Extend the life of a photographer's laptop with an SSD?

DPNow · #1 11-11-11

Here is a summary or excerpt from an article that has just been published on DPNow:

We review a 120GB SanDisk Ultra Solid State Drive (SSD) by installing it in a three year old laptop and find out if it endows said laptop with enough additional performance to make a photographer and his software happy.

Click here to read the whole article...

yoshi · #2 12-11-11

Interesting reading and thanks for that, Ian. I am currently interested in SSD for my desktops. The performance seems already attractive enough but not yet so from the viewpoint of value-for-money.
yoshi

Ian · #3 12-11-11

Hi Yoshi, yes I suspect that until prices come down the attraction of an SSD to upgrade a laptop that does not have a secondary hard drive will be hard to justify.

But I think an SSD for a desktop makes a lot of sense. I think a 64GB SSD would be adequate for a desktop as it would only need to contain program installations and the OS. My own installation with big suites and many other programs installed only totalled 30GB. The speed benefit if placing programs and the OS on an SSD is well documented. A 64GB SATA III SSD is around £75, so although per GB not very competitive, it's still an affordable upgrade. You can now also get disk cache SSDs. These work to speed up conventional hard disks through intelligent caching via SSD. I have read positive things about these too. So you could eventually have one SSD for the OS and programs, and another SSD to accelerate your conventional hard drive.

Ian

Ian · #4 17-11-11

Update: The spectacular CS5.1 start up time may have been a red herring. It seems that I may have measured the start up after Photoshop had previously loaded in that session. Starting Photoshop for the first time after a system boot takes 20 seconds, still a very handy improvement over 33 seconds.

One problem that has become evident in the days since writing the review is that the SSD often fails to be found by the BIOS when starting from cold. Re-boots aren't a problem, just cold boots. Switching off and then on or using CTRL+ALT+DEL gets the drive back on track but it's an annoying trait. Research indicates that this is a commonly experienced problem with some combination of SSD and motherboard.

Ian

Ian · #5 21-11-11

Disk not found error on cold boot - might have solved this by altering the drive boot sequence in the BIOS, putting the SSD at the top. No failures since I did this

Ian

Ian · #6 07-12-11

I was a bit premature about the cold boot issue with the SSD. It comes and goes still. It's annoying but not a major issue.

I have now been sent a 128MB SSDNOW SATA-3 SSD to try by Kingston (who sponsor our Salon comp). I will test this by installing it in my Office PC tower, replacing a 500GB 7200 RPM Seagate SATA-2 hard disk. The motherboard in this box is a few years old but supports SATA-2 and should show a larger performance boost than my laptop which only supported SATA-1.

The Kingston drive also comes with all the software and hardware required for easily migrating your system from hard disk to SSD. I had to work it all out for myself with the SanDisk SSD.

More in this soon...

Ian

JSR · #7 08-12-11

I know it's not the same thing, but I've been using SSDs as the main drive for three years - because that's what came in my netbooks. It pains me that, instead of pursuing the SSD path, all the bandwagon-jumping manufacturers went for the "keep it cheap/maximise the profits" angle of putting HDDs in all subsequent netbooks.

Had all netbooks come with SSDs, as the originals did, then maybe SSDs would have become more prolific by now (in laptops and desktops as well) and, as a consequence, cheaper per GB and better performance. Manufacturers did nothing to help the cause of SSDs.

Ian · #8 08-12-11

I think SSDs have evolved a fair bit in the last 3-4 years. There were concerns about premature wear and these worries have largely been sorted now. I think 2012 could be the year when SSDs become mainstream at last.

Ian

JSR · #9 08-12-11

How much more could they have evolved if they'd become commonplace by now? Netbooks were poised to kick-start the SSD revolution. Instead SSDs seem to have progressed nowhere - except that you can get a few more GBs for a few less £s than they would have cost 3 years ago.

Ian · #10 08-12-11

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSR

How much more could they have evolved if they'd become commonplace by now? Netbooks were poised to kick-start the SSD revolution. Instead SSDs seem to have progressed nowhere - except that you can get a few more GBs for a few less £s than they would have cost 3 years ago.

SSD controllers now have much better wear-levelling systems and OSs also support all the necessary protocols which they largely didn't back then.

I'm personally amazed at how the hard drive manufacturers have managed to if anything reduce costs of their products, which are precision engineered mechanical devices, while increasinhg performance and capacity.

Ian

JSR · #11 08-12-11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ian

SSD controllers now have much better wear-levelling systems

The "wear levelling" thing is something I've often tried to get my head around. All I know is that I've been using this same SSD in my netbook since August 2008 and it's still going. So it must work, whatever it is...

When I saw the way netbook manufacturers were cashing-in with HDD models, I quickly sought out a refurb of the same SSD model I had so that I have a spare for when my original one finally gives up the ghost (as I'm sure it must - its 8hr battery is struggling a little bit now).