Speeding up your graphics computer in 3 letters - SSD

[John Kleiber]

Been having slow HDD access issues with RDWorks, Corel, EZCAD locking up and boot time taking about 2-3 minutes, slowness in application execution in general etc.

Cleaned up as much stuff as possible, memory was already maxed out at 16gb but station still had poor performance.

Based on the HDD access going through the roof and bogging down I figured my hdd was failing.

I dropped by Frys and was going to get a new 1 TB HDD and replace it.

I notice however a whole row of SSD's... aka Solid State Drives which basically interface with my existing HDD controller.

In other words its an overgrown memory stick.

Long story short, I bought a 980 GB SDD for $225.00.

End result, Boot up time about 20 seconds. Application execution darn near instant.

Don't want to buy a new computer, this is a sure fire winner in my book.

-John

[Bill George]

Yup, John I posted about this maybe last summer. I did two of mine the Lenovo's and then one in the Samsung my wife was using. Several others on here did the same. Its like a miracle for older computers, it also helps to upgrade the system memory.

[Tim Bateson]

I hate waiting... for anything & this was a great solution for me last year. Note - SSD speed does relate to price.. for the most part. The higher end SSD run much faster than the bargain basement variety. Also needs to to be plugged into the Primary drive not secondary. This too makes a massive difference.

[Mike Audleman]

There are two main form factors for SSD (there are others but there are two commonly available). Those who adapt to the SATA bus and those who operate on the M.2 bus.

Depending on your SATA bus architecture, you are going to hit the bandwidth limit of the bus long before the drive chokes. SATA2 tops out at a theoretical 300mb/s while SATA3 tops out at 600mb/s. However its almost impossible to reach those speeds based on the chipsets and lanes configured for them. Even on a good SATA3 system, common read speeds are only around 450 to 500mb/s and even slower write speeds. So it really doesn't matter if your SSD says it can read at 2gb/s, the bus can't transfer it that fast. Its kinda like buying a Lamborghini to commute to work in Atlanta. Completely pointless but cool factor is high. So paying for extreme specs on a SSD thats SATA bus protocol is pouring money down the drain.

However the newer bus intended specifically for SSD and VERY fast SSD is the M.2 bus. This bus is intended directly for SSDs. Most have 2 lanes but many have 4 now for the M.2 PCIe interface. This puts speeds easily into the 3 to 4gb/s. The drive I chose for my new system makes use of the PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth and is capable of 3.5gb/s read and a whopping 2.1gb/s write (Samsung 960Pro 500gb). HDD speed is only one small aspect of overall system performance though. RAM and CPU are also prime factors on system performance. Having a fast SSD only alleviates one bottleneck. The motherboard must also provide sufficient data lanes to consume the data and a sufficiently fast CPU and RAM components to be able to utilize it. The new system will be built up from an Asus Sabretooth motherboard which uses the X99 LGA2011-3 architecture, a 3ghz 10 core i7 CPU and 64g of DDR 3000 Corsair RAM. The reason behind this motherboard choice is it allocates a full 4 PCIe lanes to the M.2 slot and are not shared for other data channels like on other motherboards.

So, if you have an M.2 slot on your system, don't buy an SSD for the SATA bus. Plonk down a few extra dollars on the M.2 drive and gain a REAL WORLD 4x to 5x performance over a comparable priced SATA SSD drive. If you don't have a M.2 slot then SATA is your best option. Don't bother shopping for a drive faster than 600mb/s read. Its pointless.

For bulk storage I use WD Caviar Black edition (2x 4tb) and WD Caviar Blue edition (2x 1tb). However the OS, temp files and swap memory are all housed on the SSD.