Why I Need another SSD

This kind of pattern shows why an SSD (Solid State Disk) makes a lot of sense. It is from Windows Performance Monitor. The top trace shows the CPU loading. As you can see the CPU is not doing that much, at best it is around half loaded. The bottom trace shows disk activity, which is pretty much maxed out.

I get this a lot, and I find it really annoying. I used to hate sitting waiting while the hard drive light flickered and my machine slowed down to treacle speed. Modern machines have addressed this issue by not having hard drive lights any more, but this isn’t really a good solution in my opinion.

A good solution is an SSD. It gives a huge improvement in the speed of the disk, particularly for reading files. Solid State Drives are also harder to break by dropping them, and they generally consume less power. I put one in my Alienware laptop and it really made a difference. I think I’m going to put one in my desktop too.

I reckon the best way to do this is to put all the system files on the SSD and then use an magnetic disk for all the documents. That way I still have space for all my oodles of files.

Comments

[Joe Sherwin]

The major problem I see with this solution though is cost. SSDs are still much more expensive than their magnetic counterparts. It's a shame because as you said, they do offer such a performance boost. Games particularly see this.and as a gamer, I would love to see all my games benefit from my SSD drive. However, the 60gb drive I have only fits the system files and my World of Warcraft installation (which is now hitting around 30gb.) Therefore, anything else I want to install has to be put on my 500gb Disk Drive. I'd buy more SSD, but I'm poor! :D

[Carl Pickering]

I fitted a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard disc to my laptop, 500GB of disc and 4GB of SSD which is supposed to speed things up.

The snag is I did it when upgrading from XP to Windows 7 64 bit which speeded things up immensely anyway so I'm not sure if it makes any real difference. Increasing RAM to 4GB certainly helped though.

Hard to tell what the benefit is but when I run Eclipse it maxes the processor out. But you could have the most powerful system conceivable in the world and Eclipse would hog it.

[Simon]

RAID a couple of SSDs, and you're sorted. Don't forget about NTFS Junction so you can move bigger files to slower hdds, and vica versa - there's no reason you can't junction some of your popular apps and games to be on your SSD and improve the load times.