MyCE Video: OCZ Agility 60GB SSD booting & multitasking

vbimport
#1

Pretty much everyone knows that a PC performs at its best with a fresh clean install. :iagree:

Give it a few months of everyday use and it’ll not take long until the boot time increases until it comes to the point where one can boil the kettle while waiting for the PC/Laptop to finish booting up.

Back at the beginning of October, I built a nice Core i5 based system and wanted just one thing - a responsive PC with my everyday tasks that doesn’t slow down after several months. So I decided on the Agility 60GB for the OS and redirected my desktop, documents folder and e-mail profiles to a 2TB WD RE4-GP, which I also use for data.

3 months later, I currently have around 50 applications installed, consisting of various audio, video and graphics utilities not to mention many updates over the months. As a fan of open source and free software, I also have a quite a large folder on the SSD with about 100 folders of portable freeware applications. I know by this stage, if I had a hard disk in my PC, the boot time would probably have reached at least 60 seconds at this stage for the desktop to appear, not to mention the 30 or so seconds for the OS to settle down. This also takes into account things like periodic defragging, clean-ups and disabling startup processes. That was my experience with Windows XP and now I’ve Windows 7, which while not as resource intensive as Vista, it is still is more demanding on disk activity than XP.

So after 3 months of everyday use without the usual maintenance I would have done when I had a hard disk, how long do you reckon it now takes to boot Windows 7 and launch 15 applications?

Have a look here: :slight_smile:


Note: Video opens in a new window

Seen videos showing faster boots than mines?

Sure, you’ll find hundreds of videos on YouTube showing multiple scripted launches, faster boots and so on, but that’s not the point I’m trying to show here! It’s not about shaving 1 to 2 seconds off application launches. What it is however, is having a very responsive PC that doesn’t require all the maintainence hard disks need just to keep the PC responsive as the months go by.

To give an example, I’ve seen someone with a pretty good specification PC (Intel Quad Core Q6600, 3GB RAM, 500GB HDD and so on) and this person took pretty good care of his PC, installing just what he needed. It had Windows Vista as its OS and after just a year of every day use, the PC boot time reached 2.5 minutes before anything could be launched and even after that, it took 60 seconds just to launch Firefox! Periodic disk defragging did little to help and eventually this person bought Windows 7 and did a clean install. Only time will tell if this issue repeats.

Finally, I’m sure the most common reason people avoid SSDs is the cost. :iagree:

To make an SSD purchase more affordable, try thinking about these with your next PC build/upgrade: :smiley:

[ul]
[li]PSU - Do you really need a PSU larger than 450 watts? Most PCs without more than 1 graphics card will generally not use more than 400 watts at peak. If you have a <$/€100 graphics card, your PC may max out at 250 watts, even with multiple hard disks and optical drives. My i5 750 based PC with the entry ATi HD4350 uses as little as 47 watts idle and maxes out at just under 200 watts going by my watt meter.
[/li][li]Graphics - Any modern entry level add-on graphics card can handle Full HD video acceleration, yes, even thouse under €50! If you’re not a gamer, do you really need such a fancy graphics card? Tip: If you’re not sure, get an entry-level card and if the time comes when you find that you’re using some fancy animation software that requires a higher end card, then buy one. By that time, the price will have come down or maybe even a newer model will be out than what you originally debated about.
[/li][li]Case - If you don’t intend competing with your friends on a fancy case, don’t go for more than you need. I couldn’t be happier with my Antec Three Hundred and it’s no noiser than higher end cases I’ve seen people with.
[/li][li]Blu-ray writer - Unless you have a Blu-ray disc player and want to create Blu-ray discs, consider a BD-ROM instead. Two 1TB+ hard disks (1 as backup) have a cheaper cost per gigabyte than most blank Blu-ray media.
[/li][li]RAM - Do you really need fancy high end RAM?
[/li][/ul]

Add up the savings and use them towards an SSD purchase. You may even have some change left over. :cool:

#2

Thank you for the video it is one of the best I have seen on the tube. It was really good as the video showed how the SSD worked on a live system and how fast it booted the operating system and applications.

#3

The ultimate demonstration Seán.

There’s no better way of showing just how fast SSDs are and it’s great to see a real world example of that.

Very informative indeed. :clap::clap::clap:

[B]Wombler[/B]

#4

I honestly don’t find it that impressing, my desktop boots about 12 secs slower and it uses a Hitachi T7K500 320Gb HDD which was launced in 2006 which is hardly new…

“Graphics - Any modern entry level add-on graphics card can handle Full HD video acceleration, yes, even thouse under €50! If you’re not a gamer, do you really need such a fancy graphics card?”

Because the entry cards doesn’t fully work compared to the mid-end/hi-end?
I’ve seen several posts where 4350 (cards pretty much below 4650) struggles with HD and you don’t have all deinterlacing modes available either fyi.

I’m not really sure of your reasoning of PSUs since no PSU have 100% efficiency and rails can be configured quite differently it should also be mentioned that ~400W+ PSUs (good ones that is) have much better components than your average Codegen 350W, Rosewill etc…

//Danne

#5

Dizzy, yes your system maybe only be 12 sec slower but does it load all that kind of software that fast?
The answer is a simple NO, you only need to look at the access time of any hdd and the access time of an SSD, huge difference.
The only real negative of the SSD is the price (the reason why i dont have one in my system).

#6

Never said that it was just as fast, I don’t see how amazing it is that IE starts in 1 sec instead of 2 secs…
Small applications have always been fast, that’s not something new.
//Danne

#7

Thanks, Sean.
An excellent video, and [B]DOES[/B] show how much faster an SSD is over an HDD, and with a real life system used for the test.

I mean no disrespect to people running an HDD as a system drive, but if you don’t count ODD, the HDD is by far the slowest device in your system.
If you have a fast CPU and graphics, like an i5 that Sean has, or even an overclocked i7, then you can return great CPU and GPU benchmarks. Yet, the system in real use is waiting around for data from an HDD, or waiting around on data being written to the HDD. Fitting a good SSD into that spec of machine will totally transform it.

The first SSD demo i seen in real life was the one that really got me interested in SSD.
The demo had an i7 desktop with nVidia 280 graphics, 4 GB of ram and was running on a WD VR 300GB
The second machine was a lowly MSI Wind with 1GB of ram and onboard graphics. I thought, this is no contest.
The MSI Wind had an SSD though, and although it wasn’t going to beat the desktop on shear grunt, it actually felt faster and smoother than the mega powerful desktop in real world use, just doing simple tasks like browsing the Internet.

I have said it before. You simply won’t appreciate how much faster an SSD is, until you get one yourself. Just ask any SSD owner. :slight_smile:

#8

While I’ve used SSD HDDs and they are faster they don’t dramatically change your experience as opposed to lets say getting an PVA/IPS-panel monitor instead of your average crap TN-panel. I would love to see real performance facts of your “Wind experience” since pretty much everyone says that SSDs in netbooks are dog slow which pretty much is the truth. It should also be mentioned that OSes these days caches frequently access files which makes the difference even smaller.



and so on…

//Danne

#9

[QUOTE=DiiZzY;2491919]While I’ve used SSD HDDs and they are faster they don’t dramatically change your experience as opposed to lets say getting an PVA/IPS-panel monitor instead of your average crap TN-panel. I would love to see real performance facts of your “Wind experience” since pretty much everyone says that SSDs in netbooks are dog slow which pretty much is the truth. It should also be mentioned that OSes these days caches frequently access files which makes the difference even smaller.



and so on…

//Danne[/QUOTE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNSfzA4qLqM
I don’t have access to a MSI Wind but my daughter has an Acer Netbook with a 120GB Agility SSD, i’ll see if can make a video. :stuck_out_tongue:

In the mean time, here is an Acer Netbook with a very small SSD vs an HDD Netbook, apparently both the same model.
And Dizzy, i only ever deal with “real facts” that i can verify myself.

#10

[QUOTE=DiiZzY;2491911]Never said that it was just as fast, I don’t see how amazing it is that IE starts in 1 sec instead of 2 secs…
Small applications have always been fast, that’s not something new.[/QUOTE]
Quote from 1st post:

[QUOTE=Seán;2491783]Sure, you’ll find hundreds of videos on YouTube showing multiple scripted launches, faster boots and so on, but that’s not the point I’m trying to show here! It’s not about shaving 1 to 2 seconds off application launches. What it is however, is having a very responsive PC that [U]doesn’t require all the maintainence hard disks needed just to keep the PC responsive as the months go by[/U]. [/QUOTE]

On my older PC, I regularly defragged it, carried out tweaks, performed regular clean-ups, checked upon startup processes, reinstalled software, etc. just to keep the PC running reasonably quick. Sure I didn’t mind waiting 5 or so seconds to launch something, but as this gradually climbed to 10+ seconds, it was back to tweaking. :doh: On the other hand, I admit that I do enjoy trying out all sorts of audio/video/web editing utilities I come across, which is I’m sure the main reason my PC use to slow down so much so quickly.

With the SSD now, I still carry on trying out all the utilities, plug-ins, etc. as before, but I very rarely carry out any of the maintenance tasks I use to do before, apart from the occasional clean-up to free disk space. Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare hard disk at the moment, but I have a WD Caviar 500GB ordered, which I plan using for my own experiments (e.g. trying out Linux distributions). So when this arrives, one thing I would like to do for curiosity is mirror my SSD to it and repeat the above test again between the two just to get an idea of what state my PC would be in had I been working like this from HDD all along.

Finally, it’s worth noting that hardware initialisation accounts for most of the time involved booting Windows as far as the welcome screen, not just the BIOS screen, so it’s possible to have a 30+ second Windows boot time even with a physical RAM drive if some hardware components are slow to initialise. I’ve already had experience with a PCI IDE controller that was painfully slow to initialise (can’t remember the chipset model off hand). With the right hardware components, Windows 7 will boot to the desktop in as little as 10 seconds from SSD.

#11

You gotta be kidding right?

No offense but if you don’t think that video is impressive then there is another underlying issue here.

I upgraded to an Agility 120GB and it is amazing and my system was very fast to start with.

i7 920 @ 4.0GHz
Scythe MUGEN-2 with Push/Pull
Gigabyte EX58 UD5
3X2GB G-Skill DDR3
eVGA GTX 260
24" Acer HDMI LCD
Corsair TX850
Lian-Li PC-V1000

[QUOTE=DiiZzY;2491893]I honestly don’t find it that impressing, my desktop boots about 12 secs slower and it uses a Hitachi T7K500 320Gb HDD which was launced in 2006 which is hardly new…

“Graphics - Any modern entry level add-on graphics card can handle Full HD video acceleration, yes, even thouse under €50! If you’re not a gamer, do you really need such a fancy graphics card?”

Because the entry cards doesn’t fully work compared to the mid-end/hi-end?
I’ve seen several posts where 4350 (cards pretty much below 4650) struggles with HD and you don’t have all deinterlacing modes available either fyi.

I’m not really sure of your reasoning of PSUs since no PSU have 100% efficiency and rails can be configured quite differently it should also be mentioned that ~400W+ PSUs (good ones that is) have much better components than your average Codegen 350W, Rosewill etc…

//Danne[/QUOTE]

#12

How is it “that” impressive? You have one of the most powerful CPUs available for the x86 platform, of course it’ll be fast that’s just common sense. Put it (a SSD) in a mid-end computer and the difference will be much smaller so question is if it still will be worth it.
//Danne

#13

I am being insulted with the old “it’s just common sense” comment… :rolleyes:

I suppose if you take your current system and slap in a SSD you may be impressed like I was, or maybe you won’t, or maybe you won’t admit it.

Either way I guess the basis of Seán’s thread was to show off the capability of these drives and he did that and more.

[QUOTE=DiiZzY;2492174]How is it “that” impressive? You have one of the most powerful CPUs available for the x86 platform, of course it’ll be fast that’s just common sense. Put it (a SSD) in a mid-end computer and the difference will be much smaller so question is if it still will be worth it.
//Danne[/QUOTE]

#14

The thing is that this is like comparing a customized V8 engine to a stock V6 and then get stunned that the V8 is faster/better. I didn’t mean to be rude but that’s nothing to go raving about in my book…
It would be interesting though on an “average computer” to see if there’s any noticeable performance boost at all.
//Danne

#15

Where is the crime in making a fast computer faster? Fact is it DOES make it faster by a surprising amount. Maybe it’s just me but it did impress me quite a bit.

Everyday usage, opening files and programs, converting files to DVD and Blu-ray, loading games, heck even Web browsing is snappier if the data is loaded from the cache (though people with fast internet may not see it).

Maybe soon I could grab a 60GB Agility (as prices are dropping slightly) and install it in my aging Opteron Dual core. If it makes it much faster or not much change I will be honest about it.

#16

Hopefully you have at least AHCI support on your motherboard otherwise you’ve a severely limiting controller. If you’re on S939 you probably wont see much difference at all since the controllers are pretty slow.

  • Pokes the ATI IXP400 SATA150 controller
    //Danne