SSD performance improvements
 

MY system is an i7-920 with 6GB DDR3 Ram, vista 64 soon to be Windows 7 64
MY C: with apps is a 74GB raptor
Projects and media on a RAID 0 (2x Samsung 750GBs)
Preview files on a Seagate 1.5TB
Pagefile on a Seagate 500GB

MY Raptor is getting chocker (19GB free) and my drive access Light always seems to be on. I was wondering whether changing the raptor for a 1228GB SSD would see any improvements other than boot and app loading with Premiere CS4?

Your C: drive is too full and that will grind down the performance. Are you running anything in background like Diskeeper that accesses disk? That could be part of it.

It's been a while since I did anything with SSD but the differences in performance between that and rotating magnetic constantly narrow. You should get faster performance, but how much so will depend upon the specs of the SSD.

You might do better just to get a significantly larger Raptor.

Hi Dan,
I´m running a Mac Pro. Some time ago i changed my boot disk for a couple of 128 Gigs Samsungs SSDs in RAID 0.
The result is more that i could imagine.
The Blackmagic disk test says:
Sustainable reading: 475 MB/s
Sustainable writing: 440 MB/s
or something like the possibility to capture almost 80 frames per second of uncompressed 10 bits HD footage!!!!
Now the boot time is under 4 seconds!!!
some other numbers from click to fully open: FCP: 3,5 sec AE: 7 sec
I made a long capture and the numbers were maintained even with the disks going full.
I suppose that in windows would be the same performance gain.

I recently went from Vista x64 to 7 x64 (Ultimate for both) while using an Intel X25 80GB SSD. Win 7 seems to use less drive space than Vista. Under 7, I have installed Adobe Production CS4, Cinema 4D 11.5, Office 2007 Pro, Nuke 5 and several other small programs and had 40GB free. I recall Vista having much less space free with identical apps.

Prior to the Intel SSD, I had 4 Raptors in Raid 10 for Vista, and I can't imagine EVER going back.

The way SSDs work is fairly technical so either take my advice or read Anandtech's 30+ page essay on it. Just in case you see other SSDs with more capacity and/or lower price and are tempted, please understand the most important aspect to SSD performance. This is very technical but I will explain it as simple as possible. The way SSDs store data is different from hard drives. Over time, SSDs become fragmented which hurts performance. Some vendors implement different ways of limiting the amount of performance degradation. Intel has the best and easiest method - its built into the firmware so the drive takes care of itself by constantly defragmenting for the best possible performance. Also, this fragmentation issue tends to make other SSDs slower than the Intel even though they might be rated at a higher speed. Other SSD manufacturers supply programs that require manual user initiation to clean up the drives but these apps don't work if you use the onboard Raid built into the motherboard.

There are two generations of the Intel X25 with the 2nd (G2) being a bit faster and supporting the TRIM command in Win 7. The X25 is the best SSD for the money, and to give you an idea of how popular it is - newegg was charging twice the Intel retail price for the first month of it release(Sept) and people were still buying.

The speed is insane. Literally, once I see my desktop, I am ready to do anything. Photoshop opens in 2 seconds.

Its true what others say: once you go SSD, you will never go back.