SSD recommendation sought

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I would like to upgrade the hard drive in one of our systems to an SSD. It is a Dell Optiplex 790 in the Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) and running Windows 7 Pro. This is essentially a laptop without the battery, keyboard or monitor built in. It takes one, and only one, 2.5″ drive.

My main criteria are a capacity of about 250Gb, reliability, ease of doing the upgrade with space for only one drive in the system. I have seen upgrade kits that plug into a USB port and let you copy your old drive onto the new one before installing it into the system. Do those work reliably?

Does anyone have a suggestion or advice?

Thank you,

–Brian

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Last october I bought a Crucial 256 GB m4 SSD. Works pretty well, with a caveat. If I have to brute force windows to shutdown, it may not boot until after some time. This seems to be a situation experienced by others, as one can infer from posts at their support forum.

I bought the upgrade kit. Worked perfectly and it was worth the few euros I spent. Made it much easier to get the SSD setup.

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Last october I bought a Crucial 256 GB m4 SSD. Works pretty well, with a caveat. If I have to brute force windows to shutdown, it may not boot until after some time.

I had this happen twice with a G-Force drive but after a blast from a master image (to dissimilar hardware) it hasn’t occurred again; I think they may be more electrically sensitive in general than magnetic drives.

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This boot problem, do you mean you have to wait a long time or is there some magical fussing you have to do?

And is it just that drive or is this a general problem with SSD drives?

Thanks.

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Crucial’s support docs talk about the need to power cycle the drive. In the couple times it happened, I actually removed the drive and connected it to the usb port, using the USB / SATA cable of the kit. This usually brings the drive back in 10 to 15 mins. I haven’t tried just powering up the computer and leaving it on for that amount of time, to see if that would be enough.

Don’t know why it happens with my setup, but I don’t think it’s a general problem with SSD drives. I have been using a new Toshiba laptop with another 256 GB SSD and the only time I had to force a shutdown, the computer booted normally afterwards. So I am convinced it may not even be a Crucial wide thing (surely that would be known).

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The PC in question does get moderately heavy use. Maybe more than moderate for a puny one such as it is. It is our second cash register so the Point of Sale software is running on it 8-10 hours a day. It is also our “clerical workstation” meaning that all emails, UPS shipments, and other non-POS are done on this system and those software are also running 8-10 hours a day. Finally, this is our “music jukebox” system. It plays a playlist of music that we sell all day long, feeding into the amp for the overhead speakers in the store. All but a few of the selections are MP3, those few being some older WAV files. (Yes, we do actually still sell quite a bit of music in our store. Archaic, eh?)

If I had it to do over again, I would have bought a more potent computer for this position, but the fact is, it was our main cash register system until we added one and moved this to the second position. It was the recession and we weren’t about to toss a perfectly good system. The recession is now over but I’m still not willing to toss a perfectly good system. I guess I’m just a skinflint.

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Crucial’s support docs talk about the need to power cycle the drive. In the couple times it happened, I actually removed the drive and connected it to the usb port, using the USB / SATA cable of the kit. This usually brings the drive back in 10 to 15 mins. I haven’t tried just powering up the computer and leaving it on for that amount of time, to see if that would be enough.

Don’t know why it happens with my setup, but I don’t think it’s a general problem with SSD drives. I have been using a new Toshiba laptop with another 256 GB SSD and the only time I had to force a shutdown, the computer booted normally afterwards. So I am convinced it may not even be a Crucial wide thing (surely that would be known).

I had a Crucial M4 in my laptop that failed a firmware update and had to be power cycled to run again. Afterwards, it would die evry month or so and had to be power cycled again. A couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t revive it with a power cycle either. Crucial support crass shipped me a new one. We’ll see if I have better luck with this one. Fortunately I had a recent image I was able to restore to.

Jerry

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I had a Crucial M4 in my laptop that failed a firmware update and had to be power cycled to run again. Afterwards, it would die evry month or so and had to be power cycled again. A couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t revive it with a power cycle either. Crucial support crass shipped me a new one. We’ll see if I have better luck with this one. Fortunately I had a recent image I was able to restore to.

Jerry

I like Crucial’s support. They have been nothing but great whenever I needed them.

Imaging is even more important with SSDs, as they can die with little warning, as some posts by Clint have shown.

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I like Crucial’s support. They have been nothing but great whenever I needed them.

Imaging is even more important with SSDs, as they can die with little warning, as some posts by Clint have shown.

I second both comments. RMAing the drive was painless. I’ve also had a good experience with their memory.

Jerry

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For reliability, Intel, Crucial, Samsung or Plextor – though many of the others are improving in this respect, if you get the latest version!

An easy option would be a Crucial M500 240GB and their Laptop Install Kit, the USB/Sata converter would enable use of your current drive (and any other 2.5″ SATA drive) as backup or data storage once the upgrade has been verified as good. Transfer software supplied with the install kit.

If the PC has very hard usage or you prefer additional ‘safety net’ features, a ‘Pro’ SSD line, like the Intel 520, Samsung 840 Pro or the Plextor PX-256M5Pro are worth considering.

The Crucial troubleshooting/reset guide, if* you can find it, is good for other brands too – it’s not only Crucial/Micron SSDs that suffer from occasional start up problems.

I’ve had my Crucial M4 for 429.5 days uptime and 105 stop/start counts, several hard resets/power outages, and zero problems.

* Try here.

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Whooo boy, that drive freeze would be a completely unacceptable behavior in our situation. Totally bad. Thank you for the heads up. I will be looking into this one very thoroughly before I decide to buy. At the minimum I would have to drive two hours each way to fix it and our business would be harmed during that time. At the worst I would have to fly in from our winter range in a totally different state to fix it. That’s why reliability is so important.

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It’s starting to sound like SSDs might still be a hobbyist solution, not ready for the real world…

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It’s starting to sound like SSDs might still be a hobbyist solution, not ready for the real world…

Sorry, that’s not true. They are so good, performance wise, that they are find ways to high performance database systems. Doesn’t get much more real than that.

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Sorry, that’s not true. They are so good, performance wise, that they are find ways to high performance database systems. Doesn’t get much more real than that.

I keep learning, but that freeze up thing really makes me nervous. Intuitively I would expect electronic memory to be more reliable than spinning hunks of metal with heads flying over them and moving back and forth, but the fact is that disk manufacturers have been working on reliability since at least 1975 that I know of personally (when disk drives looked like washing machines) and SSDs are still new. Are they past the bleeding edge? Were those freeze up problems due to firmware which has been fixed now? I’m still sorting it out.

I wonder whose SSDs are being used in those high performance database systems. And are they mirrored or something so that if one freezes another one takes the load or will a frozen SSD freeze the whole system? I actually used to design high availability systems for banks and utilities (~25 years ago!) and I know that they think very carefully about these things. Are they using SSDs or are these high performance systems in universities or someplace where reliability is not crucial?

One of the things that is hardest to get people to understand about a small business is that we have the exact same basic needs as big ones. And computer reliability is just as important to us if not more so. A lost day on one of our computers in our intensely busy tourist season can cause losses of 1/2 to 1% of our total annual profit. I doubt very much if a lost day on one (non switch) computer at Verizon will cost them that much. The market would skin them alive if it did.

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This thread may or may not also interest you, Brian:
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//155939-SSD-Choices-SanDisk-vs-Samsung

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This thread may or may not also interest you, Brian:

Yes, it does. Thank you. I notice that they recommend the San Disk for the enthusiast market. That is no recommendation for me. But they also point out that they serve the OEM market and make half of the world’s flash memory, which does carry more weight with me. Performance isn’t as important as reliability – I’m sure they will all blow away a hard drive in performance. Reliability is the most important criteria I have.

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Brian, I very much appreciate your value upon relieability. I can share with you what I have observed in countless customer reviews– both SSD’s and hard drives seem to share a corresponding percentage of thumbs up and thumbs down. Of course, the “green” hard drives are the most notorious for thumbs down.

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Of course, the “green” hard drives are the most notorious for thumbs down.

Does “green” mean “environmentally benign” or some corporate green logo color? (Here on the damp Oregon coast everything becomes green eventually. If you don’t keep moving you will, too!)

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Does “green” mean “environmentally benign” or some corporate green logo color? (Here on the damp Oregon coast everything becomes green eventually. If you don’t keep moving you will, too!)

Brian, as I understand it, the green drives are low-power, low-noise, low-heat, and low-cost with their reportedly energy conserving measures. Moreover, they also seem to be found wanting in performance to non-green drives. If you go Windows shopping, you’ll see that they are identified as green drives. They sure are prone to many a bad review. If you opt to go the hard drive route, may I suggest that you look for a 7200 rpm drive rather than a 5400 rpm? The performance difference just between those two alone is significant. You might want to look at Hitachi/HGST for that speed.

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Does “green” mean “environmentally benign” or some corporate green logo color? (Here on the damp Oregon coast everything becomes green eventually. If you don’t keep moving you will, too!)

“Green” always refers to “environmentally benign”.

Personally, I don’t see how very much energy is saved with a “green” hard drive or a “green” computer. If ALL other factors were equal, I would purchase “green”. But if I had any doubts as to reliability of the “green” products, I would go with what was most reliable.

I believe that sometimes, in a company’s desire to be “green”, they favor “green” over “reliability”. I don’t have hard evidence to support that, it’s just my opinion.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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For a little historical peek at SSD/HDD reliability and returns rates, you’d do worse than start here, there are 6 other reports in that series (under the Miscellaneous link), only the oldest doesn’t include SSDs.

Sandisk might make a lot of memory but I guess most ends up in USB thumb drives, last I read was that Micron (Crucial’s parent) was #2 supplier of SSD nand, with Samsung in #1 position.

Most of Intel’s SSD output ends up in the Enterprise (workstations/servers); much of Samsung’s SSD output also bypasses the retail market, Apple’s notebooks being a major user.

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For a little historical peek at SSD/HDD reliability and returns rates, you’d do worse than start here

According to that one testing organization “Intel” SSDs totally blow away the others as far as reliability goes. I gather that the number includes all the drives a manufacturer makes. So I’m leaning over the “Add to cart” button on this one. Good idea or bad?
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Series-2-5-Inch-240GB-SSDSC2CT240A4K5/dp/B009SIJ7G8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376532646&sr=8-1&keywords=Intel+335+Series+2.5-Inch+240GB+SATA3+Solid+State+Drive+SSDSC2CT240A4K5

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According to that one testing organization “Intel” SSDs totally blow away the others as far as reliability goes. I gather that the number includes all the drives a manufacturer makes. So I’m leaning over the “Add to cart” button on this one. Good idea or bad?
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Series-2-5-Inch-240GB-SSDSC2CT240A4K5/dp/B009SIJ7G8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376532646&sr=8-1&keywords=Intel+335+Series+2.5-Inch+240GB+SATA3+Solid+State+Drive+SSDSC2CT240A4K5

One thing I can say that speaks to its favor, Brian, is that the customer reviews overwhelmingly support it. Now I realize one should always expect some reviews will be bogus, but I have done a lot of internet shopping over the years, and if one notices a significant clustering of reviews at either end, It’s a good idea to take note of it.

However, I wish it featured SLC rather than MLC. SLC is supposed to enjoy a better reputation for reliability and write speeds… at last that is what I have read.
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/MLC-vs-SLC-Which-flash-SSD-is-right-for-you

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Brian,

Here’s my experience. I have a Crucial M4 256Gb SSD in my Dell 1564 i5 processor which dual boots 2 copies of Win 7 HP (one for Office 2010 & one for Office 2003). I’ve never had a single problem with this drive and it is the only drive in the laptop. I also have a Crucial M4 128Gb SSD in my new Dell XPS 8700 desktop (this was originally in the Laptop BTW as you can see if you click on the Laptop Specs in my signature). Of course this drive has only been in this machine for 3 weeks but nary a whimper. The XPS boots Win 8 in under 30 seconds! The install on this drive was interesting as I used Macrium Reflect Pro to image the 1Tb HHD the machine came with and then used it to restore and at the same time shrink the image to fit on the 128Gb drive. Worked very nicely. The 1Tb HHD is now the Swap & Data drive. All in all I’m one happy camper! HTH :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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I’ve never used this product, but it sounds like it may be good for you, since reliability is key for you:

http://www.crucial.com/store/ProductMarketing_p400e.aspx

Crucial calls it a “high-endurance SSD”.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Oh boy, a lot more things to read. Thank you, everyone, for the input.

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I think maybe we all had somewhat higher expectations for SSDs than magnetic since they don’t have any moving parts to wear out. I think they are on a par with one another and the performance is certainly there in the SSDs, but I thought well, maybe the technology will come along that can indicate the number of writes to an SSD is such and such, time to start thinking about a replacement. Something dependable like that instead of pretty much just as likely to fail at any unknown time as a magnetic drive.

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I wonder if “green” is really green when you factor in the manufacturing burden of making the replacement when they die or are replaced with something faster. Still, you have to crawl before you can walk and I expect they will continue to improve. For now the greenest thing one could probably do with a computer would be to disconnect it from power when not in use. They all used to do that when you flipped off the power switch on the back, but now there is no switch and they are constant low-level power consumers even when supposedly turned off.

I guess the two 10K RPM Velociraptor drives in my desktop computer are probably not green. But I don’t feel too guilty. I just switch off the power strip that everything is plugged into when I shut down at night. And we have a large array of solar PV cells on our roof to defray their energy consumption. Plus we don’t have a TV or DVR or any of those other energy leaks that most people have.

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I have an OCZ SSD in my PC, had some initial problems with freezing but a firmware update fixed that and it has been running flawlessly for over a year.

And SSD are DEFINITELY enterprise grade, when major enterprise storage vendors are offering SSD storage arrays commercially (I would *love* a shelf of 24 SAS SSD’s!)

Stu

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I think it’s difficult to go wrong with Intel SSDs, providing you can afford them; the only caveat is that the newer the range is, the better they’re likely to be (goes for all brands), better components, better firmware, better ‘toolbox’ software than the earlier models in the same market segment/price bracket.

In this instance, the drive wasn’t released until Q4’12, so that makes it pretty recent; any similar Intel SSD more recent than that is likely to be significantly more expensive – Intel are very slow to reduce the prices compared to their competitors.

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For what it’s worth… I noticed that Amazon is currently pricing the SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB for $199.99. My goodness, that’s a fantastic buy! I realize I am biased SD way. I’ve just had fantastic luck with their products over time, even surviving washing machines.
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-2-5-Inch-Solid-SDSSDXP-240G-G25/dp/B00COF7E3K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376537277&sr=8-1&keywords=sandisk+extreme+II+ssd

Satrow, can I share an article with you from Hard OCP, a review of SD Extreme II?
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/06/05/sandisk_240_gb_extreme_ii_ssd_review#.UgxNb9LQOAV

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For what it’s worth… I noticed that Amazon is currently pricing the SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB for $199.99. My goodness, that’s a fantastic buy!

No put down of you or of SanDisk – I’m still trying to decide what to do and I just keep learning more here. But a good buy is only good if the drive never fails me. It costs me $.62/mile to operate my old pickup. (If you have never figured out the true cost of operating your vehicle, you should – you might be surprised.) So to drive over and replace a drive will cost me over a hundred dollars just for the vehicle. Not to mention lost time and this time of year lost sales in the store, my time, any meals I might eat, stress, etc. I cannot afford an immensely expensive drive, but the difference between $200 and $279 (for that other Intel drive) is really not going to be part of my buying decision.

Now your opinion of SanDisk is important and I appreciate you telling me about it. In fact, I accidentally sucked one of their thumb drives into my built-in vacuum system (don’t ask). I heard it rattling through the tube, down one floor, through a double 45 ess curve, down another floor, slam into the flat side of an inverted tee fitting, zoom off into the room where the vacuum resides, and slam into the bottom of the metal catch tank making a sound like a really loud drum. I fished it out and it is still working after two more years. That’s reliable!

But that is kind of a physical reliability example. You also pointed out the difference between SLC and MLC drives. I read your link (thank you very much for it!) and it appears that write cycles are the issue. At 240Gb I doubt I will fill the drive before it’s time to retire the computer. Hopefully the controller can always find reliable cells to write to. This system will have mostly static data like the music database. It gets recorded and after that just plays. It will have the OS and such, but the POS and UPS databases reside on a different system and will probably always be there, so it doesn’t seem like there will be really heavy write activity on the drive except for page swapping (or whatever the modern term is.) It seems like your swap space will reach those 10,000 write/read cycles pretty quickly. Maybe the big databases use SSD because they are mostly read and not written…

Still learning, not decided yet, going to look at which ones are SLC and which are MLC next, I guess.

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No put down of you or of SanDisk – I’m still trying to decide what to do and I just keep learning more here. But a good buy is only good if the drive never fails me. It costs me $.62/mile to operate my old pickup. (If you have never figured out the true cost of operating your vehicle, you should – you might be surprised.) So to drive over and replace a drive will cost me over a hundred dollars just for the vehicle. Not to mention lost time and this time of year lost sales in the store, my time, any meals I might eat, stress, etc. I cannot afford an immensely expensive drive, but the difference between $200 and $279 (for that other Intel drive) is really not going to be part of my buying decision.

Now your opinion of SanDisk is important and I appreciate you telling me about it. In fact, I accidentally sucked one of their thumb drives into my built-in vacuum system (don’t ask). I heard it rattling through the tube, down one floor, through a double 45 ess curve, down another floor, slam into the flat side of an inverted tee fitting, zoom off into the room where the vacuum resides, and slam into the bottom of the metal catch tank making a sound like a really loud drum. I fished it out and it is still working after two more years. That’s reliable!

But that is kind of a physical reliability example. You also pointed out the difference between SLC and MLC drives. I read your link (thank you very much for it!) and it appears that write cycles are the issue. At 240Gb I doubt I will fill the drive before it’s time to retire the computer. Hopefully the controller can always find reliable cells to write to. This system will have mostly static data like the music database. It gets recorded and after that just plays. It will have the OS and such, but the POS and UPS databases reside on a different system and will probably always be there, so it doesn’t seem like there will be really heavy write activity on the drive except for page swapping (or whatever the modern term is.) It seems like your swap space will reach those 10,000 write/read cycles pretty quickly. Maybe the big databases use SSD because they are mostly read and not written…

Still learning, not decided yet, going to look at which ones are SLC and which are MLC next, I guess.

Certainly, I may be a huge fan of SanDisk, but I am not their salesman. I think you are prudent to carefully discern which solution works best for you, Brian. And I am also persuaded that in the final analysis, the reviews of the many trump any one individual review. I’ve gotten burned by single reviews on more than one occasion. In other words, I myself will not consider anything that does not bring in at least 4 stars minimum.

Thanks for the chuckle I got from your story of the vacuum incident!

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It seems like your swap space will reach those 10,000 write/read cycles pretty quickly.

That, fortunately, is not a problem in modern flash drives and SSDs: while you may be writing repeatedly to the same file in the file system (and even to the same logical blocks on your ‘disk’), underneath it all the flash drive is placing each new write to the ‘same’ location in different physical sectors such that no sectors should receive much more than the overall average number of writes (a process called ‘wear-leveling’ that evens out write wear such that no sectors should wear out before most other sectors are getting ready to).

The result is that it’s not ‘where’ you write (e.g., heavy use of a page file that occupies only a small percentage of the drive) but only how much you write altogether that should determine the useful life of the drive.

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That, fortunately, is not a problem in modern flash drives and SSDs: while you may be writing repeatedly to the same file in the file system (and even to the same logical blocks on your ‘disk’), underneath it all the flash drive is placing each new write to the ‘same’ location in different physical sectors such that no sectors should receive much more than the overall average number of writes (a process called ‘wear-leveling’ that evens out write wear such that no sectors should wear out before most other sectors are getting ready to).

The result is that it’s not ‘where’ you write (e.g., heavy use of a page file that occupies only a small percentage of the drive) but only how much you write altogether that should determine the useful life of the drive.

Well now that certainly does make sense. Thank you.
I’m off to the store now for a couple of days of hectic work, so I won’t even be thinking about SSDs until Sunday. On Sunday I will make my final decision and place an order. There is just one more thing I am wondering about. I get the impression that a new drive comes out, has problems, gets firmware updates, and then works fine thereafter. If that is an exception, then I won’t worry about it. If that is somewhat normal, or if it is normal for a particular manufacturer (the examples were Crucial) then I will need to factor that into my decision. I would rather get a model with mature firmware than a brand new one with the fastest specs but where I will need to update firmware to make it reliable. So which way is it? I posted that one Intel model I found on Amazon and then SpywareDr posted a different one which appears to be newer. Which would likely be the more reliable one? And how in the world do you tell which is newer or older? (Intel or others.)

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Well now that certainly does make sense. Thank you.
I’m off to the store now for a couple of days of hectic work, so I won’t even be thinking about SSDs until Sunday. On Sunday I will make my final decision and place an order. There is just one more thing I am wondering about. I get the impression that a new drive comes out, has problems, gets firmware updates, and then works fine thereafter. If that is an exception, then I won’t worry about it. If that is somewhat normal, or if it is normal for a particular manufacturer (the examples were Crucial) then I will need to factor that into my decision. I would rather get a model with mature firmware than a brand new one with the fastest specs but where I will need to update firmware to make it reliable. So which way is it? I posted that one Intel model I found on Amazon and then SpywareDr posted a different one which appears to be newer. Which would likely be the more reliable one? And how in the world do you tell which is newer or older? (Intel or others.)

If you are going to go with an SSD and it will be used in a system that is critical to your operation, you need to be prepared to handle an emergency situation (I guess this would be true even with a conventional HDD). So, keep the HDD you are going to replace ready, maybe clone the SSD into it regularly (say, every week), so that you can simply switch one for the other, in case something goes wrong. Also, have a mechanism to backup any critical file, to make sure no changes are lost for the time between your regular cloning of the SSD.
Again, let me state that I would take these precautions even with an HDD, since availability seems to be a crucial requirement, in your case.

In my case, I upgraded my SSD firmware not because it was having issues, but because it wasn’t the latest. It’s a simple operation, really. Anyway, I think the only thing you can do is get one from a reliable brand and plan for a worst case scenario, regardless of the brand. Even the very best products can fail.

Good luck :).

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I would also like to give a general, very big thank you to everyone for your contributions. You guys are good, positive people. There isn’t enough of that in the world.

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Intel 520 240GB SATA III – 5 year warranty

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Like anything, buy quality. Just installed the Samsung 840 Pro SSD. This entire process of converting my PC to SSD took about 10 minutes of physical work and 20 minutes of an automated “wizard” moving the OS to the SSD. After the install, everything works perfectly. Then I ran a benchmark on the SSD, the 10,000rpm HD, a Drobo raid array, and a Synology Diskstation to benchmark the differences. There is no going back. The SSD is almost 20x faster than the 10,000rpm HD – which is about the fastest mechanical drive available…the difference is more than noticeable. This is the second development machine I’ve upgraded. The other one has been running for several years and never been turned off – or had a boot issue.
Buy quality.

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Well, it can’t be almost 20x faster than the 10k HD unless there’s something wrong with the 10k HD, but certainly several times the throughput. On a bad day the 10k should do 150MB/s (Velociraptors benchmark at about 170 write and 165 read) while the SSDs top out a little over 500MB/s.

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Well, it can’t be almost 20x faster than the 10k HD unless there’s something wrong with the 10k HD, but certainly several times the throughput. On a bad day the 10k should do 150MB/s (Velociraptors benchmark at about 170 write and 165 read) while the SSDs top out a little over 500MB/s.

The dramatic performance advantages that SSDs enjoy over conventional disks lie not in streaming throughput but in random IOPS (I/O operations per second). The best a typical single 7200 rpm desktop disk can do is 75 – 80 IOPS (unqueued), i.e., around 12 – 14 ms per random 4 KB access, though with a heavily-parallel database-style workload which can be handled by a deep queue on the disk IOPS can almost double (due to the disk’s internal access-ordering optimizations that minimize head movement and rotational delay between acceses). ‘Short-stroking’ a disk can also significantly improve its random-access performance – e.g., by using only the outer third of my 2 TB 5400 rpm Samsung HD204UI drive I improved its IOPS from about 63 to 80 (just about the same as my WD 640 GB Caviar Black drive – a relatively high-performance 7200 rpm drive but which needs to move its head 3x as far on average to cover the same overall capacity). And moving up to a 15K rpm SCSI drive can raise unqueued IOPS up into the 150 area (under 7 ms per average random access) unqueued and even more queued and/or short-stroked.

But all such optimizations seem insignificant compared with SSD random access times ranging from under 100 microseconds to a few hundred microseconds (depending largely upon controller overhead). A 20x random-access performance improvement is toward the LOW end of what one should be able to expect over even a 10K rpm conventional drive – and without the significant access-time increases that queuing causes on a conventional drive (since while the disk is able to pump through more accesses per second the delay seen by each individual access increases as it has to wait for its turn in the queue to arrive – usually not a problem for highly-parallel workloads unless SOME of the included accesses have strict deadlines to meet).

So while I don’t get excited about raising streaming throughput from over 100 MB/sec (the average for my HD204UI) to several hundred MB/sec because I just don’t do all that much heavy-duty streaming and when I do it tends to occur at least somewhat in the background, I can get excited about improving my random-access performance by a factor of 20 or more because that’s the area where I’m most conscious of my disk’s performance limitations (e.g., doing a WinMerge contents comparison to validate a backup containing tens or hundreds of thousands of small files, or just seeing Explorer hang for a while expanding a directory with thousands of sub-directories, though that has been SOMEWHAT mitigated in later versions of Windows). Unfortunately, until affordable SSDs become large enough to hold such sprawling troves of data I’ll just have to put up with such delays, but for someone who’s doing heavy-duty random processing of more compact data (as in the database example I described) affordable SSDs can work wonders.

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I researched this subject thoroughly a year ago before I built my system. I believe that it is incorrect to say that Intel SSDs blow away all other brands for reliability. Intel SSDs and the Samsung 800 series were both rated extremely reliable. However, The Intel SSDs were extremely overpriced. Other vendors such as Crucial and OCZ made very good SSDs, but their later models were highest performance with bugs, while the slightly older models were lower performance with the bugs worked out. This is a generalization of course. Regarding “green” hard drives, they have a terrible reputation for reliability and “workstation” manufacturers will not use them. They are basically very cheaply built, low power HDDs. The low-power feature is the sole qualification for “green”. Not only are the WD Velociraptors durable and high performance 10,000 rpm HDDs, but they are so overpriced that their prices approach SSD prices. There are some enterprise class 7200 rpm HDDs that are extremely durable and high performance that sell for only a slight premium over mid-class HDDs. Western Digital’s RE4 is an example. Their 1Tb versions might sell for only a $10 or $20 premium over their mid-range consumer HDDs. To summarize relative to the OP’s (“Backspacer”) situation, many SSDs are extremely reliable with both some Intel high-end and some Samsung 800 series SSDs having the best reliability reputations. For greater storage capacity needs, many systems use the SSDs for operating system and apps only, and enterprise-class HDDs for storage over 250Mb or 50o0Mb. The most reliable should be SSDs for the operating system and apps with at least (2) HDDs in RAID 1 array (two mirror image copies). Therefore, for mission critical application requiring less than 500 Mb capacity, I would use one Samsung 800 series SSD (240Mb to 500 Mb) with a daily backup to an enterprise-level HDD. If capacity requirements were over 500 Mb, I would still use a Samsung 800 series SSD, 240Mb, with enterprise-level 7,200rpm HDDs for data storage.

I am an architect with many thousands or 10s of thousands of work-hours embedded in drawings. Since their loss would be catastrophic and irreplaceable, I run a Samsung 830 SSD for OS with 2 enterprise-level 7200 rpm HDDs for data storage.

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I recently tried the Samsung 840 Pro 256gig SSD, and it had Several Bad issues for me on a fresh Win7 Pro installation.
I ran their latest Magician config… software, disabled VSS/indexing/Hibernate, before Win Update/Program installation.
It was Fast, but after installing my programs, my Antec desktop tower started Hooting Constantly (Harmonics?). Drove me Nuts!
The last straw was when my outlook.com email (aka Hotmail) email address book, wouldn’t load (IE10/FF)!?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My solution-
I had also upgraded my Slave HDD to a 500gig 10k rpm WD VelociRaptor 64mb cache, and was Very Impressed with how much faster it was than with my old VelociRaptor 32mb cache!
So I reinstalled Win7, on a 250gig VelociRaptor 64mb cache (128 gig C: partition).
My system is now as Fast as the SSD, and No Noise after an advanced Win7 defrag (disable internet/AV, show Hidden Files (indexes…), Run as Admin)

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Scott — Perhaps I’m not understanding your computer problem description accurately, but how is the tower case noise related to the SSD? Ditto for the email client loading problem. Email client loading problems usually originate from incorrect email settings and have nothing to do with the hardware drive. When you substituted another HDD (VelociRaptor), was that a fresh OS install and app install?

Jerry C.

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Scott — Perhaps I’m not understanding your computer problem description accurately, but how is the tower case noise related to the SSD? Ditto for the email client loading problem. Email client loading problems usually originate from incorrect email settings and have nothing to do with the hardware drive. When you substituted another HDD (VelociRaptor), was that a fresh OS install and app install?

Jerry C.

Re: how is the tower case noise related to the SSD?-
Somehow the SSD caused the Harmonics, and never a problem with HDD.

Re: Email client loading problems usually originate from incorrect email settings…-
Hotmail is an online email service, and works good with a HDD.

Re: When you substituted another HDD (VelociRaptor), was that a fresh OS install and app install?-
No, it was from a Macrium Reflect Image backup (USB 3.0 external HDD- Fast!), that I made just prior to my 2nd & Last SSD installation.

BTW!- Samsung SSD Tech Support recommends a fresh OS/app install to see Top speed performance, and Never an HDD Image clone…(only 10% faster than HDD)!

BTW2!- If you use CCleaner… on an SSD?-
Never Wipe MFT free space (default), or Secure Delete (Many over-write passes on both, ruined my old Crucial SSD)!

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Oh, and another thing (always another, isn’t there?)

When I do the mirror, how do I do it and what do I need? Do I need to get a USB adapter? Is there a kit to do this? I seem to remember reading about one. Keep in mind, this is a Dell Ultra Small Form Factor system and I don’t think it has any place to plug in a second drive to do the installing on. It will need a USB cable of some sort.

Edit: Here it is: satrow suggested this product while discussing Crucial drives: http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CTLAPINSTALLAC. Are these things universal? Will it work to mirror/clone/copy (what is it?) my old drive to the new Intel SSD? Or do I need something more generic?

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OK, I ended up ordering the Intel 520 drive.

When I do the mirror, how do I do it and what do I need? Do I need to get a USB adapter? Is there a kit to do this? I seem to remember reading about one. Keep in mind, this is a Dell Ultra Small Form Factor system and I don’t think it has any place to plug in a second drive to do the installing on. It will need a USB cable of some sort.

Apricorn ASW-USB3-25 USB3.0-to-SATA Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit – $24.21 with free shipping

Connects to any 2.5 inch SATA Hard Drive or Solid State Drive. Comes with Apricorn’s Upgrade Suite featuring EZ Gig IV Cloning Software for Windows® and ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper for Mac®. Transfer everything in a few easy steps: Operating System, Data, E-mail, Settings and Applications. Perfect for transferring data to bare drives. Apricorn’s SATA Wire 3.0 is the easiest way to upgrade your notebook drive.

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OK, I ended up ordering the Intel 520 drive. After reading some of the links in this thread and doing some other searches that they inspired, I concluded that this drive will eventually fail, but it will probably outlast the usefulness of this puny system. I looked at the drive monitoring tool that Intel provides and it appears that I will easily be able to track its decline and if I am wrong I will be able to get a replacement installed before all of its writes are used up.

I am also about to replace my desktop and intend to move the old one into the shop to use as my remote system. It will sit on the same rack as the Optiplex with the SSD, so it will be there as a backup in case of an unpredicted failure. One of our employees is competent enough to switch some cables around with my directing her over the phone.

The drive will arrive within the next couple of days and I will install it sometime within the next week. The previous post makes me wonder, though: should I use a drive mirroring utility to copy it or start fresh like Samsung recommends for their drives? I don’t really have the time to start fresh because there is a lot of installation and configuration to do along with that and it is our busy season. Will mirroring really slow down the Intel drive enough to worry about?

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The hardware is universal, the software may be restricted to work only after detecting a drive of the same brand (Samsung has such a clone utility in their software (toolbox), does the Intel software not include such a tool?).

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I don’t know. I suspect it does. It would make sense and they are pretty sharp cookies there at Intel. But what about the connection? Maybe I need to buy one of those adapter kits and just use the cable out of it and Intel’s software.

Maybe I need to switch to an Intel support forum for this part of my research. If I do and nobody posts the answer here, I will come back and report what I learn. Everyone has given some very helpful advice here and it might benefit others besides me. (I hope so!)

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You could open the SFF case and make an internal connection to transfer the data, there are some freeware softwares that will do that – here’s Intel’s own (presumably it works from inside Windows): https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19324

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Reading farther down on that Intel link I see that they recommend “If you’re installing on a laptop computer, a third-party SATA-to-USB cable adaptor is needed.” I think that answers the big question. I will find one of these adapters and their software and give it a try sometime within the next week or so. And as I said, I’ll report back with my results.

Thanks very much for the help!

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Open the SSF case? I’m not sure what that means. If you mean open the computer, it has only two SATA connectors on the mother board. One for the hard drive and one for the CD drive. The documentation (http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/optix/en/optiplex-790-tech-guide.pdf) claims that one is SATA2 and one is SATA3. I assume the disk is on the SATA3. I suppose I could waylay the other one from the CD drive, but there is only one disk power connector. So then I’d have to get a splitter for the power. It seems easier to just use the USB and wait longer if that is workable.

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Yes, it sounds easier to wait until you have USB connection hardware available.

EDIT: here’s some generic, and specific, advice on cloning a HDD contents to SSD, worth a read to get a better understanding of what you may want to do beforehand: http://www.howtogeek.com/97242/how-to-migrate-windows-7-to-a-solid-state-drive/

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You’ve got all the basics correct Backspacer, I installed many Intel 330s and they all came with a nice metal 3.5″ mounting rack, a SATA data cable and some screws on the hardware side. 2 SATA port limit on ultra small form factors you already know about (unless it’s one of the few that includes an e-SATA port as well). There’s a few things to consider when cloning to SSD and replacing rather than installing fresh but I don’t think there’s anything fundamental between the two and cloning sure saves a lot of time if the current install is perfectly fine.

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Wow, that’s a great link! I can use it to prepare and I’ll have it open while I’m doing the upgrade, both so I don’t forget anything and in case I need that rescue disk.

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Ya, I like those all in one USB3 to SATA adapters because later one can use them to hook up an SSD (or bare notebook drive) externally and run a portable VM quite nicely.

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I am going to use the Intel software for cloning the drive so I got an adapter without the software. Hopefully it will work OK.

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So the upgrade is done and I’ll tell about it just to finish off this thread in case anyone else finds it useful.

As I said, I got the Intel 520 SSD.

I used Macrium Reflect Pro V5 to image the old drive prior to messing with it. I didn’t want to have problems with the SSD then find that I’d screwed up my old drive taking it out. (Static zap or something.)

I followed the installation instructions that came with the drive:

– I had to buy the USB to SATA cable. I connected that to the SSD and plugged it into the system.
– I downloaded the Intel drive cloning software. This turns out to be Acronis with an Intel overbrand. I suppose Macrium could have done just as well, but I couldn’t think of any reason not to use the Intel supplied software because that just removes any doubt.
– I cloned the drive following the very easy instructions. This took a while because it was just a USB 2.0 port.
– I swapped the drives. I had to look up the user manual on the Dell site to find one secret little tab to push, otherwise it was a piece of cake.
– I turned on the system.
– Everything worked perfectly but for one tiny and unimportant thing: The system boots up very quickly and you see the login screen in about two eyeblinks. (OK, maybe three.) But for some reason it takes a long time for the mouse to become active. I think it might have something to do with another USB device taking a long time to initialize. This is a Point of Sale register and there are lots of USB devices attached. I hear something else beep just before the mouse becomes active. I suspect this has always been the case but was masked by the long bootup time with the HDD. It is no problem at all because the systems are generally restarted and left on as the very last act of the day before the employees go home.

I installed the Intel SSD Toolkit and clicked the correct things to finish the setup. I don’t remember the exact terms, but it’s pretty obvious when you are in there. Windows turned off defragging automatically when it recognized the drive, either Windows or the Toolkit turned on TRIM automatically. I had already turned off drive indexing. Etc.

All in all, a VERY satisfactory experience and outcome. I’m willing to bet that I don’t have an HDD C-drive in any of my systems within a year or so.

Thank you to everyone for the help and advice. You are a great group of very knowledgeable people.

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