ssd drive vs conventional one

[happybunny]

see http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=152298 for history...

I am still somewhat happy with my netbook, although I have a Lenovo X61 from work (with XP) that I just love and since the netbook was purchase for travel, I don't use it as much as I use the x61.

But I am preparing for a trip soon and have been trying to get the netbook to boot faster.

Default Ubuntu 9.04 was taking about 1m 40s from off to a usable web site.

Many tweaks later using the default hardware still, I get boots on average of 1m 10s or so.

I have tried fluxbox and xfce4, but shave maybe 10s off on a good boot, but am then in a much more limited DE, so I don't see the 10s being a good reason to limit myself.

Using bootchart, it reports a boot time of ~30 so I really do believe it is gnome/X that is taking the longest time.

Anyway...I finally broke down and got an ssd drive from Newegg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227451).

I dd'd the old hdd to the new ssd and guess what? Absolutely no change what so ever to the boot times.

The ssd drive (although silent) has not gained me any speed at boot up. My average boot times are still 1m+.

Also, I ran a battery test last night (wrote time out to a file every minute and ran totem none stop until the battery died) and I got 2 hours of life out of the 3 cell battery.

This is about the same battery life I was getting with the traditional hdd.

In conclusion:

As it stands now, the ssd drive has gained me nothing but silence, but at the cost of 100gigs (hdd = 160gig vs ssd = 60g)...

no improvement to battery life

no improvement to boot times

The system does *seem* a little more responsive when the OS is finally up, but again, at what cost?



Anyone else experience similar disappointment with an ssd purchase?

[con]

Thats pretty much my experience too with laptops... Desktops get really fast, but I've yet to see a laptop get superfast like a Desktop computer.

At work I've got a desktop with ubuntu 9.04 and OCZ SSD, boots in 20 secs from push powerbutton to usable desktop. I'm quite sure the 10 second boot youtube video that was rolling round the net is fake.

[saikee]

I beg to differ.

There areis a wide range of ssd available and you only get fast response by opting for the fast read/write units. I got a Adata S592 series 128Gb which can do maximum 230Mb/s read and 170Mb/s write. Haven't tried it with Linux but the Vista boot time was definitely faster, as reported here (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=152733)
The boot up speed of my HP laptop Vista has been improved from 1 min 22 sec with a 5400 rpm hard disk to 55 sec with the AData SSD..

SSD excels in random read so clicking photos is possibly the best way to see how fast it works.

[mrrangerman43]

Why is it people are so concerned about boot time, now if your system took 10min to boot then yes that may be a problem. Your system most likely takes about the first 30 seconds doing the POST, take another 5 to 15 seconds for your boot loader pause time, unless you watched so you could hit enter to bypass the wait. And even if you did that you maybe took 2 sec. So now your 1m 40s is more like 1m 10s to 1m 8s because you can't worry about the POST because your HD has nothing to do with that. So the ssd hd has given you maybe only 10s less wait time before you can go to work,
The system does *seem* a little more responsive when the OS is finally up, but again, at what cost?
but if it is faster than what your other HD was for loading programs, then you've gained a lot more than you think.
Isn't it more important the time the drive saves you in actual work/play time than boot time? If you make lets say $15.00 an hr your time is worth a little less than 1/2 cent per sec so just in boot time that HD has saved you 5cents each time you boot. Now figure in the course of the day the new HD saves you 5min, that's $1.50 a day of savings, that's $10.50 in one week and $546.00 give or take a few dollars in one year the drive saved of your time.
So how much did you pay for that drive? I just looked on newegg and you can get a Kingston 128gb ssd drive for about $284.00 what should really erk you is, you tried to save money by only getting the 60gb drive you gave up 100gb of storage when a drive like the Kingston 128gb would have made you about $262.00 worth of savings in the first year and you would have lost only 32gb of storage space. ;)

[happybunny]

All good points for sure and you aren't the first to question why boot times are a concern.

I guess I'm just extremely disappointed in the technology.

Saikee: the new drive spec's *should* be impressive:
Sequential Access - Read 220MB/s(max)
Sequential Access - Write 120MB/s(max)

But it doesn't seem like this new drive is any faster at all at boot or during normal operations, even viewing pictures wasn't notably better.

So I spent $120 to reduce the disk capacity and now I feel bad for spending the money and haven't gained anything.

I am going to use this netbook with the ssd drive for a week or 2 and then go back to the hdd...sometimes I only notice how slow things are AFTER I've been on a faster machine.

Then I'll decide if it's worth the loss of 100gigs of free space.

[saikee]

For the sake of interest in SSD I finally pulled the SSD from my latop and replaced it with a normal mechanical hard disk. This enables me to use the SSD for Linux.

I dropped it into a USB/eSata docking station, removed the internal hard disk of a desktop PC so that I could boot the SSD as a eSata disk and installed Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5 in it. For comparison purpose I also installed the same distro into a normal internal hard disk. The booting time of the two are

For normal hard disk - 40 seconds

For SSD - between 28 to 30 seconds

I booted only one of them at any one time. The booting time includes selection a user name and the typing of the password.

My experience with the SSD is it does work a bit faster. The SSD unit consumes very small amount of current relatively to the normal hard disk and is virtually shock proof. Thus it will be good for laptops which do get vibrations and shocks in service. In Linux I don't know if the journalling system may wear the solid state parts down.

[JohnT]

Optimizing your kernel for your machine/setup can also make your boot-time a little more impressive. Shaving the stock kernel can significantly reduce the time.Turn off unneeded services.
Then again I run Slackware.;)

[saikee]

JohnT ,

Just think of what SSD can do to your slimmed down Slackware.

[JohnT]

"Ask not what SSD can do for Slackware, but rather what can Slackware do for SSD".
J.R."Bob" Dobbs-Church of the SubGenius

[Quake3DeathGod]

Now dare I say this, but have you heard of micro Xp? Dell, Core2duo, boots in about 9 seconds, older inspiron, P4, 2.8Ghz, boots in 20+ seconds.... Actually I have a POS via c3 that boots it in under 30 seconds. All normal hardrives, no SSD. Just thinking out loud......

You do have to tweak some boot options, quick post, boot to hdd first instead of cdrom, ect. I'm sure you've already done all that with trying for speed though.

[saikee]

Quake3DeathGod,

There are a few small Linux distros that boots extremelyexceptionally fast. Never recorded the speeds because they are stripped down. Some even do away with the desktop.

My information was just for comparing the response of two different media with a like to like identical Linux installation. In fact I cloned the installed Linux image directly from the SSD to the hard disk.

[Quake3DeathGod]

I gotcha, apples to apples....

[loopback48]

Anyway you cut it, SSD is the coming thing. I would venture to say they'll overshadow SATA drives very soon. I imagine the same argument was made between AGP v PCI-E graphics cards. There is not that much difference for the average user. Hell, as far as I'm concerned, the integrated chip would do nicely for most users. For others, like gamers, probably no. (Gamers are an odd breed. They have special needs.) Plus the boot-up time mentioned is not all that much to be concerned about. At least for me.

BlueRay optical drives v CD/DVD drives? I don't know of a single friend that has gone over to BlueRay. But one of these days that will be the only drive available. Same with SSD. It's only a matter of time. Time and computers march on. Nothing to stop them.