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Thursday, February 11, 2010
Farewell, moving parts!
12:41 PM / Technology / 
14 Comments
What's the biggest bottleneck in your system? I'm willing to stake money on it being your hard drive. It's a curious fact that, while the performance of CPUs, memory, graphics cards etc. skyrocket every year, the trusty old mechanical disc has not changed much in the last decade. If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, run the Window Experience Index and you'll almost certainly find that the lowest overall score will go to either the video card or the primary hard drive.
(The WEI rates the performance of your main components on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9, with the overall system score being determined by the slowest component. For instance, if you have a graphics card that ranks at 3.0 but a processor that delivers a score of 7.2, your base score will still only be 3.0.)
If you're not a gamer or doing serious graphics/video work, a weak graphics card is unlikely to be a major issue. However, everyone, regardless of whether they use their computer for playing Mass Effect 2 (which, incidentally, is excellent) or simply typing Word documents, will be familiar with the grind that comes when the hard drive gets bogged down and the whole system slows to a crawl while the other components wait for it to catch up with them. Generally, we just put up with it as one of the inescapable facts of life. Well, not any more. I've seen the future, and the future is solid state drives (SSD).
Think of an SSD as a super fast hard drive with no mechanical parts. It's smaller, lighter, consumes less power, is more durable and lasts longer. What's the catch? Well, the price. SSD technology is still in a relatively infant state, and the largest capacity mechanical HDD will tend to cost about the same as the smallest SSD. Case in point: this week, my brother bought a 2 terabyte HDD and it cost him roughly the same as the 80 GB SSD I picked up at around the same time. To be fair, though, I did go for an Intel X25-M, which is just about the fastest (and among the most expensive, in terms of its ratio of space to cost) available. I knew I was going to be using this as my boot drive and storing all the most important and frequently accessed software on it (the operating system, cache, and the programs I use on a daily basis), so it made sense not to skimp. If I wasn't concerned about eking as much speed as possible out of the thing, I'd have stuck with my old mechanical boot drive.
As a result, my primary drive has gone from being the slowest component in my system to the fastest:
This was particularly true when I set my SATA devices to operate in AHCI mode as opposed to the old legacy IDE emulation mode. (There's a handy guide here on how to do this on an existing Windows installation without borking the whole thing. Scroll down to "Activating AHCI".)
I am, of course, continuing to use the same two mechanical drives (both Hitachi Deskstars, one 400 GB, the other 1 TB) as always for storing documents, TV show recordings, music and the like. In this day and age, 80 GB is never going to be enough to store everything you want. I don't doubt that, some time in the future, we'll all move over completely to SSDs, and mechanical hard drives will be consigned to the same rubbish heap as floppy drives, 16-bit operating systems and other obsolete concepts. For the time being, though, it's simply too expensive, unless you're a millionaire and money is no object.
Right now, I'm extremely happy with my dinky little 80 GB SSD. It's lightning fast, and I don't just mean in the "Gee, if I run this benchmarking program I get a higher score" sense. In terms of real world usability, I can see a massive difference in performance. Booting Windows cold (i.e. not resuming from hibernation), the grind I used to experience is completely eliminated. Applications open in the blink of an eye (the Microsoft Word loading screen basically flickers on the screen for a fraction of a second), software installs at a pace I never believed I'd see (I went from an unformatted disc to a working Windows 7 installation in about 25 minutes), and just about every simple day to day activity feels quicker and more responsive. If you've got the money and are contemplating a system upgrade, I strongly recommend looking into the prospect of switching to an SSD. I'm inclined to suspect that, unless your system is absolutely ancient, you'll see more of a performance improvement from junking your old HDD than, say, replacing the CPU.
14 Comments
Yeah, although that's going to be the case with just about any rapidly developing technology: you can wait six months to a year for a drop in price, but by that time something else equally new and exciting will have come along to tempt you.
Perhaps somewhere down the line I'll pick up another, larger capacity SSD (when they're more affordable) and move my current one over to my laptop, where the increased durability and low power consumption would be particularly nice, and the upgrade over its lowly 5,400 RPM HDD would be even more noticeable than going from a 7,200 RPM drive, as I did with my desktop machine.
By the way, Photoshop loads for me in less than two seconds.
(Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 2:20 PM)
Foxy:
As far as I know, the Mobility Radeon 4870 (the one found in laptops) is not directly comparable performance-wise to desktop models. They're based on the same technology but are essentially stripped down, given the concerns over space and cooling. Look at the massive heatsink on the desktop 4870:
No way would you fit that inside a laptop, so concessions must have been made somewhere.
As for setting up the graphics card, I haven't changed my default settings either, other than to force vertical sync in games, and to disable video edge enhancement and noise reduction in the registry. Windows Media Center has an annoying habit of re-enabling NR whenever you run it unless you've forced it off via a registry edit (at least I think it does - it certainly did in Vista).
If you want a laugh, here are the ratings for my laptop:
Processor: 3.9
Memory: 4.9
Graphics: 3.6
Gaming Graphics: 3.3
Primary Hard Disk: 5.6
Overall: 3.3
It's definitely noticeable in terms of real world usage, and it's all but useless for 3D games or even 1080p video files. It's worth it, though, I feel, given how much battery life I get out of it.
(Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 4:41 PM)
Foxy:
Yeah, I remember all the brou-ha-ha back when there wasn't even an NR or EE control in the ATI control panel. I was all ready to ditch ATI for an nVidia card at one point, until I discovered (a) that there was a registry hack and (b) that most nVidia cards had ridiculously noisy leaf-blowers for cooling and, at the time, severe problems with their video playback (gamma values shifting behind your back being the biggest headache I encountered). However, at least in Vista, unless you disabled NR completely in the registry, it would for some reason re-enable itself to a setting of about 40-50 every time you went into Windows Media Center. Perhaps this too has been fixed for Windows 7, but I did the registry hack anyway just in case.
As for Sharpen Complex 2... well, yeah, it does add edge enhancement. By its very nature, that's what it's been designed to do: to artificially sharpen the image. Of course, on a small screen viewed from an appropriate distance, a little edge enhancement (or a lot) can be helpful in creating an illusion of detail.
(Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 6:32 PM)
Bobafett:
Bearing in mind that I haven't touched an nVidia card in three years and have no idea what sort of shape they're in at the moment as far as video playback and fan noise are concerned, I'd suggest going for the cheapest ATI card you can find with the smallest fan. Unless I'm very much mistaken, they all have on-chip HDCP support now, so that's not going to be an issue either.
As far as I'm aware, even the lowest end of the current generation of cards should be able to handle 1080p playback without breaking a sweat, and for an HTPC the single most important thing I'd be concerned about is how much noise the system makes.
That said, if you're going to be using it for other tasks besides BD playback, such as games, disregard all of the above and go for whatever gives the best trade-off between horsepower and cost. Going by the wording on ATI's site and the way they market their cards, I suspect a 4000 series card is probably your best bet.
However, the new generation of both nVidia and ATI cards should be announced in a couple of months' time so it may be worth waiting to see what they have to offer.
(Posted on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 6:13 PM)
Bobafett:
Actually, this may be just what you're looking for:
http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/new-ati-radeon-hd-5450-graphics-card2010feb04.aspx
ATI specifically sells it as a low cost (under $60 US), low noise solution for HTPC users. It has passive rather than active cooling, so essentially it should be completely silent. And, you could put the money you save towards a lifetime subscription to AnyDVD HD, turning it into a multi-region system.
(Posted on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 6:36 PM)
R. Pupkin:
1) By default, defragmentation is disabled by Windows 7 if it detects an SSD, and I've left it that way. The reasoning behind this is explained in this article, but the long and short of it is that SSDs perform well enough on random reads for fragmentation to be a non-issue.
2) I'd imagine it probably would speed up load times, provided the game was installed to the hard drive and not being read off the BD. As for in-game performance, probably not, unless it's a game that streams data during playback rather than pre-loading it at the start of a level. Even then, though, there might not be a noticeable improvement, unless you specifically notice the hard drive grinding and causing slowdown during gameplay.
(Posted on Monday, February 22, 2010 at 5:46 PM)
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1. ChuckZ said:
'Tis a shame. Unless you needed a SSD now, I would have waited until later this year to pick one up. Intel and Micron just announced the completion of a new process shrink:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3731
What does this mean? Double the capacity for the same (or less) price plus improved I/O performance.
Intel and Micron are one year ahead of their competitors.
(Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 2:06 PM)