SSDs – overrated?

I had a pretty reasonable experience with using an SSD because my Thinkpad X300 has a 64GB Samsung SSD in it. It cost me a fortune. A year later SSDs are twice as fast and less than half the cost, so they must be getting more attractive right? I use a laptop at work, a pretty beefy Dell XPS M1530 by all accounts, loaded up with 4GB RAM and a 2.5gHz Core2Duo. However using it for multi-tasking, email, browser, video editing stuff (I actually do a fair bit of basic editing it’s not the usual bullshit every ‘power user’ says) and so on. The laptop is sluggish, particularly after it’s just booted in the morning right when I want to get at my email. I put it down to the shitful 5,400rpm notebook drive.

Eventually I had enough and bought an SSD. With my own money. People call me mad when I do this sort of thing but if I’m sat there 8 hours a day being irritated by something then this is worth money to me, assuming I can’t get the company to pay. For this sort of indulgence it was unlikely. So I bought an OCZ Apex 60GB SSD, took the laptop home for the weekend and reinstalled Vista. What followed was not as expected…

I’m a super-geek right? That much is obvious. So I know all about how these things work and I’m perfectly capable of hunting down why stuff doesn’t work well. When I put the SSD in my Vista was actually worse. It locked up for ages at a time. Not just unresponsive, I mean it would lock up – you can’t type. So I googled up some advice and applied a motherlode of SSD tweaks. All sorts of registry changes. Although as usual the community of people doing this often advocate turning stuff off (the whole Vista hoo-hah about services springs to mind) which is a Bad Idea. Indexing is a pretty good example of that if you actually use Outlook for mail. Try searching for stuff in Outlook with no index. It’s not happening.

Anyway tweaks applied (not that my X300 apparently needed these tweaks to fly) and really not much of an improvement. I looked deeper. Specific issues with this OCZ (more accurately the nature of flash memory and the shitty controller which is found on most of these budget-level units) related to partition alignment. However it transpires since I used Vista, the partition was aligned correctly. I tested it anyway, and it was. There really is no reason why this SSD should make my laptop slower than the HD. At that point I was taken to thinking, you know what – eBay is sounding good.

Then in some other thread I heard mention of this thing called Windows Readystate which had been cited as fixing things. What this thing does is basically cache all writes to your system volume (and only your system volume) into a big cache file which is written contiguously. The net result is that writing small blocks on SSDs is diabolical and, it appears, this SSD more than most. Great… they seemed to leave this off the marketing blurb and it’s strangely missing from ‘reviews’.

Bottom line is that with Readystate installed, the laptop was transformed. It’s like a new machine. No pauses, no stutters, everything is exactly as I imagined it would be on an SSD. It’s like a faster version of my Thinkpad. So that’s a bit of a victory I suppose but I can’t help but think it’s a pretty hideous hack for what really ought to have been sorted out on the device itself. I mean look, they’re half the cost that they were – if they’ve introduced these issues, why not chuck some memory on the damn things?

As for using them on desktops… well, I don’t think you would. Desktop drives are proper nippy. If you want to get even nippier you could do stuff like buy three drives and do a RAID 5 array and gain some redundancy and some speed. It’d still store a shitload more and it’d still be a shitload cheaper than SSDs. Nevertheless the SSD brigade advocates SSDs with crazy-ass RAID controllers that have loads of cache on them. This is absurd. The problem is that the SSDs being sold now aren’t fit for purpose. Running Windows Vista strikes me as the defining requirement. If the drive is causing the OS to perform way worse than it would under a hard drive, then you need to change to drive. Change the controller, put RAM on it, anything.

It’s seriously worrying how many people must have been fooled into buying an aftermarket SSD for their laptop only to find things got noticably worse. We’re not talking about bargain basement SSDs here either. The OCZ Apex… this is mid-range stuff, from a performance memory brand. It’s enthusiast gear. I actually have difficulty coming to terms with the fact that a company like OCZ could actually manufacture something like this and not run into the diabolical performance and try to do something about it.

The problem is some SSDs are probably okay. Unfortunately the community of intellectual retards that run the enthusiast review sites all tend to boot their system and run the same disk benchmark tools and do retarded stuff like measure how long Windows takes to boot. Until this stuff gets a lot more mature, until Windows is properly mindful of appropriate access schemes or – as really ought to be the case – the hardware itself ought to be mindful and specified to deal with the likely profile of disk access, I think SSDs are pretty much a steer-clear decision. That doesn’t apply to products bundled with SSDs which, presumably, have been tested by the manufacturer. Eg they’ve actually loaded up Windows and tested to see if it makes them want to slit their wrists rather than running HD-tach…