Joined: 12th Dec, 2008 Posts: 11773 Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
Right. Drive came today. Drive model is the Corsair X32 Extreme series. I paid £116 delivered. They're really hard to track down tbh.
I posted a pic of the box earlier. Kinda dissapointing for something so expensive. No documentation, no manual, no stickers and no screws. You can tell Corsair are cutting it fine to keep costs down. Any way, I tried to use Drive XML or something but it would only detect FAT32 drives. Not sure if there was another version but what the hey, I have Acronis so it was only lazyness preventing me from installing that. It had to be a clone because I only get 3 activations with my Windows license due to it being technet. Either way Acronis worked fine. Scheduled a clone and rebooted. Then you get this -
Cloning took about two minutes, then you get a message to say it was successful.
Then it was time to boot windows. And quick? fuck me this thing is stupid quick. As you can see Win7 has a small footprint. And I have yet to move all of the files for the internet and shit away to other drives.
Corsair have done an excellent guide on stopping the drive writing as much as you can here -
Basically it shows you how to offload any annoying stuff onto a platter drive to stop the SSD writing all the time. Keeping it clutter free and nice and quick.
Did a quick Win7 rating and have gone from 5.7 to 7.1
And some videos. Now bear in mind my PC has fucking awful POST times. Basically because my board has RAID enabled and thus has to check all of my hard drives and hardware (of which there is a lot.)
Before video. With all of my posting bollocks the PC took 1 min 29 secs. And, it was still churning away when I stopped filming.
And the aftermath. From pressing on the power button it now takes 1.02.
Funny because the 27 secs it has shaved all come off of the boot time itself.
Can someone who knows please edit this post and make those videos show properly here? I'm fucked if I know how to do that.
More benchies and comparissons coming later
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Last edited by Cras on Tue Jan 05, 2010 13:48, edited 1 time in total.
No they haven't - some random guy from the Internet called Dave did. Dave is a graphic designer. His nerfing of the page file strikes me as odd, as fast page file read / writes would be a huge advantage of an SSD, I'd have thought. Thinking about it, moving the scratch folder seems kind of strange, too.
Still. I look forward to some benchmarks.
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Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 14:02
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 32624
Grim... wrote:
No they haven't - some random guy from the Internet called Dave did. Dave is a graphic designer. His nerfing of the page file strikes me as odd, as fast page file read / writes would be a huge advantage of an SSD, I'd have thought.
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1, * Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB. * Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 14:05
Esoteric
Joined: 12th Dec, 2008 Posts: 11773 Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
Grim... wrote:
Nemmie wrote:
Your post time is comical.
I thought that - what's it doing? Does is check all the RAM or something odd?
It checks everything and posts it to the LCD 'poster'.
DRAM, CPU, NVRAM, VRAM USB you name it. Then of course there's a matter of getting through the Raid bios which has 5 drives to check.
And if you do a 'hold power button in' shutdown? Itll refuse to boot until you depower the PSU for about 10 secs and plug it all in. It's just safety features tbh. Especially with the over clocking options it has.
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Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 14:32
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 32624
Indeed, my own research has just come to the same conclusion. Still, though. How often do you write loads of stuff to the Windows partition? Not often. The real-world performance drop of these SSDs isn't that significant.
Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 14:47
Esoteric
Joined: 12th Dec, 2008 Posts: 11773 Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
Thanks for embedding the vids Craster. Appreciate it..
Also, watching over those videos again I wanted to point something out. The test on bootup was just to get to the desktop. In the raptor video (before) the PC wasn't what I would call ready to use. However, I didn't want to run the camera any more due to file size and uploads. With the SSD however? about a second after I stopped the video the activity light for the hdd went out.
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Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 14:50
Sitting balls-back folder
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 10135
Gah, want - and not just for performance, but also to extend the life of the shitty battery in my Lenovo - extended life ones cost way over £100, so while the display is the biggest factor, this is a cheaper way to get some of the benefits.
Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 14:58
Esoteric
Joined: 12th Dec, 2008 Posts: 11773 Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Indeed, my own research has just come to the same conclusion. Still, though. How often do you write loads of stuff to the Windows partition? Not often. The real-world performance drop of these SSDs isn't that significant.
TBH Doc I doubt I will bugger around using that guide of theirs. I thought about it earlier and the only real concern to me was temporary internet files and cache etc. Thing is I run a disk cleanup once a week any way and delete it all. So it doesn't matter if it's on the SSD or somewhere else.
Must say the Raptor was a waste of cash. It's crap tbh. It was only scoring 5.7 in Win7 and isn't anywhere near as fast as a good modern SATA 2 drive. Ah well, it'll be a good thing to have in an external case for backup files and Acronis images
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Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 15:14
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 32624
No, but if you're just browsing it shouldn't be accessing the drive unless it's extremely RAM-starved. Start | run | perfmon and put some of the disk counters on, to see if the drive is really being accessed. You can then attach those counters per process and figure out what's doing it.
Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 16:51
Esoteric
Joined: 12th Dec, 2008 Posts: 11773 Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
Same test on an empty 250gb SATA300 Baracuda.
So basically the SSD can read twice as fast. Write seems dissapointing. Only thing I can put it down to is running the benchmark on a drive with Windows on. I ran the test on the raptor with it booting windows and not booting windows and it wrote much faster when not running windows. Odd.
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Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 18:12
Sitting balls-back folder
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 10135
Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
No, but if you're just browsing it shouldn't be accessing the drive unless it's extremely RAM-starved. Start | run | perfmon and put some of the disk counters on, to see if the drive is really being accessed. You can then attach those counters per process and figure out what's doing it.
It'll be adding to, updating, comparing attributes with, or reading from the cache. So unless the OS (or the drive controller) were to extremely aggressively hold things off and read ahead from disk, it'll be accessed.
Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 19:35
Esoteric
Joined: 12th Dec, 2008 Posts: 11773 Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
OK well I think I have reduced the shit write speeds down to a few variables.
1. It could be that I didn't do a fresh install and Win7 sets up for an SSD when you install it. I cloned it from a mechanical drive and cluster size etc is apparently important.
2. I am using a 32bit OS. This could have an impact.
3. Those write speeds may only apply to Linux.
4. The benchmark app is being weird.
5. My bios could be having an effect. I hear that some people get half the speeds I do.
I'm not bothered. I didn't buy it to write to and the 32X drive does 200mbps max. I'm like 200k short of that which is bloody fast.
So all happy campers here
_________________ I reject your context and reality, and substitute my own.
Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 20:42
Esoteric
Joined: 12th Dec, 2008 Posts: 11773 Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
Craster wrote:
I would suggest that you really shouldn't have done a clone.
Yeah I know. Sadly I only have three Windows activations per license. So I'm reluctant to do a fresh install. Not only that it takes about three days all told to get everything back to normal. If the speed increases were minimal I would do it but they're huge.
If I knew whether a clone counts as an activation that would help.
_________________ I reject your context and reality, and substitute my own.
Post subject: Re: Corsair X32 SSD initial impressions
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 21:31
Gogmagog
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 48819 Location: Cheshire
Do you think, maybe, and I'm not at all trying to be funny here, but the time spent making it work is massively greater than the time saved when doing stuff, for the lifetime use of the disk?
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