Solid State Drives


RGWhite
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  • 7 months later...

Installed a solid state drive a few days ago..........oddly, everything on the system seem quite a bit faster.......except Chief Arch.

Seem to start and run exactly the same..........in fact it actually seem a bit slower, but I don't see how that would even be possible.

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To get the maximum performance from an SSD it must be setup as your primary boot drive with the operating system, programs must be installed on it and your active files must be on it. It will now be your "C" drive. If you have retained your former hard drive it will now be "D" and you would use it for archiving purposes.

 

The SSD only improves program/file read/write operations. Once your program and file is loaded into Ram then the SSD does not have much impact, It would only provide a benefit if you have too little Ram which would then necessitate file swapping which should not be an issue if you have 8GB of Ram or more.

 

Graham

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Perry, could do, it just depends on the number of programs running, their RAM requirements and the number of active working files. Checking Task Manager will show RAM usage so you can see how much of the 12 is being used. I know that some video editing software and Photoshop, depending on the working file size, can really eat up RAM. Most other regular programs such as Office including Chief are not overly demanding and 8GB should rarely be exceeded.

 

Graham

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Check out this article.  Explains it pretty good...

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/171432/ram-disks-explained-what-they-are-and-why-you-probably-shouldnt-use-one/

 

Not sure it was mentioned in the article (at least I don't remember reading it), but it seems like using a RAM disk could potentially slow down a lot of other processes on the computer being that part of your RAM is being reserved for the drive.  

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Not sure what the real advantage is with a software Ramdisk. When you boot-up the program still has to be loaded from your other drive into the dedicated memory ram area, this is no different than what happens when you first start a program. I understand that while the program is running in the dedicated memory area it is also saving/backing up the files to your Ram. This would be faster, but I have never sensed any system slowness due to this. Also, if your system crashes or there is a power glitch everything is lost as your working file and it's backups are only in your volatile Ram.

 

Graham

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REALLY GOOD: SSD fast dives without any spinning components. 

 

BAD: Remember to disable and avoid any type of disk defragmentation software, avoid checkdisk. These drives do not care if data is fragmented, however they designed for limited writes, consistently writing data again and again will cause drive to fail. My users burned number of drives that way.

 

VERY BAD: SSD failure almost always renders entire drive unusable. Unlike spinning drives - you lose everything. not just few bad blocks. 

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From my investigations it appears that SSD's have about the same overall reliability as a traditional HDD. Most current SDD's have their own built-in software to manage everything so they are best to be left alone. Newer ones also have management software to address the writing limitations so the same cell is not being constantly written to. However nothing is infallible, "always back-up".

 

Graham

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