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solid state drives

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    solid state drives

    has anyone installed Alpha on one - any pros/cons - the speed looks tempting!
    Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
    972 524 8714
    [email protected]

    ____________________
    "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

    #2
    Re: solid state drives

    I suggest you do some independent research on solid state drives. There is a limit on the number of writes the drive is able to perform. This is my biggest concern and I am planning on waiting a couple of years to see if it is a true issue or a mute point.

    Besides the speed aspect the other pros are the durability, weigh less and consume less electricity than normal mechanical drives making them ideal for a laptop.

    The cons are the limit of writes and price.
    Andrew

    Comment


      #3
      Re: solid state drives

      Andrew,

      There is a limit on the number of writes the drive is able to perform. This is my biggest concern
      I'd be more worried about your disc drives wearing out before using up the read/write cycles currently that exist even on the worst SSD....and will generally get better and not worse. I think most people are using the relatively short cycle life of a USB flash drive in determining what the life of a typical SSD is....same technology basically, but much different in the actual result. I'm sure a check on Google will alleviate your concerns a bit. :)

      Of course if this is to be used say for your OS page file then maybe your concerns are a bit more justified!!
      Mike
      __________________________________________
      It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
      It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
      Henry David Thoreau
      __________________________________________



      Comment


        #4
        Re: solid state drives

        I am tempted! :) In fact, in the not too distant future I am gonna put together a test machine with one of the more "enterprise class" SSD drives. My preliminary research shows that all SSD's are not created equal. They vary GREATLY in read and write performance.

        It seems Intel and OCZ seem to be the highest performers in a general sense. Of particular interest to me is one of the OCZ drives that has the SSD attached right to a PCIe card. The performance numbers are insane. Even if the drives could only achieve 50% of their rating, they would insure that the bottle neck would be the the LAN and how fast the workstation could receive the data (in a non TS world). Given the fact that most gigabit networks cannot even approach their rated speed and the fact that DISK I/O seems to be the bottleneck (according to Tom's Hardware)....these things do look enticing.

        I'll report back with some benchmarking once I get things sorted.



        Regards,

        Jeff

        Comment


          #5
          Re: solid state drives

          I messed around with the fastest SSD OCZ had out about a year ago.

          I ran Alpha V9 RT and didn't notice anything special. A WD Velociraptor had the same performance qualities in this respect. For the money, I wouldn't buy one for speed, but for the removal of a mechanical part. All-in-all, your limited by the speed of the controller such as SATA. If you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA , there is a chart at the bottom of the page that will give speeds of different interfaces. Whats interesting is that USB 3.0 is faster than SATA II.

          Something to keep in mind, a Velociraptor doing a sequential read will blow any present day SSD out of the water.


          I've been waiting for a PCIe I-RAM to come out...but it doesn't look that that's ever going to happen. Good idea though.
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

          Comment


            #6
            Re: solid state drives

            It has been a couple of years and there have been a number of advances in technology since the last post in this thread.

            Might anybody want to comment about the efficacy of running the Alpha App and/or Alpha Databases on a Solid State Drive?

            Comment


              #7
              Re: solid state drives

              I have a hybrid system running which has a 50gb SSD running as a Solid State Cache. Only works on windows 7 but basically it caches active data leaving less active or inactive data on the hard drive. When installed you cannot see the drive as the dataplex software manages it.

              So with my whole system running on it I can definitely say I have noticed a signficant difference. Away from Alpha, the PC boots much much faster, MS Outlook opens in under 2 seconds (compared to about 17-18 seconds before). In Alpha the noticeable differences can be seen in the speed of backups/restores, the processing of complex queries and scripts and just generally moving around the product esp in the web control panel.

              And the real major feature... only cost about �70 (about $100). Found it at Crucial.com called Crucial Adrenaline.
              Glen Schild



              My Blog

              Comment


                #8
                Re: solid state drives

                I recently bought a new system - where I moved from XP-32 to W7-Pro-64. I had been avoiding leaving XP as long as possible. And since I only replace my main development machine maybe every 5 years, it was a major decision for me and I put in a lot of time researching, etc.

                I was going to get 2 256GIG SSD's, but when reading about them I came accross a few alarming articles. They said that the fastest SSD's were storing 1 unit of data per cell (kinda like RAM, I guess) but that manufacturers were starting to stuff 2 or more units of data per cell, to increase their capacity. And that in doing so they were slowing them down to an HD speed, and errors were increased tremendously and life expectantcy was significantly reduced.

                So when I explored ordering a system I asked if engineering could guarantee that we would get one with "one unit per cell" and they said they could not. So I opted for 2 300 GIG 15,000 RPM SCSSI's. I've had the best experience with SCSSI's over the years. They are fast and extremely reliable. I suspect that SSD's or equivalent will eventually be the norm, and HD's will become like floppys.
                Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
                972 524 8714
                [email protected]

                ____________________
                "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: solid state drives

                  Martin, I upgraded my dev PC about 9 months ago.
                  Win 7 boots from the SSD - 15 seconds - and nearly all my professional applications run from the SSD, (Visual Paradigm, Toad, MS Project, Word etc), but I've placed Alpha stuff outside the SSD because of the problems with reads and writes.
                  My processor is an I5 processor with 8 gig ram.
                  The only issue I have is that the Data drive is "D" and the boot drive is "C" but that's easy to get used to.

                  My latest laptop has an I3 processor with 4gig and conventional disks. The starup time is really, really, noticably slower.
                  See our Hybrid Option here;
                  https://hybridapps.example-software.com/


                  Apologies to anyone I haven't managed to upset yet.
                  You are held in a queue and I will get to you soon.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: solid state drives

                    SCSSI's don't boot fast, but they run fast (I/O)
                    I leave my main system on 24/7 - and reboot when it feels necessary.
                    Believe it or not, I had 1 computer where the SCSSI drives lasted a bit over 10 years.
                    Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
                    972 524 8714
                    [email protected]

                    ____________________
                    "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: solid state drives

                      I upgraded from wd caviar green 1tb to an adata 256 gb ssd asynvhronous drive and boy! A 10 minute recalculating process is cut short to 1 minute i can only swear by it.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: solid state drives

                        I have been running Alpha on an SSD drive for about 6 months. Absolutely no problems to date. The SSD drives do everything faster, boot, run, calculate. They even let you make mistakes quickly.

                        Lou Braun

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: solid state drives

                          I have a client system running on a Mac mini with SSD for about 2 years with no problems. Win XP runs under VMWare Fusion.

                          Terry

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: solid state drives

                            Alpha has limited software support, these systems are always relatively small, because they are dependent on custom- programmed software.
                            Sample Forms

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: solid state drives

                              Originally posted by reddy2011 View Post
                              Alpha has limited software support, these systems are always relatively small, because they are dependent on custom- programmed software.
                              Could you please elaborate - not sure I understand the linkage between "limited software support", "relatively small", and "dependent on custom-programmed software".

                              Terry

                              Comment

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