SSD upgrade

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rickryan.com

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Dec 9, 2009
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I know I'm late to the party, but I finally upgraded to a WD, 1TB SSD in my main DJ laptop. I have about 350gigs that had to be transferred. It took about an hour. I left the player running last night in a loop, still working this morning. I was pretty shocked at how fast the box comes up, just crazy. Of those here who have already made the jump, how much did you gain in battery life? Anything? Any pitfalls to watch for?
 
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SSD’s are fast, but they are not perfect. There’s a limited number of WRITES with SSD’s, but unlike traditional hard drives, there is an infinite number of READS. One thing you NEVER wanna do on an SSD is DEFRAGMENT... Don’t do it. SSD’s deliberately write data split into different cells across the entire drive to limit the number of writes to any particular cell. This extends the life of the drive. SSD’s used as data repositories, where they are read a lot, but written to infrequently could last 300 years or more. If you do a lot of writes to an SSD, some cells may become unusable, and the capacity will decrease, and the speed will decrease. Who knows how long that will take???... Too many variables. Your SSD will very likely last longer than the computer.[emoji4]


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I have a 500Gb and a 1Tb in my main laptop .. the 500Gb is in the M.2 slot and is the OS drive. No difference in battery life (though I run primarily on AC) .. but yeah, comes up in seconds.
 
SSD’s are fast, but they are not perfect. There’s a limited number of WRITES with SSD’s, but unlike traditional hard drives, there is an infinite number of READS. One thing you NEVER wanna do on an SSD is DEFRAGMENT... Don’t do it. SSD’s deliberately write data split into different cells across the entire drive to limit the number of writes to any particular cell. This extends the life of the drive. SSD’s used as data repositories, where they are read a lot, but written to infrequently could last 300 years or more. If you do a lot of writes to an SSD, some cells may become unusable, and the capacity will decrease, and the speed will decrease. Who knows how long that will take???... Too many variables. Your SSD will very likely last longer than the computer.[emoji4]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Crap, and the first thing I did after getting it installed? Defrag. Ugh.
 
The ideal set up would be a mix of SSD and HD, with the SSD for the boot, and then the HD for the storage, my next laptop I think is going to have that setup.
 
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The ideal set up would be a mix of SSD and HD, with the SSD for the boot, and then the HD for the storage, my next laptop I think is going to have that setup.
Actually, Ideal would be ALL SSD .. SSD boot and standard or hybrid (better) drive for storage, though, is the better value.
 
The ideal set up would be a mix of SSD and HD, with the SSD for the boot, and then the HD for the storage, my next laptop I think is going to have that setup.

The only reason I can see for using a non-SSD drive is if I were doing video. My current laptop keeps my entire mp3 music library and everything is less than 500 megs in size.
 
Actually, Ideal would be ALL SSD .. SSD boot and standard or hybrid (better) drive for storage, though, is the better value.
Ok, yes, for the 100% super duper ideal, yes, all SSD would be ideal, I should of worded what I said a bit differently and said it was medium ideal.
 
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The only reason I can see for using a non-SSD drive is if I were doing video. My current laptop keeps my entire mp3 music library and everything is less than 500 megs in size.
I do a fair amount of video so one reason why I stuck with HDD, and cost was the biggest factor. Sounds like you dont need a large drive so a SSD would be ideal for you and if you are not doing a ton of rewriting and and dont store a lot of large files.



I purchased a new laptop today , 1TB HDD and I opted for the 128GB SSD for boot, I guess we will see ideal it is for me, now I just need to bump the 8gb of memory up to the max of 32bg ;)
 
While there are reports of SSD limits to the life of the drives regarding writes, I personally have yet to experience a single hiccup with an SSD used for DJ applications. I play all video at events but do very little hardcore editing. I do a lot of DVD ripping to .mp4, but again, little editing post rip. I've experienced more disc failures in the standard drive 5400 rpm class than in any other speeds, regardless of brands.

What I am trying to discern is the properly sized swap file when using all SSD and having maxed out RAM. There are all kinds of opinions in every direction imaginable. So far, in experimentation of my usage patterns, having no swap file has given me the best overall performance while allowing Windows to manage it had created one annoying issue wherein the drive will stall and freeze for about 60 seconds once or twice a day and mostly after several hours of at idle.
 
If you're manually setting it, your Swap should be a minimum of 1.5 times and a maximum of 4 times the size of memory you have.

Example: If your machine has 8GB or RAM, then your minimum would be 12GB and your maximum would be 32GB.
 
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While there are reports of SSD limits to the life of the drives regarding writes, I personally have yet to experience a single hiccup with an SSD used for DJ applications. I play all video at events but do very little hardcore editing. I do a lot of DVD ripping to .mp4, but again, little editing post rip. I've experienced more disc failures in the standard drive 5400 rpm class than in any other speeds, regardless of brands.

What I am trying to discern is the properly sized swap file when using all SSD and having maxed out RAM. There are all kinds of opinions in every direction imaginable. So far, in experimentation of my usage patterns, having no swap file has given me the best overall performance while allowing Windows to manage it had created one annoying issue wherein the drive will stall and freeze for about 60 seconds once or twice a day and mostly after several hours of at idle.

Cap - just food for thought:

No matter how much RAM you have, you want the system to be able to use it efficiently. Not having a page file at all forces the operating system to use RAM inefficiently for two reasons:

First, it cannot make pages discardable, even if they have not been accessed or modified in a very long time, which forces the disk cache to be smaller.

Second, it has to reserve physical RAM to back allocations that are very unlikely to ever require it (for example, a private, modifiable file mapping), leading to a case where you can have plenty of free physical RAM and yet allocations are refused to avoid over-committing.

Consider, for example, if a program makes a writable, private memory mapping of a 4 GB file. The operating system has to reserve 4 GB of RAM for this mapping because the program could conceivably modify every byte and there is no place but RAM to store it. So from the start, 4 GB of RAM is basically wasted (it can be used to cache clean disk pages, but that is about it).

You need to have a page file if you want to get the most out of your RAM, even if it is never used. It acts as an insurance policy that allows the operating system to actually use the RAM it has, rather than having to reserve it for possibilities that are extraordinarily unlikely.

The people who designed your operating system’s behavior are not fools. Having a page file gives the operating system more choices, and it will not make bad ones.

There is no point in trying to put a page file in RAM. And if you have lots of RAM, the page file is very unlikely to be used (it just needs to be there), so it does not particularly matter how fast the device it is on is.
 
I thought that 1.5 by 4 sizing rule died with Win 98. Thank you for the discourse, Tig. I will try it again.

This brings up a second technical question. My desktop primary drive ( 500GB SSD 850EVO ) is partitioned as 150gb C: (operating system and programs only; no data files), 300GB L: (rarely used archived files and folders) and a raw 50gb section used by the EVO for higher performance. Should the swap/page file reside on a completely different physical drive or can it reside on the L: partition even though it is the same physical drive as the OS, or, should I have it on a separate physical drive (D drive), which has all my frequently used data files and is accessed all the time (10,000rpm 1TB raptor)?

My system is pretty much a beast, indexing across the board at 7.8 (8 core 4ghz 24gb ram) however I was born a tweaker and am never satisfied until it's sick with efficiency.
 
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One thing you'll learn with W10 - if you tweak, it will be weak. MS doesn't like being told what to do. It is better if you let MS handle the page file.

It used to be if you set the Page file, it was better to set it to a different drive (to increase throughput on the primary drive) - but I don't believe that's true anymore. Keep in mind that logical drives won't make a difference as the read/writes have to get in line and go through the same cables.

If you're intent on moving it to a separate drive, then I would also move it to a separate controller.

I wonder if the stall or freeze is due to a sleeping system / drive?
 
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Still using 7 on the office machine. Should the swap file be on a non-SSD drive? Seems the extra on-going read/writes will shorten the drive life, yes?

Sleeping drive? Shazaam. I don't have any newer "green drives" but it bears a thorough look-see.
 
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