, aka POST. Actual booting of the OS took maybe 10 seconds.
And that was with an SSD nowhere near the top tier of performance. A RAID 1+0 (redundancy plus striping) of SSDs would be SICK. The smaller ones are getting less insanely-expensive (I won't say "cheap" until/unless they head well below $1/GB), to the point where I contemplate doing so in my next build. FWIW, Windows XP does not have native TRIM support. Most SSD vendors (all?) have a utility you can run periodically to "take out the trash," so your performance doesn't go in the toilet. Ubuntu does support TRIM natively, beginning with kernel version 2.6.33. |
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Kind of OT but, why do you alt-tab for Vent? Is there something preventing you from using it in-game? I haven't bothered to figure out the key sequences to try to change channels, update my comment, etc etc. In the game I'm playing, it has a 'lobby', which is where I'd be when I'm coordinating with other clan members, and would alt-tab to the desktop to futz with Vent. Or when we're done, I'll alt-tab out of the lobby to close Vent. |