SSD recommendations please

[The late XV105]

Home media server
XP SP3 Media Center Edition 2005
ASUS P5N32-SLI
Four physical HDDs and sensible partitioning
Four-level backup strategy (tested!) in case it all goes wrong

This custom-built machine has maintained blistering performance since new in 2006. Blistering that is, apart from boot; whilst it has not got any slower with time it still takes about 120 seconds to fully complete even with the number of startup jobs pared to a minimum (it is still quite considerable) and auto-updates switched off. No, I don't want to revisit this list, I want to take another approach to reduce boot time:

I need to perform some maintenance that involves replacing one of the HDDs with a larger one and swapping around what gets stored where, so at the same time I want to change the HDD from which the machine boots with a SSD.

Hardware recommendations and any tips and tricks, please?

If I treat the SSD only as a boot device I only need a tiddler but if the best performance-per-pound ratio dictates something larger that I use for storing other data too, that's what I will do.


TVM
XV

[Saab Dastard]

I want to take another approach to reduce boot time

OK, don't switch it off...

Work out the cost of operating it per hour, multiply by the number of hours it would otherwise be off and there's the budget for your SSD.

SD

[Keef]

Turn it off?

Mine goes off when there's a power cut, or when an update needs to restart the machine. So about once in three months.

[The late XV105]

Laptop stays on all the time I am at home and is hibernated for travel.
Media server is switched off whenever I leave the home, which is frequently for extended overseas travel.

Now, to my question, please.

[Spitoon]

By co-incidence I'm just investigating SSDs myself, although for a standard desktop rather than media machine. Still in the early stages of enquiries and I suspect you already know but SSDs are ideally suited to fast read operations and, depending on the controller, can be a lot slower to write. Additionally there is the 'problem' that they have a limited lifespan if written to repeatedly. I'm looking at a tiddler for OS and apps but will keep a traditional HDD for swap files and app data etc. (akin to media files, I guess). It seems that the this remains the general recommendation for longevity and bang for buck value - although the technology is advancing quickly. OCZ seems to be the brand to go for from what I read.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Advice for SSDs:

- Ensure you buy one which supports TRIM (earlier ones sometimes didn't)
- Ensure you put it in a BIOS/SATA mode which also supports TRIM (EHCI etc)
- Read properly the manufacturers' details about the drive and update it's firmware
- Disable drive defragmenting and indexing
- Enable a backup of the drive regularly (as i've had a SSD lose it's partitioning information due to a known hibernation issue on my Dell E6500, and when it loses that info it loses ALL the data on the drive - there's no way of rebuilding the info and rescuing the data!)
- Be aware that OCZ SSDs are good, but they do go wrong - i'm RMAing one currently....and after jumping through hoops it has had to be sent to Holland for RMA!!

Enjoy the much reduced boot times

[The late XV105]

Thanks, Both.

Yup, aware of the SSD disadvantages, but in this case - as a dedicated boot disk - the advantages are attractive and the disadvantages somewhat mitigated so I will dip my toe in the water and see what happens. After reading your advice, M-B, I have decided on a Crucial M4 2.5" 64GB SSD which at eighty quid is not "cheap" (in the throwing money away sense) but won't completely break the bank if it all goes Pete Tong.

As a step to reducing the amount of writing done to the disk, before I start using it in earnest I might have a go at moving "Documents and Settings" to one of the physical HDDs.

[terrain safe]

Silly question. Isn't the TRIM command a Windows 7 only function? Therefore XP won't use it. It will degrade quicker than a W7 machine.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Originally Posted by terrain safe

Silly question. Isn't the TRIM command a Windows 7 only function? Therefore XP won't use it. It will degrade quicker than a W7 machine.

It's not Windows 7 only, but you're right in that XP doesn't provide it. However, as you can see from this link there are (sort of) workarounds:
Does windows xp support ssd trim command? - Super User

[The Nr Fairy]

Two things:

1. Buy from a reputable source - Punter bags 500GB SSD, finds 128MB Flash inside ? reghardware

2. I snaffled a 256Gb Crucial M4 which is the primary disk in my Macbook Pro. Used, therefore £260 compared to £350 or so retail but only 2 months old. Has made a hell of a difference especially when running lots of virtual machines.

[Saab Dastard]

it still takes about 120 seconds to fully complete

Does it take this long with all profiles?

SD

[Terraplaneblues]

SSD - just made the leap

One Raptor in my raid zero, recently failed and after much reading I went for the Intel 320 series 120GB, especially after reading some reliability stats.

I use XP and the boot up is considerably quicker, the blue squares that track across the screen during a boot used to complete 7 cycles, now it's 2.5, the PC is altogether better to use.

The intel software was very good at transferring the data from the old setup, and the SSD toolbox provides a schedule to trim the drive routinely.

My stuff is on a separate HDD's and backups (Ghost) of C go to 2 different disks. Board is ASUS P5WDH Deluxe so the sata 2 of the Intel appealed and I think they deliberately targeted upgraders without sata 3 boards.

I would recommend upgrade to SSD

[The late XV105]

Greetings, Everyone.
Thanks for all the advice and shared experience.
It's time for an update.

Firstly, the failed HDD.
Actually, it had not failed* and the problem has now been shown to be with the SATA cable! One new cable purchased for the princely sum of £1.03; fitting it has cured the problem. Fit the old cable to one of the other HDDs and it fails to be detected by the BIOS, indicating that this almost certainly was the cause.

Now I had my O/S back at almost no cost, before investing in the Crucial SSD and prompted by SD's comment (which indicated there was probably a gain to be had) I turned to tuning it despite the fact that I actively housekeep the computer and try to do so in a preventative-maintenance manner.

My research lead me to MyDefrag which I tried out after first removing Diskeeper Pro. What a fantastic utility; I can well believe the spiel about optimizing by moving critical files to the edge of the disk to reduce seek time and balancing defragging vs maintaining contiguous blocks of data because the result was stunning. On top of an already freshly "Diskeepered and CCleanered PC with truck loads of empty space on each HDD" I obtained a repeatable reduction in time to XP logon of over 40%. To pick up on your interesting observation, Terraplane Blues, the XP progress bar now completes after 3.75 cycles instead of 7.75!

I then used Winpatrol to check whether I could disable any more services than I already had (I couldn't) as well as to set half a dozen non-critical services to run at stages between 1 and 3 minutes after the desktop has built. The result is that I can now use the desktop with normal performance (confirmed by Task Manage CPU indicator dropping to idle) within about 10 seconds of it displaying.

The entire boot sequence from power-on to usable machine is now about 70 seconds. That's more like it!

Secondly, the new HDD coincidentally required for extra storage.
My preferred HDDs have long been Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM on the basis of sustained performance for the usage I put them to and total reliability - now with "total" intact again.

I was staggered to find that the 1TB 32MB cache Barracuda that I wanted today costs the paltry sum of £44.98 from Amazon, delivery included. Now fitted and in commission but how anyone has made a profit on the road from Thailand to my front door in the UK amazes me.



*Just realised that the apparent failure cropped up since I started this post, hence no trace of it previously.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Originally Posted by XV105

The entire boot sequence from power-on to usable machine is now about 70 seconds. That's more like it!

For a comparison, my 2yr old Dell E6500 laptop (Core2Duo P8700, so not exactly current) does it in 33 seconds with an SSD under Windows 7.

[The late XV105]

Thanks, M-B. I have no doubt that SSD is the way to go but considering that it's not being frequently booted, the 70 seconds that I'm down to for no cost (okay a quid for the cable but even that was not really connected to tuning), is acceptable.

For the record; I usually cold boot, not from any of the suspend states, because the TV tuner gets its knickers in a twist if I try. If I don't need the TV tuner, boot from standby is less than 10 seconds.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Originally Posted by XV105

Thanks, M-B. I have no doubt that SSD is the way to go but considering that it's not being frequently booted, the 70 seconds that I'm down to for no cost (okay a quid for the cable but even that was not really connected to tuning), is acceptable.

For the record; I usually cold boot, not from any of the suspend states, because the TV tuner gets its knickers in a twist if I try. If I don't need the TV tuner, boot from standby is less than 10 seconds.

No worries, I recognise your solution in bang-for-your-buck is unbeatable.

FWIW, I never trusted Windows XP's ability (and architecture) to suspend/hibernate and resume.....and whilst I flirted with suspending on Windows 7 and it worked fine, my one time where the SSD lost the entire data (at 2:30am, right in the middle of an overnight migration of a remote MS Exchange hosted server via RDP) convinced me never to do that again, so that 33 seconds is from cold too.

[Saab Dastard]

I never trusted Windows XP's ability (and architecture) to suspend/hibernate and resume

Amen to that!

SD

[mixture]

does it in 33 seconds with an SSD under Windows 7.

My W7 boots up in 33 seconds (or less !) , and that's in a VMWare window off an old-fashioned hard drive.... none of this SSD business !

[The late XV105]

The entire boot sequence from power-on to usable machine is now about 70 seconds. That's more like it!

Further minor tweaking and a driver change now has it down to 58 seconds.

I'll call it quits now!

[Squawk7777]

a word of caution

As a step to reducing the amount of writing done to the disk, before I start using it in earnest I might have a go at moving "Documents and Settings" to one of the physical HDDs.

You might want to keep it this way! I have read in several magazines that at present there is no tool that can guarantee a successful deletion of data on SSDs. So if you plan on selling your SSD a few years down the road, make sure that you never had personal files on it, unless you want to share your little secrets (which we all have).