Computer newbies forum: SSD and HHD Basic Setup

Thanks for this great information!
I was wondering, how is the speed (read) effected loading the apps on the SSD vs the HHD?
Thanks!

Others here will be able to tell you better with their technical knowledge, so I will just say what my layman mind understands.

SSD is not a spinning disk at all. I understand that there are now SSD/spinning disk 'hybrids', (example explanation here), but from your post I'm assuming this is a separate SSD with a separate hdd, (spinning disk drive).

SSD is really just a collection of memory chips like a computer's RAM. RAM is so much quicker than hdd access because there are no moving parts. As I understand it, we are talking multiples of 10 faster over spinning disks.

The immediate effect is boot up time. From over one minute to 2 or 3 minutes with an hdd, to 30-45 seconds with SSD.

But after boot, writing to an SSD and reading from one is faster because the microchip at the heart of the OS doesn't have to wait for the hdd to get to the right position to write/read data. We're talking milliseconds here for a hdd so we humans can't really tell, but cumulatively I am assuming the SSD is noticeably faster when loading applications and when writing data to it or reading data from it.

That is how I understand it, but like I said, others here may have better ideas.

Hope it helps.

Mark

Thank you for your time and help Mark! Great info

I wouldn't be amazed at all if the time after the BIOS did what it needs to do (that is, from starting Windows) to the welcome screen is 10 seconds and the time from clicking on your name (and entering your password if you have one) to a working desktop is 5 seconds when all programs are on the SSD.

Quite nice, having an SSD. Sorry to note that Mark was somewhat too early buying one and had such serious problems that he doesn't use it any more. Mine is still fine after 1.5 years.

Kees

My own situation was a couple of years ago.

I got myself an Alienware Area 51X with an experimental setup, two 160GB SSDs in RAID 0 format, (giving me 320 GB), with a couple of 1 TB hdds.

But this was running Vista which doesn't have the TRIM controls that Win 7 has and the SSDs were still experimental then and subject to failing regularly because of the way they then deleted files. I changed my setup by removing the SSDs and using normal hdds.

I assume that all that is sorted now, as shown by what Kees says with his system, still working after a good year and a half.

It would be interesting to know if Kees' system has specific controllers on his board for the SSDs, or if he is relying solely on the TRIM commands to manage the SSDs.

Mark

Hi Mark,

It's a 60 GB KINGSTON SNVP325 S2 64GB ATA Device. Device Manager says that it has just the standard Microsoft drivers. I installed Windows 7 myself, and there was no driver disk coming with the PC when it came from the shop.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139108 has some details.

I'm doing nothing special (except: not defrag!) with it. I hope those TRIM everybody mentions are automatic.
However, because of the limited number of writes available on such a disk I chose to have the browsers cache on my hdd. I don't think it influences my browsing speed.

Kees

So limited write is still a problem then?

Let me know when the disk fails!

You may be interested in this;

How To check if SSD and TRIM have all windows 7 functions working?.

It's all Greek to me!

Mark