Last week, thanks to a one-day sale at Newegg, I picked up an OCZ Vertex 2 solid state drive (SSD). It’s only 60GB, which is plenty of room for Windows 7 and an assortment of apps. It will quickly run out of room for data, but that’s easily fixed by adding a conventional hard disk drive and making sure that all data files get saved there.
I’ve set this system—a Dell XPS435MT with an i7-920—in a dual-boot configuration, with Windows 7 Home Premium on the SSD and Windows 7 Professional on a 1TB Seagate SATA II drive. Both systems are running a clean install of Windows 7 (64-bit) with the most recent drivers for all components.
In the Windows Experience Index, the hard disk drive is rated 5.9. That’s about as high as a standard SATA II drive can get. Here, by contrast, is the WEI in detail for the SSD-based installation:
That’s a 7.7 for the SSD, close to the maximum 7.9 that Windows 7 allows. (I also looked at the PassMark benchmark scores for each drive. This score for the OCZ drive is nearly double that of the Seagate SATA drive, which is the second highest ranked SATA drive in the charts. If you’re in the market, be sure to check the scores before you buy.)
So the differences benchmark-wise are big, but how much of a difference does an SSD make in day-to-day operation? The most obvious difference is at startup. Using a stopwatch, I started timing when the Windows boot menu appears, ignoring the 12 seconds or so that the BIOS consumes initially as it enumerates hardware. As soon as the desktop is visible, I press Windows logo key+1 to launch Internet Explorer and click the stop button when the browser’s home page finishes loading.
The resutls?
- The hard-disk installation of Windows requires 53 seconds from a cold start to as fully loaded web page.
- Using the SSD, the total time for the same sequence is 24 seconds.
That’s a difference of nearly 30 seconds, more than 50% of the total startup time. The increase in speed is noticeable, as splash screens whiz by instead of hanging around. I can also feel the difference each time I open an app, even though the raw times are too short to measure accurately using a stopwatch.
I’ve been studying the ins and outs of solid-state drives intently lately as we begin our first big update to Windows 7 Inside Out, and have been struck by the lack of useful information on how to work with SSDs. Although prices are coming down quickly, SSDs are still far more expensive than conventional hard disks, and performance varies widely. SSD is definitely still an emerging technology, and I plan to write in much more detail about my experiences with this drive and a similar Samsung SSD that’s installed in my two notebooks.
Have you used an SSD? Has it made a big performance boost for you? Leave your comments below…
Ed Bott 
I just bought the same drive about a month ago. It made a massive improvement in the general performance of my system and I’ve loved it.
Good stuff.
The thing I’ve noticed is my SATA drive gets sluggish if i don’t shut down my PC for a long time (7 days+); resource monitor shows massive amounts of data being written to and read from the temp folders, my guess is this is where a SSD would show a major impact… as even james pointed out.
I bought my first SSD some time ago. It was made by Toshiba. The improved performance was quite noticable. But more recently I bought an Intel SSD and the performance is even greater. So, while all SSDs provide greater performance, not all SSDs are alike.
Ok, my SSD experience is actually with hardware that Ed should remember. I bought Ed’s Dell Latitude XT at the beginning of 2010. It came with a ZIF PATA 60GB 3500 RPM IDE Hard Drive. Doing anything on this thing took forever. I loved the tablet platform and with Windows 7, this machine had a lot of possibilities. The only thing holding it back was HDD performance.
I purchased a Runcore ZIF PATA 120GB SSD and got it installed. The performance change was amazing. It went from about a 60 second boot to start menu and desktop with login on the HDD to about 12-15 seconds with the SSD. The change was amazing. I did run into an issue where the machine would lock up randomly. After much review of online postings, it was determined that it was the “TRIM” command that was the problem. My response … “AUGGGGGG!” I broke down and disabled the TRIM command. Performance slowed a bit to 15-20 seconds for the total boot but no where near the 60 seconds. I am more than happy with my performance and the improved battery life.
It has made this Dell Latitude XT very usable!
I haven’t tried an SSD on a windows machine, but here’s my experience on the Mac platform.
I used to have a MacBook Pro with a 5400 rpm drive. It has 4GB of ram and 2.53ghz Core 2 Duo. I could boot to a fully functioning desktop in 38 seconds, take about 5 seconds to load Firefox, and 18 seconds to load Photoshop CS5. I hadn’t timed iTunes but it took a while – probably in the 8-10 second range.
I recently purchased a MacBook Air with 256GB SSD, 2.13ghz Core 2 duo and 4 GB of ram. The processor is slower, but everything about the machine is faster. I can boot to a fully functioning desktop in 13 seconds (although my record is 11). Firefox boots in 1 second flat and Photoshop CS5 loads in 2 seconds. iTunes is about 1 second as well. There are a few processor intense things that take a little longer like photoshop-image processing, but anything dealing with the disk just makes the whole system so much snappier.
I haven’t tried Windows yet, but maybe someday I’ll get Windows on Boot Camp or get a PC with an SSD. Either way it would be hard to get back to a typical HDD after this.
I have three drives running Windows 7 on the same ASUS desktop. My solid state drives are all running as fast as when new. The mechanical drives are no slackers, either. The Seagate Momentus hybrid drive isn’t much faster than the big Hitachi, but it is quieter, and spins up quicker. I think the ASUS has pretty good thruput, so the mechanical drives do run well.
I tried the Seagate drive on an old ThinkPad T-60, and it was about twice as fast as the 5400 rpm drive in the machine, and booted in half the time.
More bang for the buck can be had with the hybrid; greater capacity, and near SSD speed.
results below if anybody cares:
-SEAGATE HYBRID DRIVE- boot time: not counting windows password entry: 27 seconds
Component Details Subscore Base score
Processor AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1035T Processor 7.3 5.9
Determined by lowest subscore
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB 7.4
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series 7.3
Gaming graphics 4083 MB Total available graphics memory 7.3
Primary hard disk 210GB Free (233GB Total) 5.9
Windows 7 Ultimate
System
Manufacturer ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Model CG1330
Total amount of system memory 8.00 GB RAM
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 6
========================
-HITACHI 3 1/2 INCH 7200 RPM DRIVE- boot time: not counting windows password entry: 27 seconds
Component Details Subscore Base score
Processor AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1035T Processor 7.3 5.9
Determined by lowest subscore
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB 7.4
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series 7.3
Gaming graphics 4083 MB Total available graphics memory 7.3
Primary hard disk 348GB Free (378GB Total) 5.9
Windows 7 Home Premium
System
Manufacturer ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Model CG1330
Total amount of system memory 8.00 GB RAM
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 6
========================
-SSD (INTEL) 80 gig-installed July ’09- boot time: not counting windows password entry: 15 seconds
Component Details Subscore Base score
Processor AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1035T Processor 7.3 7.0
Determined by lowest subscore
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB 7.4
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series 7.3
Gaming graphics 4083 MB Total available graphics memory 7.3
Primary hard disk 9GB Free (39GB Total) 7.0
Windows 7 Ultimate
System
Manufacturer ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Model CG1330
Total amount of system memory 8.00 GB RAM
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 6
I swapped a Raptor HDD for Intel SSD about a year ago. The old HDD was already very fast, boot time was short, I don’t reboot often anyway, etc.
Where SSD shines is the thing you don’t notice. The machine very rarely stalls because too many things are accessing the drive at once.
It’s difficult to know when the old setup would have started chugging so it’s not something you appreciate at first. Only after a while, or when using another system, do you realise how good it’s been.
As an aside, I’d advise people to stay well away from the older SSD drives (except the Intel ones, and maybe the Toshiba ones) as their controllers were terrible and they actually performed far worse than standard HDDs. The early SSD drives from OCZ and most other makes were an utter disgrace — I wasted money on one which, after a brief test, has sat in a box ever since — unless you really needed a drive that didn’t produce noise/heat and had no moving parts, and didn’t mind paying lots in return and having a machine that locked up for seconds at a time. (When the drive’s cache filled — which it did every few minutes under load — it would stop responding until it had sorted itself out, which took a long time and completely cancelled out any speed gain from the technology.) The newer OCZ drives are good, though.
Oh yeah, if you have an SSD, open the Windows Disk Defragmenter and verify that it has automatically excluded the SSD drive.
If it hasn’t, Windows has failed to detect your drive as an SSD and is treating it like a normal HDD. I believe Windows uses different caching strategies on SSD drives and it’s also a good idea to avoid defragging them (as the gain is marginal and it needlessly reduces the life of the drive).
The SATA controller and its drivers can get in the way here. I have the misfortune to have an NVidia motherboard and when I was using the NVidia storage drivers Windows couldn’t detect SSDs as SSDs. (Most SMART tools failed, too. CrystalDiskInfo worked, though; great tool.) When I switched to the generic SATA drivers which came with Windows 7 the SSD was detected properly. I also saw massive speed increases on all of my HDDs. The NVidia storage drivers really are a pile of poop. (Or were last time I tried them.)
This also affects the TRIM command, if your SSD supports it. Windows won’t take advantage of TRIM unless it detects the drive as an SSD and detects it supports TRIM. Again, the NVidia storage drivers broke that until I kicked them to the kerb.
TRIM is important as it lets the drive avoid storing multiple filesystem blocks within single drive blocks until the drive is really that full, which in turn means it can more often do a direct write instead of having to read, merge and write blocks of data.
(…No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!…)
I meant to say that RAID setups can also get in the way of Windows detecting SSDs and/or TRIM support. As usual, outside of servers, RAID causes far more problems than it solves. 🙂
You know, I’ve been considering it for my new build that I’m planning. But I’m hesitant to learn what kind of crazy app issues I’ll have for keeping my data on a separate drive from my root. That is, if I, for example, install iTunes on the SSD as C:, but keep my music on D:, what kinds of issues will I encounter? I worry about this for all my apps.
I have an Intel X25-M 80 gig I am running as my primary boot drive and 1TB as my secondary drive. My boot time to desktop is 14 seconds. It’s a world of difference. The only bad thing is prices are still up there. The average price for my drive has drop roughly 60 cents per gigabyte from the time I bought it last December 2009. It’s going to be a while before the masses incorporate into their systems.
Had an SSD for more almost 2 years now (an Intel X25 80GB, bought early 2009). Everything felt (and was) much faster right away. I am never going back to a regular drive, very happy with it, no issues yet.
I have one of the original Vertex SSD drives. I adopted early on this, with a very expensive 128GB version, and have loved the speed. What confuses me is that my Windows Experience score for the drive is only a 6.1, yet it’s obviously faster than a normal hard drive in my daily use too. I wonder if the Windows Experience index is somewhat off on this score?
@Kat:
I wouldn’t worry about that. There are very few apps which store a large amount of data and don’t let you put the data or the entire app in another place. (And in the rare cases where you can’t, you can use NTFS junctions or softlinks to trick the app into using a different drive.)
iTunes is fine with its data being stored elsewhere (although I wouldn’t allow iTunes/Quicktime to infect anything but a sacrificial virtual machine for several other reasons :)).
Steam (the game distribution/DRM platform from Valve) is a bit of a hassle but does let you move its data.
@Scott:
The Windows Experience stuff only gives you a rough idea of which “class” your hardware falls into. It’s not a very detailed benchmark (which is probably why it is almost completely ignored by everyone/everything). Handy as a very quick, informal guide, but that’s all.
I’m going to respectfully disagree with my colleague Leo here. 😉 Or at least add some extra information.
The Windows Experience Index as presented in System Properties is not very detailed, but if you know where to look the underlying test data is quite thorough. We cover the Windows System Assessment Tool (Winsat.exe) in some detail on pages 705-709 of Windows 7 Inside Out. I think we will do a much more detailed look at this data in the forthcoming deluxe edition. I might be able to preview it in a blog post here.
Huh? Not to be a nit picker, but unless your browser’s start page is set to a local file, doesn’t that kinda invalidate the test?
Josh, it’s a very simple page on a domain I own. It typically loads in a fraction of a second. The point of using it is to make sure the network is connected and the browser is fully loaded.
@Ed, re the Windows Experience Index, my comments were based on noticing that entire classes of hardware — with much variation within the members of that class — ended up being mapped to the same values. The ratings seemed to be, more or less, about which features hardware supported but not so much about how well they performed relative to similar hardware.
The values are good for determining the class of hardware you have (assuming the Windows version is new enough to understand the class; else it’ll just hit the ceiling value for that version of the OS) but they don’t (or at least didn’t) seem good for telling whether one piece of hardware was/is better than another within the same class.
That’s my experience, anyway. Maybe it’s gotten better since I last used it!
Ofc. no benchmark is perfect, but when any “fast non-SSD SATA drive” scores 5.9 (or whatever it was) in Windows 7, despite some of those drives being quite a bit faster than others, that doesn’t seem like a great benchmark to me. Good for a rough idea, though.
“The Windows Experience Index as presented in System Properties is not very detailed, but if you know where to look the underlying test data is quite thorough. ”
Ah, just re-read your comment and noticed this part. (I’ve had a bit of a christmas drink. :)) I’ve only seen the System Properties page, so that’s all I’m talking about. I didn’t know there was more detailed info elsewhere.
FWIW, as an aside, I had to disable the automatic WinSAT updates on my machine as I kept finding it re-running the test in the background, using 100% CPU for long periods of time. It seemed to keep thinking my hardware had changed and it needed to re-run the test or something. (Manually telling it to refresh the benchmark still works.) Dunno if that’s fixed now. It happened just after Win7’s release, and may have been due to my graphics drivers (or something) rather than the OS itself.
7.7 out of 7.9 is very good score. Intel SSD is the fastest I think 🙂
The problem with SSDs is that they are less reliable. There are SSDs with NAND flash memory which has limited life cycle and with DRAM memory which relies on power source.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssd#Comparison_of_SSD_with_hard_disk_drives
7.7 is awesome man.. Mine is 4.2 too low compared to yours!