What y'all think of SSDs?

[SiegeTank]

In my business I support a lot of rather old apps that are installed on older systems, like Pentium-Ds running Windows XP. The code on these apps won't run on 64-bit so since Microsoft is "retiring" XP next year, I'm looking to move my clients over to Win7 32-bit, where they can still run these old apps without needing the complications of virtual PCs and "XP mode."

Yeah, I've already advised them to pay to have these old programs written anew and brought forward into the post-medieval age but if anyone here has history consulting with small businesses and budget-minded merchants you already know how hard a sell that can be.

So... when I port them over to Win7, I'm thinking of trying to sell them the idea of replacing their hard disks with solid state drives. The selling point is that these old apps do NOT require a lot of storage. Some are still using old 80gig WD and Seagate hard drives, so a $89-99 Kingston 120G SSD would actually be a step UP for pure storage needs! Some of that will be eaten up by Win7 O/S but there'll still come out ahead.

I haven't "played" with an SSD yet, but I'm going to do so within a day or two. I do see some incredibly fast bootup and app times on YouTube. With older apps like these, I'm wondering if we'll see very noticeably faster operations. Some of these old programs go back to the days of Ramdisks, where HDD access and CPUs were so slow that programs would allocate some of RAM to operate as virtual physical storage and only write to the physical disk periodically. I would think a RAMdisk would still be faster than a SSD since RAM is still faster than solid state technology.

I'll be finding out for myself soon but just curious if anyone has moved an old app---or an ancient DOS game---to an SSD and noticed remarkable improvements in operating speed?

It's worth it anyway just for faster O/S loading... some of these clients don't even like to reboot after a software patch because of the downtime causing by slowness of O/S re-loading...

 

[evilbarney]

the only real negative i have ever herd for ssd drives is if you do alot of writing to the drive like video/sound editing

 

[Wendel]

I've had SSD drives in my workstation and laptop now for about 2 years.
I couldn't imagine sitting through a boot up process without one now.
While I can't comment on DOS programs running faster, I did notice that my laptop went from a 1 minute boot up period to about 12 seconds.

Have you confirmed the apps run okay in windows 7?

Have you considered just virtualizing the windows XP instances and having your users RDP into them? That is what I have done for a few of my clients that run some very old software as well. I was able to port them all over to a vmware server and they are very happy with the performance, plus they can use an up to date 64bit OS for anything else they need to run(outlook, word, etc)

 

[SiegeTank]

You talking about using remote desktop? Sounds potentially like adding a layer of complication. If these apps run in 32-bit Win7, and the one I tested runs there as smooth as in XP, the only real issue is whether the SDD would give them a big speed boost, especially as old DOS programs tie up a lot of RAM when running in a Windows environment.

Thanks for the feedback, though, food for thought!

 

[sigx]

ssd drives have a huge performance gain over stndard disc drives. You put an ssd as the main drive on any server or computer otherwise, and you will never want to switch back. Th price per gb have been dropping again recently as well.

 

[Wendel]

You talking about using remote desktop? Sounds potentially like adding a layer of complication. If these apps run in 32-bit Win7, and the one I tested runs there as smooth as in XP, the only real issue is whether the SDD would give them a big speed boost, especially as old DOS programs tie up a lot of RAM when running in a Windows environment.

Thanks for the feedback, though, food for thought!

I had to do this for one of my clients. They ran ACCPAC, a very old dos version, they were too cheap to upgrade and now they no longer have an upgrade path.
When we virtualized we didn't have to do anything different at all, it saved them calling in a pricey ACCPAC consultant. This software is poised to run for another 15 or 20 years now
I do realize that some end users really need to wear a protective helmet when they are using computers, but I'm sure they could handle this with enough beatings.

 

[dewey2461]

The only thing(s) I hate about SSD are the price premium and they way they fail. With a normal drive you usually get plenty of warning that something bad is happening. I've had two SSD's just stop working. Could even read back.

On the other hand I have 12 newer intel 256 GB models and they have been rock solid for 2 yrs.

Performance wise its hit or miss based on what the real bottleneck for your application is.

The biggest winner is bootup times.
For everquest I noticed a slight decrease in load times.
For visual studio projects, a slight decrease in load times, compile times did not significantly change though. Shaved about 30 seconds on a 12 minute compile.

Newer drives should make the differences better.

 

[Stratus]

I would think they would/should be worrying more about reliability than speed if it is business accounts you are working with. SSD's are a huge increase in speed, but only in certain types of workloads as mentioned above.

I would look at what type of workload will be done first. Do the programs they are using even benefit from faster read/writes, other than just opening the program up initially? Even if so, you need to address the durability/reliability issue first. If it is some type of database setup that will be reading huge amounts of data daily, then an SSD would not be a good choice in my opinion. It is well known that they can only take so many write cycles before they can no longer be wrote to again, only read from.

Keep in mind it isn't THAT little of write cycles before it stops. For most normal users the average SSD will last plenty long enough for the normal upgrade cycle. But if in a business things can be very different. Certain types of loads could easily use up that write cycle limit in less than a year or two. Just something to keep in mind.

 

[devestator]

IMO, SSDs are great, but not yet ready for workstation PCs. You really don't need 12 second boots on a workstation. As for the performance, as long as they aren't using PCs from the same era as the ancient DOS programs that they are using, I highly doubt they will see much performance gain in the programs themselves.

A program has to be doing a LOT of large read / writes to disk (not memory) to see a performance increase from a SSD. Initial program load times may be slightly faster, but I'm willing to bet the regular usage of the program will not benefit.

As for those hard headed small businesses, when I had to deal with people like that I gave them a deadline, and three options. They either committed to upgrading, they paid a hefty legacy support tax, or they found support elsewhere. Back in 2006 when I had people come to me with Window ME installed, I told them they could either spend the 200 on a license to upgrade to XP or get charged an additional 40 dollars per hour for me to work on it (that was on top of my at that time 75 dollars per hour fee).

 

[fauxshizle]

Heat, and power consumption are extremely low for SSD's by comparison to a standard HD.

Noise.....there is none.

You must change OS Sleep/Suspension/etc settings using SSD's do avoid basically crashes. As stated above, there is no need to power down an SSD b/c the head and power consumption are very....very low.

I have had SSD drives ONLY in my main box for 3 years now....starting with an Intel 40, then added a 64, then a 128....flawless. Win7Ultimate boots from post screen in 5 seconds.

 

[StaticX27]

One thing you could suggest, since it sounds like they don't have massive storage needs:

1) Load up SSD's in all the computers, then set the drives to be read only and invisible to the users.
2) Set up a fairly small NAS drive that is shared amongst all the users. All documents, files, etc are saved to the network drive, reducing the overall load on the SSD's while still keeping the increased performance.

Most users never need to change system files, or install new software once the machine is up and running. You, as the main IT guy, can easily set up administrator privileges for installing new applications, running updates (or just have a universal updater for all the machines in the office, if there are a lot of em).