Luke122
06-18-2010, 01:28 PM
Unless you are living under a rock these days, you have heard of an SSD. A Solid State Drive is a hard drive composed of non-volatile NAND memory, rather then mechanical parts like a standard hard drive. The benefits are many; no moving parts means less chance of mechanical failure, far faster seek, read, and write times, ZERO noise, ZERO vibration, much less heat output, lighter weight, and potentially less power consumption. (Independent testing of power requirements show great variances between brands and models, so I’ll leave the power savings as a possibility.)
Well, with all of these great benefits, why don’t we all have SSD’s, and hard drives can be completely retired?
The cost of an SSD means that we end up paying substantially more for similar capacity, and not all applications need the consistently higher speeds that an SSD can offer. The SSD in this test is 160gb, and cost nearly $500 CAD. A standard 2.5” (laptop size) hard drive will cost you around $60; a fairly large margin of difference! Standard hard drives are now available in 2TB (2 Terabytes, or 2000 Gigabytes), and cost around $250, depending on where you shop.
Comparitively, you can get 2 – 2TB SATA HDD’s for the same price as ONE 160gb SATA SSD. With those two 2TB HDD’s, you could set up a RAID stripe, and get a very healthy increase in performance that will come close to the speed of the SSD. Close, but not quite. Plus, you now have two possible points of failure, and twice the weight, noise, heat, vibration, and added complexity of a RAID. You also get 25 times the storage capacity. Decisions, decisions…
Keep in mind that most notebook computers do not offer dual hard drives (some do, not all that have two drives offer RAID ability), and that the current largest 2.5” (notebook size) hard drive I’ve seen is 750gb, so ultimately, you *could* get 1.5tb RAID setup in a notebook. If you *really* want to.. I don’t recommend it.
Anyways…
Today I’ll be replacing the hard drive in a Fujitsu Lifebook T-Series tablet PC, to see how much of a gain in performance you can realistically expect from an SSD. The existing hard drive is a Fujitsu 160gb, 5400rpm SATA drive. The SSD we are replacing it with is an Intel X25-M, 160gb.
At a cost of almost $500 for the SSD, this is not a cheap upgrade. However, the read and write speeds of the SSD make a pretty good argument for a performance gain! Once you factor in the cost of reinstalling your OS, apps, data, and the time spent on all of that, you could be looking at a $600-700 upgrade for your laptop. If you are buying a new OS, include another $150-200. Is your laptop worth spending $900 to upgrade?
The Victim.. err.. System
The base system specs are as follows:
Fujitsu Lifebook
Model T5010
CPU: T9550 @ 2.66ghz
Ram: PC2-5300 (1x1gb, 1x2gb)
OS: Vista Business SP2 (32 Bit)
Current HDD: Fujitsu CP224812 – 160gb, 5400rpm
With this configuration, I recorded a baseline boot time of 46 seconds from Pressing the power button, to the Windows Login box, ready for the user password. The system was tuned up before the test, to ensure the best possible response time. Temps and recycle bin were emptied, unnecessary services were disabled.
I’m using Paragon HDD Manager to clone the hard drive to the SSD, with all the partitions and data kept exactly as is. This will give the best possible comparison, since there are no other factors to consider in the speed difference.
There are 3 partitions on the drive; a small diagnostic partition, a recovery partition, and a primary NTFS partition of 140gb. The clone is being done on a separate computer, with both drives attached to a PCI - SATA controller card, and the estimated time to complete is 34 minutes.
This seems unusually long to me, but there is approximately 100gb in use on the drive, so I suppose it’s not unreasonable to assume 50mb/s for the copy process.
After the completion of the drive, I attempted to boot the SSD. I was prompted with a repair startup error, so I dropped in the Vista Biz dvd, and ran the repair tool. After that completed, I shut the system down completely.
From a cold startup (first try), the system booted to the log in prompt in 34.4 seconds! That’s a 12.2 second improvement! Substantially faster!
Part 2 to come...
Well, with all of these great benefits, why don’t we all have SSD’s, and hard drives can be completely retired?
The cost of an SSD means that we end up paying substantially more for similar capacity, and not all applications need the consistently higher speeds that an SSD can offer. The SSD in this test is 160gb, and cost nearly $500 CAD. A standard 2.5” (laptop size) hard drive will cost you around $60; a fairly large margin of difference! Standard hard drives are now available in 2TB (2 Terabytes, or 2000 Gigabytes), and cost around $250, depending on where you shop.
Comparitively, you can get 2 – 2TB SATA HDD’s for the same price as ONE 160gb SATA SSD. With those two 2TB HDD’s, you could set up a RAID stripe, and get a very healthy increase in performance that will come close to the speed of the SSD. Close, but not quite. Plus, you now have two possible points of failure, and twice the weight, noise, heat, vibration, and added complexity of a RAID. You also get 25 times the storage capacity. Decisions, decisions…
Keep in mind that most notebook computers do not offer dual hard drives (some do, not all that have two drives offer RAID ability), and that the current largest 2.5” (notebook size) hard drive I’ve seen is 750gb, so ultimately, you *could* get 1.5tb RAID setup in a notebook. If you *really* want to.. I don’t recommend it.
Anyways…
Today I’ll be replacing the hard drive in a Fujitsu Lifebook T-Series tablet PC, to see how much of a gain in performance you can realistically expect from an SSD. The existing hard drive is a Fujitsu 160gb, 5400rpm SATA drive. The SSD we are replacing it with is an Intel X25-M, 160gb.
At a cost of almost $500 for the SSD, this is not a cheap upgrade. However, the read and write speeds of the SSD make a pretty good argument for a performance gain! Once you factor in the cost of reinstalling your OS, apps, data, and the time spent on all of that, you could be looking at a $600-700 upgrade for your laptop. If you are buying a new OS, include another $150-200. Is your laptop worth spending $900 to upgrade?
The Victim.. err.. System
The base system specs are as follows:
Fujitsu Lifebook
Model T5010
CPU: T9550 @ 2.66ghz
Ram: PC2-5300 (1x1gb, 1x2gb)
OS: Vista Business SP2 (32 Bit)
Current HDD: Fujitsu CP224812 – 160gb, 5400rpm
With this configuration, I recorded a baseline boot time of 46 seconds from Pressing the power button, to the Windows Login box, ready for the user password. The system was tuned up before the test, to ensure the best possible response time. Temps and recycle bin were emptied, unnecessary services were disabled.
I’m using Paragon HDD Manager to clone the hard drive to the SSD, with all the partitions and data kept exactly as is. This will give the best possible comparison, since there are no other factors to consider in the speed difference.
There are 3 partitions on the drive; a small diagnostic partition, a recovery partition, and a primary NTFS partition of 140gb. The clone is being done on a separate computer, with both drives attached to a PCI - SATA controller card, and the estimated time to complete is 34 minutes.
This seems unusually long to me, but there is approximately 100gb in use on the drive, so I suppose it’s not unreasonable to assume 50mb/s for the copy process.
After the completion of the drive, I attempted to boot the SSD. I was prompted with a repair startup error, so I dropped in the Vista Biz dvd, and ran the repair tool. After that completed, I shut the system down completely.
From a cold startup (first try), the system booted to the log in prompt in 34.4 seconds! That’s a 12.2 second improvement! Substantially faster!
Part 2 to come...