75ZT Community

Hi all,

I was thinking of using an SSD as the boot disk for my main desktop PC and was wondering what people's opinions were.

Are they really that much faster to boot and operate from?

How do you clone your HDD boot disk over to SSD?

Are they worth the cost?

etc. etc.

My present boot drive partition takes up some 79GB so I was thinking of a 100MB SSD.

Opinions and ideas most welcome - Thank you

No opinions then?

Well, I have no idea. Does that count as an opinion? Is the boot up time really that bad? What OS are you running?

Windows 7 64bit

Both my W7 64 bit machines (desktop and laptop) boot really fast, so never felt the need for increased speed. Only thing that slows down what I'm doing is transfer speeds from external sources (network, external disks) or processing speed if I'm rendering a project.

Hi Paul,

an SSD in combination with a fast HDD for all the data can indeed boost the performance of your PC.

But not in any case. It doesn't make sense in combination with older hardware. For example an older CPU can be the bottle neck and an SSD wouldn't give you any advantage. If you can hear the HDD working hard very often, then an SSD may be useful. Or have a look at the Resource Monitor (via Task Manager, Performance tab), while using your PC. If the blue line stays at the top end of the diagram Disk very often, while the green indicated transfer volume stays in the single digit mega bytes and the CPU usage isn't very high, then an SSD could make sense.

Due to the technique used for the data management of SSD's, which includes a hidden reserve, it's reasonable not to use all the space available for the partition(s). Just let a few GB's unpartitioned. So you can increase the reserve available. An SSD with a high filling level will loose a greater part of its writing performance.

Your system partition contains 80 GB of data, so I recommend a disk size of at least 128 GB. You can use Acronis True Image for cloning your disk, or any other software of that kind. But it's important not to do a sector by sector image (as the Linux command dd will do), because that would copy empty disk space too. And the controller of the SSD will consider these blocks as used, resulting in a decrease of writing performance.

HTH

So the question is, what components is your PC made of?

Thanks Jürgen

My CPU and Mobo are less than 2 years old. It's an Intel quad core q6600 2.4 GHz CPU with 8GB RAM

I have two 128GB SSD's in Raid for my boot disk. They are amazingly quick! Once the boot process from the mobo is over windows loads very fast, and all applications load fast. I can load Photoshop CS5 in about 4 seconds (although I am running Dual Hexacore CPU's with 12GB Ram). Also having no noise from a HDD during boot is quite eerie! Loudest component on my setup now is the CPU fans.

I have regular 3.5" 1TB disks for storage and they are not as fast.

raistlin wrote:Thanks Jürgen

My CPU and Mobo are less than 2 years old. It's an Intel quad core q6600 2.4 GHz CPU with 8GB RAM

In this case, Paul, I don't think that the effort needed to upgrade your PC would be wasted.

Thanks again Jürgen.

It's actually not much effort at all

The SSD from the Kingston kit plugs straight in to a SATA port and you boot from the supplied CD which contains a tailored version of Acronis and follow the instructions.

Looks like I've got a 1TB drive to get rid on now

Sounds good to me, Paul. Go for it.

Flaming nora... that is fast

I think I'll be fitting one in my laptop soon.

Yes, with a SSD takes mine about 15 seconds to fully load Windows etc.

raistlin wrote:Flaming nora... that is fast

Remember to fasten your seat belts before system startup.