Fuel Injection For Your Computer

[Jack H.]

I gave my desktop a Christmas present in the form of an Intel X-25 solid state disk to replace my SATA, rotating platter, HDD. MAN, I need to equip my office desk chair with a set of seat belts now!!!

This all started when I saw a holiday special deal on a Blu Ray drive to replace my DVD drive. It should have delivered a 2-4X speed increase for doing system backups, but ran about the same elapsed time with the new Blu Ray drive as it did with the older DVD drive. This peaked my curiousity...why?

Using various Microsoft utilities, I found the lion's share of my CPU was 'stuck' in the System Idle task during the backup task. Hum, while rotating disks ARE fast today, there's still a 7 mSec average latency time for the R/W head to seek and begin the read/write process. Run a quickie calculation...

Suppose the backup job entails 1,000,000 file fetch actions. At 7 mSec per fetch, that works out to 1.9 HOURS of the system sitting on its arse waiting on the HDD!

So, having a chat with Rob Musquetier, I discovered Intel's rather new product line of flash memory based 1.8-inch/2.5-inch solid state disk drives and did some searches of various comparison test reviews. Wow!

Rather cost effective (about $200 for an 80 GB drive and $400+ for a 160 GB drive) with a performance break through in multi-layer NAND gate flash memory construction. Bottom line, these drives ROAR with almost NO latency and I/O rates for read/write operations that rival today's top drawer HDD's using rotating magnetic memory platters.

I bought one, did the upgrade and my computer runs FAST! How fast? Well, I used to push the power button and go get a cup of coffee while the system started and Windows loaded. It took 5-7 minutes for Windows to come up with ALL of its supporting tasks loaded and operational.

Now, I turn the system on and she's up in about 30 seconds!!! I suspect it'd be faster if there weren't certain tasks (anti-virus/firewall) that have to crawl out through the communication link to check with 'mother' over the internet to complete their load/start...

About my Blu Ray disk drive and the system backup task that took so long? Once the Intel SSD was installed, my backup time decreased significantly but still didn't 'push' the read/write specs of the Blu Ray drive.

Another inspection with Microsoft's Process Explorer and the 'second' bottleneck was revealed! Another task (my system firewall + anti-virus code) was hogging as much system run time as the Blu Ray drive.

I hit the OFF button on my cable modem, and temporarily killed my AV + firewall tasks. When I re-ran my backup job, it ROARED climbing right up to the Blu Ray drive's specified I/O rates...

Bottom line, if you're thinking about upgrading your computer, my conclusion is a new motherboard, faster processor, more/faster memory, Etc. is pretty much a waste of time/$$$. I'll bet you aren't really pushing the hardware you have currently due to the technical constraints of your existing HDD and your best 'bang' for the buck is replacing the HDD with a SSD...

[David D.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

High 'Sytem States' are killers for performance! Using your system is a constant tuning process between procesor, I/O and memory. A lot like fuel, ignition and gear ratios.

[Duke W.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Bottom line, if you're thinking about upgrading your computer, my conclusion is a new motherboard, faster processor, more/faster memory, Etc. is pretty much a waste of time/$$$. I'll bet you aren't really pushing the hardware you have currently due to the technical constraints of your existing HDD and your best 'bang' for the buck is replacing the HDD with a SSD...

I agree. Most personal computing tasks are I/O bound, but guys focus on processor speeds. I expect that within a few years most PCs, especially laptops, will have solid state storage devices instead of HDDs. This will significantly speed up most personal computing tasks and eliminate the least reliable critical component on a personal computer - the HDD.

Duke

[Patrick H.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Jack,

What processor do you have?

My system is 3 1/2y old and I've been looking at new ones as my HD's are giving signs of nearing their life's end. Unfortunately even a 250GB solid state HD is quite expensive at this time, and I've used over 200 of my current 250GB. Add in the fact that I run them as RAID1 so I'd need 2 of them and it really gets expensive.

Maybe I'll cross my fingers and watch for sales.

Patrick

[Michael H.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

I gave my desktop a Christmas present in the form of an Intel X-25 solid state disk to replace my SATA, rotating platter, HDD. ...

Thanks Jack. Very interesting. Can a new SSD be installed in any computer, such as one that is 3 or 4 years old? What else, if anything, would be required?
I know just enough about the components inside my computer to get me into deep trouble.

[Russ U.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Yep - moving to a faster disk system can really perk up a slow computer. I do a ton of medium duty digital work (scanning, photoshop, lightroom and digital video editing), and have zero tolerance for computer related delays. So I really pay attention to computer speed related issues.

A number of things can cause a speed related bottleneck. The big 3 culprits (in order of importance):

1. Not enough memory
2. Slow hard drive
3. Slow processor

Computer makers usually tend to balance out a system. The most expensive computers have lots of memory, a fast hard drive, and a fast processor. A cheap system has just the opposite. Adding more memory is the best way to perk up your computer typically. The speed improvements can be dramatic.

I'm a bit surprised that SSD created a huge improvement in speed for Jack's computer. On the Apple side of the planet, SSD looks to be very good but not a great improvement in the disk area. I think the SSDs are just in laptops, but I don't know that for sure.

If you want real top end speed from your disks, go with a RAID setup (which is creating one disk out of multiple disks) with plenty of drive capacity. Smoking fast. But all that speed is wasted if you have insufficient memory or a slow processor.

My system:

2 TB RAID disk setup (with a matching 2TB RAID backup disk)
10GB memory
2 quad-core Intel Xeon processors

And yes, I am primarily responsible for 70% of man-made global warming between my cars and computers.

Russ

[Dick W.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Thanks Jack. Very interesting. Can a new SSD be installed in any computer, such as one that is 3 or 4 years old? What else, if anything, would be required?
I know just enough about the components inside my computer to get me into deep trouble.

Michael

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167005

[Michael H.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Michael

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167005

Thanks Dick. I'm impressed. This may be in my near future.

My computer has been running non stop for about 4 years now and it's probably getting near time for the HHD to fail. I would sure hate to loose all the info and pic's. This new gizmo may be a great replacement.

[Dick W.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

I strongly suggest that you either invest in a stand alone hard drive, or a subscription service such as Carbonite, to back up all your data.

[Michael H.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

I strongly suggest that you either invest in a stand alone hard drive, or a subscription service such as Carbonite, to back up all your data.

I'm having 2nd thoughts now. If I replace my hard drive, something else could fizzle next month.
If I just buy a new computer, that would eliminate that problem and the included HDD would be good for at least several years.

Or... if I buy the fancy HDD, I could copy the files on my current puter to it. Then if my old puter dies, I could just add the new HDD to a new puter.

Decisions decisions...........

[Duke W.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Get a network controller with provision for a HDD on a USB port. Use the network drive to back up all your critical files - stuff you've created or downloaded and all your email. Some DSL modems have network contollers built in. You only turn on the network drive when you need to read or write to it, so they should last virtually forever. I think my hard wire/wireless network controller was about 40 bucks.

If the computer's HDD pukes, you just reload the OS on a new drive, bring all your files down from the network drive, run the installation files to load all the third party software, and you should be back to where you were. Buy a spare HDD for the computer, load the OS, and you're halfway there to recovering from a drive failure.

My desktop is ten years old and the laptop if five. But both have been upgraded with memory and bigger drives, and I plan on running them both until the processors or motherboards die.

So now I'm going back to my project of installing a turbocharger on my PCs exhaust vent.

Duke

[Russ U.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

If your computer is 4 years or older and seems slow, you probably should consider getting a new computer. Putting in more memory or a faster disk will speed things up a bit. But you will still have plenty of other bottlenecks to deal with. You are better off investing in a new and much faster computer running the most current operating system.

And anybody considering a new computer should seriously consider buying an Apple rather than a PC. I use an Apple at home and a PC at work. I find the Apple to be much easier and more enjoyable to use. My Apple is virus free, and backs itself up automatically every hour. I have not tried the newest MS operating system, however, which I hear is a huge improvement over VISTA. Nevertheless, after running PCs and Macs side by side for years, I am a huge Mac fan.

Russ

[Terry M.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Anything, even a chisel on stone, would be an improvement over VISTA.

[Clem Z.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Anything, even a chisel on stone, would be an improvement over VISTA.

windows 7 is just vista cleaned up. i have vista on my laptop and have had no problems other than all the safety features built in to keep you from screwing things up and getting pissed at microsoft.

[Donald O.]

Re: Fuel Injection For Your Computer

Santa brought Mrs Claus an ASUS netbook with Window 7. This thing screams in speed. makes it much faster for Santa to type Corvette