SSD Drives

[STE\/E]

Question, I'm thinking of getting a new Laptop & am wondering if getting SSD Drives are worth the cost for just running BOINC ??? Also among the Crucial or the Intel SSD Drives which would be better if I went with SSD Drives ... Thanks

[nanoprobe]

Question, I'm thinking of getting a new Laptop & am wondering if getting SSD Drives are worth the cost for just running BOINC ??? Also among the Crucial or the Intel SSD Drives which would be better if I went with SSD Drives ... Thanks

FWIW I use SSD drives on all my crunchers. I've had very good success with Intel. I look for those on sale. I also have OCZ drives. They have been good but I have had 2 fail over the years. They were replaced under warranty and the replacements have been rock solid.

[STE\/E]

I know the SSD Drives are good Drives, I just want to know if their really worth the added Cost v Performance you might get when running BOINC ... I don't Stream Media or play games (Carpel Tunnel Syndrome prevents that) so the only benefit I might see would be running BOINC but is the cost justified for the SSD Drives over SATA 2 or 3 Drives ...

[nanoprobe]

I know the SSD Drives are good Drives, I just want to know if their really worth the added Cost v Performance you might get when running BOINC ... I don't Stream Media or play games (Carpel Tunnel Syndrome prevents that) so the only benefit I might see would be running BOINC but is the cost justified for the SSD Drives over SATA 2 or 3 Drives ...
I use them because they use way less power and generate no heat. With the cost per gig trending lower and lower you'll have to decide if it's worth it. For machines that strictly crunch there is probably little to no advantage in running SSDs other than the 2 I mentioned earlier. I only use 32-40GB SSDs for crunchers so the cost is acceptable.

[Fire$torm]

In regards to BOINC credits, I believe the the speed advantage of SSDs would be very hard to measure/quantify. The one measurable benefit for someone with multiple machines like you would be the reduced power consumption. So the question becomes, does the cost of upgrading to SSDs justify the reduction of your monthly electric bill? You would be able to offset the upgrades by selling your mechanical drives (After using a data scrubber like Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://www.dban.org/)).

Note that the SSD makers are pushing a new version of SSD tech, TLC NAND chips, to reduce cost. But, it does so by sacrificing longevity. IMO, TLC is a waste of money.

Good MLC NAND SSDs
Samsung Pro 840 series (The non-Pro version uses TLC)
OCZ Vector, Vortex 4 & Agility 4 series (note: 64GB drives are slower then the higher capacity units)
Intel 520, 330 series (Not sure of the 320 series)

[STE\/E]

I'm not looking to Upgrade my entire Pharm with SSD Drives, it simply wouldn't be worth it. If I was going to do that I would have done it while rebuilding them not wait until after their all rebuilt. I just thought about them if I got a new Laptop I'd maybe give them a try, but if there's no real advantage other than I might save a dime in electricity then their not worth it for the Laptop either especially when I would have to pay $100+ to drop from a 750 SATA3 Drive to a 60gb SSD Drive ...

[Draconian]

I'm not looking to Upgrade my entire Pharm with SSD Drives, it simply wouldn't be worth it. If I was going to do that I would have done it while rebuilding them not wait until after their all rebuilt. I just thought about them if I got a new Laptop I'd maybe give them a try, but if there's no real advantage other than I might save a dime in electricity then their not worth it for the Laptop either especially when I would have to pay $100+ to drop from a 750 SATA3 Drive to a 60gb SSD Drive ...

My laptop came with 2 SSD drives in a raid 0 config. Boots great and opens programs very fast - but once data is in RAM, no real performance improvement. For BOINC, guess there would be some value IF the application were accessing the drive all the time. Should be able to open performance monitor and see if it's a bottleneck for you. With my laptop - most GPU/CPU BOINC tasks will run it into pretty high heat levels if they are run 100% of the time on all the cores - so can't run it full tilt anyway which may negate any potential benefit of SSD and BOINC. Runs games and everything else perfectly though - of course, they don't redline the CPU and GPU and keep them there.

I have an SSD on my desktop and see more potential benefit from that - I can redline the desktop all I want. Currently running 5 on 5 Poem, and really doesn't appear to access the disk much though anyway. IMO, SSD is very nice, but, performance improvements are fairly small once the system is up and the application is running - SSD will get the data INTO RAM faster - after that....meh... An application that is accessing the disk a LOT will notice an improvement if it is to the point where a standard harddrive is a bottleneck.

Your call and your money. If you have a LOT of disk access, sure - but if it's a system that is booted and just crunches away and doesn't have a ton of disk access, I think the performance improvement is minimal given the cost.