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SSD boot drive vs. hard drive with large cache for boot drive? speed difference?
I'm planning to purchase a new Dell PC. I'm a fairly typical user- I use MS
Office, Paintshop Pro for some amateur photo stuff, and I now enjoy amateur video editing- and I do lots of web surfing. I'm comparing a Dell with a SSD boot drive (and a 2nd drive for data) with a standard hard drive with a 32 gig cache. Is there likely to be a dramatic difference in speed between the two? no doubt the SSD will boot up faster- but beyond that, will ordinary use of the computer seem much faster? if the SSD boot drive will be much faster I'll spring for the extra cost- but if it's only, say, 20% faster- I probably can't afford it for that benefit. Joe |
#2
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SSD boot drive vs. hard drive with large cache for boot drive?speed difference?
Joe wrote:
I'm planning to purchase a new Dell PC. I'm a fairly typical user- I use MS Office, Paintshop Pro for some amateur photo stuff, and I now enjoy amateur video editing- and I do lots of web surfing. I'm comparing a Dell with a SSD boot drive (and a 2nd drive for data) with a standard hard drive with a 32 gig cache. Is there likely to be a dramatic difference in speed between the two? no doubt the SSD will boot up faster- but beyond that, will ordinary use of the computer seem much faster? if the SSD boot drive will be much faster I'll spring for the extra cost- but if it's only, say, 20% faster- I probably can't afford it for that benefit. Joe SSD will be MUCH faster, but at a cost. They have a finite number of read/write cycles and when they fail, it's a total loss. -- Steve W. |
#3
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SSD boot drive vs. hard drive with large cache for boot drive?speed difference?
On Saturday, October 11, 2014 7:45:32 AM UTC-4, Joe wrote:
I'm planning to purchase a new Dell PC. I'm a fairly typical user- I use MS Office, Paintshop Pro for some amateur photo stuff, and I now enjoy amateur video editing- and I do lots of web surfing. I'm comparing a Dell with a SSD boot drive (and a 2nd drive for data) with a standard hard drive with a 32 gig cache. Is there likely to be a dramatic difference in speed between the two? no doubt the SSD will boot up faster- but beyond that, will ordinary use of the computer seem much faster? if the SSD boot drive will be much faster I'll spring for the extra cost- but if it's only, say, 20% faster- I probably can't afford it for that benefit. Joe Which model of Dell? My primary experience is with systems that have only SSDs. My own laptop boots from its SSD in maybe 30 seconds. I replaced the hard drive in my client's laptop with a 512GB Samsung SSD. For the client, booting up includes starting up Outlook with a 6GB Outlook PST file to manage her daily life. Before SSD, the boot up was in minutes, enough to power up the machine, walk away, have breakfast, then come back. After SSD, the boot up time was about a minute with Outlook at the ready. Still running A-OK after 18 months. Not sure how much improvement comes from having an SSD boot drive alongside a spinning hard drive. It all depends on how Dell has implemented it. I added a 128GB SSD to a Lenovo Thinkpad recently, then ran Lenovo's version of the 3rd party software to manage the speedup. The Lenovo 3rd party "ExpressCache" software allocated only 32GB of the entire 128GB SSD, in mSATA format (same as a wifi card), and I am not too impressed with the speedup. I set up a second 96GB partition to be used for whatever the owner wants... Ben Myers |
#4
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SSD boot drive vs. hard drive with large cache for boot drive? speed difference?
I should have mentioned the systems- it's their XPS Special Edition models-
there are several: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-8700-se/pd?ref=PD_OC in addition to booting faster, I should think programs will run faster too, but maybe not? Joe "Ben Myers" wrote in message ... On Saturday, October 11, 2014 7:45:32 AM UTC-4, Joe wrote: I'm planning to purchase a new Dell PC. I'm a fairly typical user- I use MS Office, Paintshop Pro for some amateur photo stuff, and I now enjoy amateur video editing- and I do lots of web surfing. I'm comparing a Dell with a SSD boot drive (and a 2nd drive for data) with a standard hard drive with a 32 gig cache. Is there likely to be a dramatic difference in speed between the two? no doubt the SSD will boot up faster- but beyond that, will ordinary use of the computer seem much faster? if the SSD boot drive will be much faster I'll spring for the extra cost- but if it's only, say, 20% faster- I probably can't afford it for that benefit. Joe Which model of Dell? My primary experience is with systems that have only SSDs. My own laptop boots from its SSD in maybe 30 seconds. I replaced the hard drive in my client's laptop with a 512GB Samsung SSD. For the client, booting up includes starting up Outlook with a 6GB Outlook PST file to manage her daily life. Before SSD, the boot up was in minutes, enough to power up the machine, walk away, have breakfast, then come back. After SSD, the boot up time was about a minute with Outlook at the ready. Still running A-OK after 18 months. Not sure how much improvement comes from having an SSD boot drive alongside a spinning hard drive. It all depends on how Dell has implemented it. I added a 128GB SSD to a Lenovo Thinkpad recently, then ran Lenovo's version of the 3rd party software to manage the speedup. The Lenovo 3rd party "ExpressCache" software allocated only 32GB of the entire 128GB SSD, in mSATA format (same as a wifi card), and I am not too impressed with the speedup. I set up a second 96GB partition to be used for whatever the owner wants... Ben Myers |
#5
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SSD boot drive vs. hard drive with large cache for boot drive?speed difference?
On Saturday, October 11, 2014 7:45:32 AM UTC-4, Joe wrote:
I'm planning to purchase a new Dell PC. I'm a fairly typical user- I use MS Office, Paintshop Pro for some amateur photo stuff, and I now enjoy amateur video editing- and I do lots of web surfing. I'm comparing a Dell with a SSD boot drive (and a 2nd drive for data) with a standard hard drive with a 32 gig cache. Is there likely to be a dramatic difference in speed between the two? no doubt the SSD will boot up faster- but beyond that, will ordinary use of the computer seem much faster? if the SSD boot drive will be much faster I'll spring for the extra cost- but if it's only, say, 20% faster- I probably can't afford it for that benefit. Joe The Dell web site has XPS 8700 drivers for the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver. The Intel documentation is very vague as to what it does and how it works, except that you can do some RAID with it. But RAID is not necessarily faster than a plain single hard drive. The mSATA SSD software, ExpressCache, I've used is done by the Diskeepper company, same ones who did the defragmenting software for Windows. The Condusiv (real name of company now) web site has a web page about its OEM softwa http://www.condusiv.com/products/oem/ It makes claims, but I am skeptical. Dell does not say which software it provides for its mSATA SSDs, nor does it really say that it is used for booting the system, or how much of the operating system is stored there. It's a big darn promotional black hole... Ben Myers |
#6
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SSD boot drive vs. hard drive with large cache for boot drive? speed difference?
well, before I buy a new computer, every several years, I'm at a loss since
I don't keep up with changes--- regarding this issue, I've asked in many online places and I'm concluding I might as well spring for the 256 G SSD as a boot drive rather than their HDD with an attached 32 G SSD as a cache Joe "Ben Myers" wrote in message ... On Saturday, October 11, 2014 7:45:32 AM UTC-4, Joe wrote: I'm planning to purchase a new Dell PC. I'm a fairly typical user- I use MS Office, Paintshop Pro for some amateur photo stuff, and I now enjoy amateur video editing- and I do lots of web surfing. I'm comparing a Dell with a SSD boot drive (and a 2nd drive for data) with a standard hard drive with a 32 gig cache. Is there likely to be a dramatic difference in speed between the two? no doubt the SSD will boot up faster- but beyond that, will ordinary use of the computer seem much faster? if the SSD boot drive will be much faster I'll spring for the extra cost- but if it's only, say, 20% faster- I probably can't afford it for that benefit. Joe The Dell web site has XPS 8700 drivers for the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver. The Intel documentation is very vague as to what it does and how it works, except that you can do some RAID with it. But RAID is not necessarily faster than a plain single hard drive. The mSATA SSD software, ExpressCache, I've used is done by the Diskeepper company, same ones who did the defragmenting software for Windows. The Condusiv (real name of company now) web site has a web page about its OEM softwa http://www.condusiv.com/products/oem/ It makes claims, but I am skeptical. Dell does not say which software it provides for its mSATA SSDs, nor does it really say that it is used for booting the system, or how much of the operating system is stored there. It's a big darn promotional black hole... Ben Myers |
#7
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SSD boot drive vs. hard drive with large cache for boot drive?speed difference?
On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 7:58:17 AM UTC-4, Joe wrote:
well, before I buy a new computer, every several years, I'm at a loss since I don't keep up with changes--- regarding this issue, I've asked in many online places and I'm concluding I might as well spring for the 256 G SSD as a boot drive rather than their HDD with an attached 32 G SSD as a cache Joe "Ben Myers" wrote in message ... On Saturday, October 11, 2014 7:45:32 AM UTC-4, Joe wrote: I'm planning to purchase a new Dell PC. I'm a fairly typical user- I use MS Office, Paintshop Pro for some amateur photo stuff, and I now enjoy amateur video editing- and I do lots of web surfing. I'm comparing a Dell with a SSD boot drive (and a 2nd drive for data) with a standard hard drive with a 32 gig cache. Is there likely to be a dramatic difference in speed between the two? no doubt the SSD will boot up faster- but beyond that, will ordinary use of the computer seem much faster? if the SSD boot drive will be much faster I'll spring for the extra cost- but if it's only, say, 20% faster- I probably can't afford it for that benefit. Joe The Dell web site has XPS 8700 drivers for the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver. The Intel documentation is very vague as to what it does and how it works, except that you can do some RAID with it. But RAID is not necessarily faster than a plain single hard drive. The mSATA SSD software, ExpressCache, I've used is done by the Diskeepper company, same ones who did the defragmenting software for Windows. The Condusiv (real name of company now) web site has a web page about its OEM softwa http://www.condusiv.com/products/oem/ It makes claims, but I am skeptical. Dell does not say which software it provides for its mSATA SSDs, nor does it really say that it is used for booting the system, or how much of the operating system is stored there. It's a big darn promotional black hole.... Ben Myers With SSD prices dropping somewhat, you might find it better overall to buy a system with a traditional hard drive, buy an SSD, and clone the contents of the hard drive onto the SSD. The free Partition Wizard does the job nicely, taking into account the sector alignment needed by SSDs to work well. You may end up with more computer for less money plus some work. Of course, this is easy for me to say, because I have done this sort of replacement numerous times, saving one of my clients some money and giving me some 500GB laptop hard drives to be used elsewhere. On Amazon you can get a 256GB Samsung SSD for $128.99 and a 512GB one for $219.99. Samsung SSDs are quite good, but then so are Intel's, Crucial's, and some others... Ben Myers |
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