SSD are they worth it?

[ThatIrishGuy]

will there be a boost in performance if ti got an SSD(Solid State Drive), over a regular spinning drive?

[ÆONFLUX]

The advice I can give you is to DL a hardware monitoring program. I personally use nVidia Monitor to check my HD usage. It's not the best but its the best I have ATM.


You would be surprised how much your HD will sit there if you have a ample amount of RAM and a good video card. If you are looking to drop 3+ grand on a computer it might be worth it for you. However if you are in the < 2,ooo budget then I would advise to upgrade other components.

[leukos]

I've been waffling back and forth on upgrading to a Solid State Drive (SSD) or a better collection of RAID disks for some time. It seems the longer I wait the better SSD keep looking (from a cost standpoint).

I believe the Short answer is you will very likely see a performance increase with a SSD that shows performance metrics greater then the existing mechanical drive storage system you are trying to replace (how is that for a no brainer). The longer answer is, be careful what you buy. I think the consumer SSD market is still maturing, but an SSD can fit certain solutions very well.


SSD _should_ be faster; and that is where I feel the SSD market starts to get murky. There seems to a big difference between the Transcend SSDs, and the Seagate/Samsung/MTRON SSDs; both in price and performance. I think the Transcends will start to be pushed out of the market as SSD solutions with performance metrics greater then mechanical disk start competing.

StorageReview.com has just started publishing metrics for the MTRON SSD line. They also have a "World of Warcraft" performance test they do, and it looks like they did include the MTRON drives in that particular test. Tom's Hardware and other hardware sites have been reviewing the Samsung/Seagate/OCZ models for awhile now. Take a look.

SSD do have three clear benefits on most mechanical hard disks - less noise, less vibration, and less power (usually). However, I had to replace power supply fans and CPU fans before I could hear the noise of my hard drives. Vibration can be lessened by hanging the hard drive on elastic cords. Power - a regular SATA drives consumes anywhere between 4 - 7W of power, most SSD <1W, and laptop hard drives can be found in the 2W - 4W range (they also usually spin at 5400RPM). We can't do much on power.


Of course, mechanical disks can be combined to offer greater performance, but then we start to see more noise, more vibration, and more power used. For those running many computers there also becomes the problem of using this nice fast storage from many boxes at the same time. I haven't found any fibre switches, HBAs, and SANs dumpster diving. ISCSI and ATA over Ethernet are other alternatives. With these solutions you could throw a bunch of disks at the problem and stick the storage in another room, but require a higher skill level then just sticking a disk in each computer.

The reason I point this out; the $600 cost for that MTRON SSD in 32GB finish gives us some play room to look at alternative solutions, especially if we want to put one in each computer on a multi-computer setup.

I think that booting and running 5 clients from separate computers would make the cost for 2 or 3 shared 16GB or 32GB MTRON (or any other higher performance brand) SSD worth looking at, but I don't think you will find a solution on the market for the average home computer user to effectively share these disk. NAS type appliances may work for the sharing of the Warcraft directory, but I haven't seen one that you can boot a computer from yet. For that we have to go with block sharing.

There are some interesting solutions out there in the Linux world, if you want to spend the time. Combining some type of boot support for XP/Vista from your shared storage (accessed by fibre channel, ISCSI, AoE, the yet to materialize FCoE) and a copy on write file system (zfs, ext3cow) and you could get all your machines up and running on a single 32GB SSD. Being careful it could be done on a 16GB SSD. However, since we are after performance increases, with either size drive I would probably want to throw at least two of them in a RAID-1 at the problem.


Anyone have any 20Gb/s infiniband adaptors and a spare switch around?





For performance tracking there are some good performance counters built into the Windows Operating System. Using the Performance Logs and Alerts Microsoft Management Console, browse the Logical Disk object for the following counters (You could look at both the _Total instance and the instance for your Operating System logical disk and Warcraft logical disk, assuming they are on separate Logical disk):


- % Disk Read Time, % Disk Write Time: This gives you a high level view of what the disk is doing
- Avg Disk Bytes/Read, Avg Disk Bytes/Write: Gives you an idea if you have many small reads/writes, many large reads/writes
- Avg Disk Read Queue Length/Avg Disk Write Queue Length: This isn't a great performance metric when we start talking about multiple disk spindles. While I wouldn't ignore it when monitoring/planning a workload, as it can give you an indication you are asking too much from your storage system, I usually play closer attention to the next metrics.
- Avg Disk Sec/Read, Avg Disk Sec/Write: This tells you how long a read/write takes from/to disk. When this number is high (>20msec for more then 10 - 20 seconds), especially when I don't know what the underlining storage system is, I start to get worried.

[Noids99]

That's a whole lotta reply above and a fair way above my technical knowledge :P



From tests I have seen that the Mtrons are a fair degree better than all of the other brands, although you do pay a premium for them.



Playing WoW, if you have sufficient RAM, you will likely see an improvement in zone loading times only. Considering the premium you pay for SSD over std HDD at this point and the fact that this is only going to reduce with time, personally I would stick with raptors over SSDs at this point.



Cheers

[ÆONFLUX]

Playing WoW, if you have sufficient RAM, you will likely see an improvement in zone loading times only. Considering the premium you pay for SSD over std HDD at this point and the fact that this is only going to reduce with time, personally I would stick with raptors over SSDs at this point.



CheersThis pretty much. With my rig the first load of shat takes a bit of time (drops down to 10-20fps 5box) but after running a 5man and coming back it seems to only drop down to 20-30fps. Loading a 5man, clearing, exiting, resetting, then back into the 5man does not access my HD AT ALL. Food for thought.

[Bovidae]

SSD's will definitely be in my next main rig, in two years. It's still to young(and expensive) for my tastes.

[Chorizotarian]

Playing WoW, if you have sufficient RAM, you will likely see an improvement in zone loading times only. Considering the premium you pay for SSD over std HDD at this point and the fact that this is only going to reduce with time, personally I would stick with raptors over SSDs at this point.

CheersThis pretty much. With my rig the first load of shat takes a bit of time (drops down to 10-20fps 5box) but after running a 5man and coming back it seems to only drop down to 20-30fps. Loading a 5man, clearing, exiting, resetting, then back into the 5man does not access my HD AT ALL. Food for thought.

I see the same thing running 5x symbolically linked WoWs. My HD barely gets used. On Vista you can check with perfmon.

[Sarduci]

NAS type appliances may work for the sharing of the Warcraft directory, but I haven't seen one that you can boot a computer from yet. For that we have to go with block sharing.
There are NAS Linux distros that allow for PXE boot from random computer parts you can build at home. If you're going that far out on a limb, why not just install and iSCSI SAN for $15,000? Much cleaner and spindle balancing for read/write I/O can be done at the block level via a 4 or 8GB cache controller holding a RAM disk. When we're talking $3k for a good SSD, $15k isn't that big of a jump in price considering the performance gains.

[Hakaslak]

I stuck a 16GB mtron in my desktop that I use for quin boxing.

Short answer is. It lags. Very bad.

There is no real noticeable difference in load times, but windows as a whole seems to suffer terrible interface lag, as in the computer will stop responding. Seems the memory is getting flooded with write requests that the SSD cannot keep up with, being flash based.

Or so I read.

Anyways, it is really really worse than a Raptor, as far as the actually use goes.