SSD Vs HDD hard drives is it worth it?

[Mark Norville]

Hi Guys,

Just running more updates due to a fresh install on a SSD hard drive. I am writing this for the non technical people, and also the more technical people that are thinking about getting an SSD hard drive, thinking that it is a magical solution to slow running jukeboxes.

I can only speak in relation to Windows 7 64 bit operating system, and have not tried this on XP, 8 or 10 or other operating systems such as Android or Linux.

I just spent £57 on a 240 gig SSD Scandisk and although when you go to control panel, click on system, and then get a system rating, my old hard drive was giving about 5.9 rating, since installing the new SSD it jumped to 7.7 in disk TRANSFER rate.

I have highlighted the transfer rate for a reason, the reason that I have done this for is because unless you are transferring files from one SSD to another, or from a HDD to SSD then pretty much the increase of speed is not really needed.

On my jukebox cabinet I have a standard HDD which boots pretty quickly and is pretty clean, e.g I don't go surfing dodgy websites, there are no dodgy pirated games etc etc on there.

SSD is the future, however if you have a normal HDD which is clean and within it's shelf life, then pretty much you do not need to update to SSD as yet.

If I was running just a jukebox for example for commercial purposes only, then 120 gigs is even too large, for just the operating system, and also eTouch, the only benefit of having a 120 gig or 240 gig SSD is if you carry advertising as well.

If you have a hard drive say 3 tb, which has operating system, and then music as well, this offers more value for money, but also will wear your hard drive down faster. However for a 2 to 3 year or even longer life span, this still offers more bang for your money.

So really is SSD really needed for a home jukebox, or maybe even commercial? No not really. The only advantage that I can see is portability and if you only want to run a small jukebox anyway of say maybe 10,000 tracks. I have just done a check of the MP3's that I am retagging and 176 gigs for 31 thousand files, but that includes art work as well.

So if you was running a tight ship, and just adding single tracks by artists that have actually entered the charts as singles, then you have a wide variety of choice that you could put onto a larger SSD, and do reasonably less work. One master hard drive, and then cloning out drives and installing into new systems.

Anyway updates almost finished, so shall end here before a reboot. Hopefully this might save you some money if you are thinking about a SSD hard drive.

Regards

Mark

[Gaucho]

More or less agree with you there Mark. The big difference I have noticed is when using the online search option while random play is running. Because it is writing the download to my SSD and reading my music which is on a separate HDD it's 5 times faster then when I was running everything on one HDD.

One other small difference is that the juke loads quicker and etouch is a bit more responsive running on the separate SSD.

[Mark Norville]

I just done two videos as I was curious, I shall upload to youtube only about 3 minutes but both machines pretty much loaded in the same time, but I will say that my arcade/jukebox was a bit faster, and that was without the SSD however I have an i5 processor in there, with 8 gigs of ram. The computer that I am on now, is an i3 with 4 gigs of ram, both have onboard graphics.

So I am guessing that hardware plays a part in this as well, I kind of feel a bit cheated at the moment in buying an SSD drive. The increase in speed might be of course not having to go through acres of data to find somewhere to put it, such as the old platters, but with a decent spec pc, no real difference in boot times, or closing down times.

I actually had more loading on my arcade/jukebox machine as well so was pretty impressed.

Regards

Mark

[Mark Norville]

Just in case any one wants to watch this pile of crap

Video 1 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR6izS1z8J4 SSD Windows 7 64 bit fresh install, i3 processor with 4 gigs of ram, onboard video card (1:18)

Video 2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIJNgkMXoO4 HDD Windows 7 64 bit old install i5 processor with 8 gigs of ram, onboard video (1:09)

So just looking at those times the HDD video was a massive 9 seconds different.

Regards

Mark

[Barcrest]

You need to compare both drives in the same computer. I have found it a much quicker experience personally. If you want more speed and your motherboard supports raid then get 2 smaller ones and raid them to get improved read write speeds. Admittedly you are more open to drive failure but you will probably upgrade before that happens. The SSD/HDD hybrids are a reasonable compromise to use just for storing your library on as they are still quicker than a standard drive but offer much cheaper price per tb than SSD.

[Mark Norville]

It sounds weird, but I am finding more errors now in relation to surfing the internet than I ever did on a HDD, I just went to one page, and half of the graphics never loaded up, it might not be related but there are little bits that I am noticing maybe it is something new and trying to pick faults, I honestly have not noticed much difference in speed apart from starting up and shutting down on the old hard drive, but that was probably down to viruses rather than anything else.

I just tried to load Gimp and it is like watching knight rider, it gets to the part about loading fonts, and then the bar keeps going back and fourth, and sits for a while, I have not tried on eTouch so far as still need to sort out the databases.

I know that at the moment, I do not think that I will buy another SSD again, I honestly am not that impressed.

[Barcrest]

It sounds weird, but I am finding more errors now in relation to surfing the internet than I ever did on a HDD, I just went to one page, and half of the graphics never loaded up, it might not be related but there are little bits that I am noticing maybe it is something new and trying to pick faults, I honestly have not noticed much difference in speed apart from starting up and shutting down on the old hard drive, but that was probably down to viruses rather than anything else.

I just tried to load Gimp and it is like watching knight rider, it gets to the part about loading fonts, and then the bar keeps going back and fourth, and sits for a while, I have not tried on eTouch so far as still need to sort out the databases.

I know that at the moment, I do not think that I will buy another SSD again, I honestly am not that impressed.

To be honest it sounds like you might not have it set up correctly, are you using windows 7? It could always be faulty.

[Mark Norville]

I have just put the bios to achi just seen that it is recommended. I downloaded the scandisk software and tested it on a short scan and that works, however I try it on a long scan but that fails and comes up with error 27. I google it and it seems a pretty common problem.

I have seen some other forums, which literally you need to have a PHD to follow, so gave up on that. It is ok just not as fast as I was expecting really.

Just downloading crystal disk info now just to give that a try.