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Fynl wrote on 2011-09-07 01:09
So I've been looking to squeeze a little bit more speed out of my computer and I was recommended to buy a SSD drive and use it as a boot drive. Regarding this, I have a few questions:
1) I already have two sata hard drives load with all my stuff. If I buy a new SSD drive, would it be easy (take less than 2 hours or so) to transfer my OS and all that to the drive? Or would I need to do a clean install?
2) Would loading my OS onto the SSD really make a noticeable change in speed? I read somewhere that I had to move a swap file or something to make a huge difference, but I'm not too sure what to do with that.
Also, these questions assume that I get a SSD that's less than $150-200. I mention the price because in the past I've asked people simple questions on computer things and usually they answer by telling me to buy some parts that are thousands of dollars and are unnecessary for me otherwise my computer will never work.
Thanks for the help!
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Osayidan wrote on 2011-09-07 02:24
SSD will help load applications/games faster since there's nearly no seek time, unlike mechanical hard drives. (as long as they're installed onto it of course).
To transfer your OS to it is possible, but not really recommended for simplicity. If you were a more advanced user there's ways to make disc images or clone the disk, but if you'd be comfortable trying that you likely wouldn't need to ask about SSDs. I would suggest a fresh install anyways for added speed, an SSD will help for sure but an old, unclean windows installation doesn't help either.
Also keep in mind that SSDs have a much higher cost per gigabyte than HDD. So transferring your whole "C:" drive to it might not be a good idea.
You'll also need to change some settings in windows to maximize space and performance (windows 7 does some of it automatically) and get in the habit of not saving your files on the desktop or "My Documents" (or remap their locations to other drives).
So a simple step by step procedure I would suggest is:
1) Unplug both your current drives and plug in the SSD (avoid any confusion when deciding where to install, also windows 7 likes to randomly add the "system reserved" partition to other drives for some reason).
2) Install windows as usual
3) Disable hibernation: run command prompt as admin, type "powercfg -h off" (this saves space equal to how much RAM you have, also disables any funny nonsense with SSDs and hibernation).
4) disable indexing on the OS drive: right click on the C: drive in my computer, go to properties, uncheck "allow files on this drive to have contents indexed..." and make sure to apply to all subfolders and files.
5) shut down and plug back in your other drives at this point. You might have trouble since you now have 2 hard drives with windows on it, so go into your BIOS and configure the boot order to include only your SSD as hard drives.
6) Now you can access all your files from both drives as you normally would.
7) Move the page file (swap file you spoke of) off the SSD and onto any one of the other two drives.: right click "my computer" and go to properties, go to advanced system settings -> "advanced" tab -> "settings" button under "performance" subsection -> "advanced" tab again, click "change" under the "virtual memory" section.
Now select your SSD drive (probably "C:") and remove the checkbox on "automatically manage..." and set "no paging file", click set.
Select one of the other drives (hint: create a partition dedicated to the swap file to avoid excess fragmentation, but not required), remove the checkbox again. This time set a custom size by using the correct radio button and in both boxes for initial and maximum, set the number equal or double your RAM (in MB), so 1024 or 2048 for example. I suggest for 3GB or more to have it equal to, and for 2GB or less to have it double. Click set when done, click ok/apply all the way out and restart.
8) While you have access to all your data from the other 2 drives, your apps installed on your old windows drive won't work (unless you boot from that one instead). So you need to reinstall them all. If you have many large apps like games, consider installing the ones that don't need the performance boost of an SSD onto your other hard drives to save that precious solid state space.
All that is assuming you're on windows 7. Very similar for XP and Vista but you should look it all up on google either way. On vista you may need to disable the scheduled defragmentation, and on XP just don't ever run defrag on it.
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Fynl wrote on 2011-09-07 02:47
Haha, thanks. I wouldn't mind making images, but I'm just lazy, so I was looking for something simple.
Anyway, thanks a lot! I appreciate the help :)
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-09-07 02:54
Just so you know, moving the page file off the SSD will reduce performance. You shouldn't do that unless you're in extreme space conservation mode. xd
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Osayidan wrote on 2011-09-07 03:08
Quote from Yoorah;580463:
Just so you know, moving the page file off the SSD will reduce performance. You shouldn't do that unless you're in extreme space conservation mode. xd
Depending on the brand/quality it'll either reduce lifespan or slow it down (or both). Lower end consumer SSDs are a good boost from HDD but nothing special especially if you keep all the stuff on it that typically slows down disk performance.
If you have enough RAM it's a non-issue though and you just have the page file on another disk as a backup in case you somehow use too much RAM (opening 700 tabs on danbooru for example).
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Andy-Buddy wrote on 2011-09-07 03:20
Quote from Yoorah;580463:
Just so you know, moving the page file off the SSD will reduce performance. You shouldn't do that unless you're in extreme space conservation mode. xd
Isn't a page file useless if you have a good amount of RAM?
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Osayidan wrote on 2011-09-07 03:21
Quote from Andy-Buddy;580486:
Isn't a page file useless if you have a good amount of RAM?
If you don't exceed how much RAM you have. I disabled mine since I have 24GB but anywhere under 12GB I'd keep it on with at least 256MB.
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-09-07 03:34
Reducing lifespan is a given, although it shouldn't be an issue unless you write a ton to the SSD already.
As for the performance part, I'm not so sure. Windows will preemptively swap to the page file even if you have a ton of RAM and you're not using all of it. The only way to make it not use the page file is by disabling entirely. :( But that can cause issues, so some people go the RAMdisk route to take care of it. Anyway, I don't see how SSD pagefile would decrease performance. Fragmentation is not an issue. And neither is write throughput saturation. Read throughput is even less of an issue. And really, if you have throughput issues with a SSD, then asking a HDD to do that instead is going to bottleneck things harder. Do you have a better explanation or test data?
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Osayidan wrote on 2011-09-07 03:46
No test data but it makes sense if you think of it as focusing the SSD as much as possible for the apps, and keeping it in overall good health.
If you have the budget for only one SSD, you're going to want to dedicate it as much as possible to running the OS/apps.
If a HDD that's normally running the OS + Apps + page file never gave you problems with a page file on it before, if it now has nothing except stored files + page file it will work slightly faster for the page file, while reducing I/O to the SSD.
Even if the page file wouldn't bottleneck it, page file I/O is random for the whole period while the OS is running, depending on how often it needs to swap that I/O can be pretty frequent. So by moving it off your only SSD you free it of that I/O, which as fast as an SSD might be is still adding latency to other requests for I/O by your apps.
Though the main concern is still writes wearing down the lifespan of the SSD. Unless you're also using the drive to record stuff like fraps or do video editing or all your torrents go to it (strongly advised not to), the page file will be the most write intensive thing on that drive. SSDs love reads, but writes wear them down fairly quick, especially on MLC architectures, and even more so on lower end consumer drives. So unless you know for a fact the SSD you buy is designed with writes in mind, if you have the option to move the page file to another physical disk you probably should.
The writes might not cause your drive to die but they wear down the cells, which over a period of months can slow down reads/writes. I've seen SSDs at that stage and they're worse than HDDs, minus the fragmentation.
It's something you certainly don't need to do, but probably should unless you have a good reason not to. At the very least reduce it to a very small, fixed size, so the wear of those writes is limited to a small area of the physical drive.
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Fynl wrote on 2011-09-07 03:48
Hm, well, I'm aiming for at least 60 GB for a SSD for only Windows 7, MS Office, and browsing, so I don't think space should be a huge issue. I'm also looking into maybe 16 GB for my computer (games and work) and 8 GB for my dad's that I'm building (just work).
I thought that moving the page/swap file was suppose to increase performance (I read that somewhere), but if it doesn't help, might as well not XD. I don't think I've touched it before, so I'm unsure how to proceed with that in terms of where to keep it (if I should keep it at all...)
What kind of issues would I run into with the page file? Also, do you guys have any recommendations to deal with it? :/
EDIT: As for the budget (not sure if that was at me), I was just looking for something that'll get to a usable desktop in Windows 7 faster. Right now, it takes me maybe 2-5 minutes to get from power on to desktop, as well as under 30 seconds to load most programs. If I can cut down the time to get to my desktop faster, I'll be satisfied. If the SSD won't make a difference with that, then I might not even go that route.
EDITEDIT: Also, I don't plan to write much to the SSD. That's what my other satas are going to be for. The SSD is just to, hopefully, quicken up windows a bit.
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-09-07 04:11
60GB is pretty low. x( I think Windows 7 will eat almost half or 1/3 of that just by itself. While I disagree with Osayidan with regards to the page file SSD performance issue, I think you should move it to HDD for the space savings consideration. :P
I don't think you'll run into issues with moving the page file to the HDD. The issues I referred to are when some people disable their page files entirely, as it will cause some software to freak out on you.
And 5 minutes boot time? What? O_o That's terrible and I don't think the HDD is at fault!
Which OS do you have? If you have Windows 7, you can accurately track boot time from the time the Windows logo appears after the BIOS.
Event Viewer > Application and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational
Look for Event ID 100s
For example, mine says:
Windows has started up:
Boot Duration : 41374ms
It's kind of interesting, at least. My comp's running on an ancient, first gen Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz and boots from an HDD.
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Fynl wrote on 2011-09-07 04:23
Quote from Yoorah;580564:
60GB is pretty low. x( I think Windows 7 will eat almost half or 1/3 of that just by itself. While I disagree with Osayidan with regards to the page file SSD performance issue, I think you should move it to HDD for the space savings consideration. :P
I don't think you'll run into issues with moving the page file to the HDD. The issues I referred to are when some people disable their page files entirely, as it will cause some software to freak out on you.
And 5 minutes boot time? What? O_o That's terrible and I don't think the HDD is at fault!
Which OS do you have? If you have Windows 7, you can accurately track boot time from the time the Windows logo appears after the BIOS.
Event Viewer > Application and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational
Look for Event ID 100s
For example, mine says:
Windows has started up:
Boot Duration : 41374ms
It's kind of interesting, at least. My comp's running on an ancient, first gen Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz and boots from an HDD.
Win7 64 bit, and for today, mine says ...just closed it. 51k ms from memory, so it's around there. I timed mine earlier from on button, through dual boot screen, through password screen, to desktop, and it was just shy of 2 mins. I'm not complaining about the speed of mine (my dad's on the other hand takes a good 10-20 mins to start up), it's just that I'm treating myself to an upgrade sometime this month or early next, and I'd like to have a noticeable difference, otherwise I'll feel like it's wasted money :/. I'm keeping all of my games and cad programs on my hard drives, so hopefully that'll conserve space.
Also, while 60 GB is low, considering what's going on it, is it too low? :/
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-09-07 04:47
It's only low in the sense that after installing Windows on it, you'll look at it and think "damn, I just installed Windows and half the space is already gone." :P You'll have around 25~30GB to mess around with as you see fit. And I'd install games and CAD programs that you use often onto the SSD, since using the SSD only for speeding up Windows booting is kinda pointless. I mean, you only turn on the computer once or twice a day, and the SSD will shorten your boot time by maybe 30 seconds? The real value is in stuff like game maps and various software loading quicker, since your computer has to perform those tasks many times a day, as opposed to 1 or 2 boots.. and the occasional system update. :P
As for the general impression of system performance improvement, I'm not really sure. I would guess around 2x faster, but you should Google for benchmarks yourself. Try search keywords like "SSD vs HDD boot time" or w/e.
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Fynl wrote on 2011-09-07 04:58
Quote from Yoorah;580593:
It's only low in the sense that after installing Windows on it, you'll look at it and think "damn, I just installed Windows and half the space is already gone." :P You'll have around 25~30GB to mess around with as you see fit. And I'd install games and CAD programs that you use often onto the SSD, since using the SSD only for speeding up Windows booting is kinda pointless. I mean, you only turn on the computer once or twice a day, and the SSD will shorten your boot time by maybe 30 seconds? The real value is in stuff like game maps and various software loading quicker, since your computer has to perform those tasks many times a day, as opposed to 1 or 2 boots.. and the occasional system update. :P
As for the general impression of system performance improvement, I'm not really sure. I would guess around 2x faster, but you should Google for benchmarks yourself. Try search keywords like "SSD vs HDD boot time" or w/e.
Well, I'm pretty content with how fast my games load, that's why I'm iffy about buying a larger SSD just to do so. I might load solidworks on there just because that'll be my main work program. I'll have to take a look at prices and see how much I'm willing to spend before committing to getting a SSD I suppose. Gotta try to cover two computers with my budget!
Again, thanks for everyone's help!
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Osayidan wrote on 2011-09-07 06:15
An SSD has been compared to giving new life to an old computer.
Clean install of windows + an SSD, on hardware that's a few years old, can be compared to getting a brand new low end system of today (assuming no other hardware components are failing).
So if your goal is to extend the life of your system and it isn't too old, and your RAM is maxed out (32bit) or high enough (64bit), and a graphics card isn't relevant to what you need a performance gain on, then an SSD is your best friend.