New HDD for Windows 7
I have a pre-order for windows7 arriving towards the end of October.
I thought I may as well install this on a new HDD that's decent - Vista OEM is installed on what ever Dell decided to give me... so...
1. Is it worth trying to setup some kind of mirroring using 2 drives (or is this over complicated and overkill for home use?)
2. Are Seagate still the manufacturer of choice - every drive I've ever purchased myself has been a Seagate - internal or external
3. Are there any features - rpm, cache which would display noticeable performance increases over a 'stock' drive (7200rpm, 8mb cache) (It looks like > 7200 may be very expensive, and certainly overkill - I wont be using it as a SQL server!)
Space is not a concern - I don't use OS HDDs to store data, just the OS and program files etc...
So, let me know your thoughts...
I thought I may as well install this on a new HDD that's decent - Vista OEM is installed on what ever Dell decided to give me... so...
1. Is it worth trying to setup some kind of mirroring using 2 drives (or is this over complicated and overkill for home use?)
2. Are Seagate still the manufacturer of choice - every drive I've ever purchased myself has been a Seagate - internal or external
3. Are there any features - rpm, cache which would display noticeable performance increases over a 'stock' drive (7200rpm, 8mb cache) (It looks like > 7200 may be very expensive, and certainly overkill - I wont be using it as a SQL server!)
Space is not a concern - I don't use OS HDDs to store data, just the OS and program files etc...
So, let me know your thoughts...
0
Comments
Don't go for a raid, its not worth it on soooo many levels.
Seagate drives are fine, but so are Western Digital's.
My personal favorite is WD 640Gb Black.
640gb is more than enough space, I was thinking more towards something in the 200 or so capacity.
What impact will a 16mb cache have over an 8mb cache?
They look pretty pricey too - £100+ for a 64gb one when Western Digital WD3200AAKS 320GB SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM Caviar Blue is 35 quid.
What benefits do they offer then? (I have one in my Acer Aspire 1 hehe!)
Ultimately, it's your call, but mechanical disks are the last bottleneck on a modern PC. They were created in the 80s, and the technology is fundamentally identical to what it was when it was created. People will pay hundreds of dollars for a slight boost in gaming performance with a new video card, but they won't do the same for a huge benefit in everything. I don't get it.
I think allot of it is fear of the unknown. People have largely rolled with a single drive configuration that would suit them for some time and the idea of having a file storage drive along with an SSD is at least marginally intimidating to them, even if it should not be.
My main fear is the maturity of the tech. Is it proven, have the kinks been worked out? That sort of thing. I really, really want that speed though, but I have been standing on the SSD ledge for months, afraid to jump off. With a fresh copy of Windows 7 in hand, I'm thinking now may be a good time.
I've read allot about different drives having certain built in trim features and defragmentation features, I think the OCZ vertex calls theirs "Garbage Collection". Do you think this is necessary in the Windows 7 environment? If you were just looking at a 64 GB drive for OS and program files, what would you recommend?
I wasn't aware SSD offered quite such benefits, perhaps I should consider it as a serious alternative... would there be any pre-requisits I would need on my system before I could make use of one?
I won't pay hundreds of pounds for a slight boost in anything gaming, that's for sure! - I don't game!
@OSAddict: No, no prerequisites. Just know that SSDs almost exclusively use the laptop HDD form factor, so you'll need drive rails (they'll be a few quid, at most) to mount the drive in a desktop case. As a preference, I do suggest Windows 7 for SSDs, because the OS has optimizations that Vista and XP don't, but it's not essential.
@Both:
There are two drives I can completely recommend for this purpose, from fastest (most expensive) to slowest (least expensive).
60GB OCZ Vertex Turbo
60GB OCZ Vertex
Drives that use the garbage collection feature in the Indilinx on-SSD controller can use any OS well enough. Any SSDs that rely on the SATA TRIM command (Such as the Intel X25-M G2) will require Windows 7 for long-term performance. There are several other drives that support TRIM, but because OCZ uses GC, and because they have the best price/performance of any SSDs on the market, they're my go-to choice.
I wonder if the price will fall anytime soon - I reckon it will... just because I get W7 soon I don't have to install it right away I guess lol
See this for more details. Pay specific attention to the 2nd section.
And not that everyone here has access to a drive cloner like we have at work, but recovery of info off of a SSD after a drive failure is a lot harder than with regular SATA or SAS
In b4 "well my HDD has lasted 7 years." Good, yours is above average.
FUD is bad, mmk.
Until they find a new way to do SSDs that isn't NAND flash I'm staying far away from them and advising everyone else to do the same. Especially once you take into account that NAND speeds degrade as you cram more data into smaller spaces. Thus the larger the drives get either the slower they are going to get or the larger the chips will need to be physically.
In the words of an IronKey employee "Believe it or not, the “quality†of flash has been declining steadily as the density has increased. Flash memory is inherently unreliable, and it requires the controller chip to implement wear leveling and error correction to prevent your data from being corrupted." URL="http://blog.ironkey.com/?p=595"]source[/URL
You can trust your data to a medium that steadily declines in quality and is inherently unreliable if you want. I won't. As for your standard drive argument. I've personally owned upwards of a dozen hard drives in my life. Not one of them has died before I outgrew it and replaced it for more space. I've also seen reletavely few standard drives fail in the 5 years I did desktop support in college.
Secondarily, trying to pawn the IronKey quote off as some indictment of NAND is hardly legitimate. Flash memory decreases in its reliability as you increase cell density, not drive density, and cell density has not changed in SSDs in nearly 4 years. Today's drives, like the earliest drives in 2006, use 2 bits-per-cell MLCs. The industry has not switched to 4-bpc MLCs because they require more voltage to read into and out of the disk, thereby shortening the longevity. Any and all R&D has gone into improving lifetimes on 2bpc MLC to exceed 20gb/day/5 years, and SLC disks are even better.
Saying that the chips need to be "physically larger" is patently absurd. If anything, NAND cells must physically get smaller. This lessens the voltage requirement and dramatically improves the lifetime of the chip, but the same can be said for any microelectronic.
Lastly, saying that an SSD's performance degrades as it fills completely ignores two huge developments that overcome that little myth: SATA TRIM and garbage collection. Both techniques efficiently reorder data in the SSD to prevent fragmented blocks from impacting the drive's performance, even at capacity. Drives equipped with TRIM or GC will run just the same at 6GB or 60.
You know, for a long time, hard drives also were at risk of data corruption, and the problem was only going to get worse as the capacity increased. That's why PMR was created. Wear leveling is to solid state as PMR is to HDDs. Did you argue against longitudinal mechanical disks, too?
There are perils with every technology. Knowing what you're buying, and the limitations are important. Based on Osaddict's goals, there's no doubt he will never come close to finding an SSD's limitations before it's time to upgrade. And that sounds suspiciously like an HDD to me.
If $$$ was not an object, I'd get an SSD. (with back ups three ways from Sunday) I've seen how badly a slow HHD can cripple a system all to often, and how snappy a system can be with a fast OS drive.
Personally, I use the Vertex at work and its been a huge success. We had them deployed to 20 or so developer workstations and we've not only seen pretty significant performance gains / time savings, the drives haven't faltered for even a moment.
Our particular use case involves us writing up to 4gb to the disk when compiling our entire source code. This task could probably happen up to 5 times a day for a dev. I guess in time we'll see if this load ever becomes a problem, but my guess is that we'll be ready to upgrade the entire workstation well before we ever see a single one fail.
It now seems like quite an interesting idea with some definite benefits.
At the moment I think the price is a bit of a limiting factor for me, I rarely jump on technology when it's very new so I think I might wait until I can get a reasonable drive for around the £100 mark, it seems decent drives are nearly double this at the moment.
So, (I know Thrax is going to hate this!) what standard drive would you suggest? - The same requirements apply - a balance between reliability, speed and price, with reliability being the most important factor. Factors such as capacity, acoustics, power consumption etc are of little interest to me.
Also, as a slight aside, as W7 requires a fresh install, could I easily keep the vista OS HDD as is and then have the option to boot into either?
I sorted this a while ago with XP and Win98SE but that was on the same drive, and with quite a lot of hand holding from a mate.
They're generally available for less than $100. If you're looking for a smaller one, they get pretty inexpensive.
^This. Unless you bought the machine in the last year or so, its out of warranty anyway and installing 7 over top of Vista isn't going to hurt anything. That being said, I'd still open it up at peak at the harddrive, because personally, I'd get a new drive if its a Hiatchi Death Star :|
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT32N315
It seems a half decent traditional hdd will end up being around 40-50, so if this is around 100 then that's not too much more - otherwise, based on my theory of waiting till the price of the 64gb ones fell to 100, add on the 40-50 I may as well buy one now.
Not sure if that makes sense, however, what would the performance of the crucial one be compared to a standard hdd and the OCZ ones Trax was suggesting?
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