Using SSD for OS Question

Hey there,

Do you think the following setup would significantly enhance performance and reduce energy consumption?

I currently partition my 640GB HD so Windows 7 runs on about 90GB of it, and the rest is reserved for file storage. I currently use about 30GB of the OS partition for storage.

I was thinking of setting up a SSD for the OS, and then using the entire disk HD as file storage. I was thinking of getting an Intel 128 GB or so SSD.

1. Would this significantly reduce power consumption, and to what degree?

2. Would this significantly enhance performance, and to what degree?

Thanks,
James

 

Well, you told us nothing about your computer (PC or notebook, CPU, RAM, graphics solution, etc.) so we have no idea if any performance improvement will be significant or not. But in any case, since most performance issues are determined by processing power, as opposed to disk reads and writes, performance gains with only the OS on the SSD will mostly be "on paper" or in synthetic benchmarks - such as Windows Experience Index scores. The system will boot faster, but after that most OS functions are in the background anyway.

Power consumption would likely go up, not down because you are not replacing the HD, but adding more hardware.

If you want to truly improve both, you need to replace your HD with a SSD, then run the OS and all your major applications from the SSD.

 

Greetings, MJames23...

I read a Maximum PC article recently that compared SSDs with IDEs and SATAs, and the concensus was that the SSD has not yet reached a level of performance/reliability to justify the cost...in fact, some of the quicker SATAs consistently benchmarked better than most of the SSDs tested...

IMO, the SSD is promising for the future, but for now, I'd stick with SATA...

 

MA, it was in a hardcopy I read in Books-A-Million a couple of months ago while waiting for my wife, probably September/October...I'll see if I can dig up an online version...

 

I think SSDs are great for notebooks where battery run time is important. For a PC with decent drives and lots of RAM, the benifits are not so clear - unless you can afford the best. I have been considering a small one to put my Page File on.

A good read: AnandTech - Intel X25-M SSD

 

Neither of these online blurbs go into depth like the hardcopy article did, but they seem to be drifting the same way...

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/are_ssds_all_that_and_a_bag_chips

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/flash_flood

 

From what I have read on Tom's hardware.com, SSD power consumption in most cases is the same or higher than normal HDDs when working, but it obviously drops to close to 0 when it is not working. There are also problems with fragmentation with SSDs at the moment, but Intel are countering that in their drives.

Sources: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-x25-m-firmware,review-31715.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-x25-m-vertex,review-31671.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-performance-power,review-31565.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-x25-e-ssd,review-31524.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-hdd-flash,review-31500.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-x25-m-SSD,review-31316.html