Intel SSD to boost Windows 8 boot, wake times

I think the tagline for Windows 8 should be: Windows 8+SSD, you should do it.

Hmm, it seems the Intel 313 SSD will only work on a platform running Intel hardware...I wonder if there is chance for that to work on AMD hardware.

Most oem's now have these little cache drives. If you already have an ssd than no need for anything like this.

Hi there
I'm using a SAMSUNG SSD -- W8 boots up like greased lightning -- even on a "Lowly Aspire one Netbook (AO521 type) " with an AMD V105 1200 Mhz processor.

I have 4GB RAM also in the netbook but for such a small machine and within its limitations performance is AWESOME -- even gives me 7.8 on the Primary Hard disk -- it can't do any more than that -- not because of the inherent performance of the Disk but the poor old machine can't drive it any faster !!!!

The same disk gives 9.4 when used on my fairly powerful workstation.

I use this netbook rather than a full blown laptop when travelling as I LIKE the small size -- a 15 or 17 inch laptop with an I5 or I7 processor is great but not when you use planes or the Eurostar train a lot. !!!

Weight and above all SIZE are the key these days -- a tablet isn't sufficient for my purposes.

I don't know what it's like in the US now storing Baggage in the hold but in Europe these days if you have to stick Baggage in the Aircraft's hold it can often cost you MORE than the price of your flight -- so I travel as light as possible.

I think Intel and MS are "Barking up the wrong tree" here. Concentrate on LARGER capacity FASTER SSD's with bigger and faster cache's too.

And please --above all cheaper ones.!!!

(Incidentally to those who've never tried SSD's -- if you can afford it now is a good time to start -- not too expensive, problems/bugs all fixed and performance is WAY WAY better than you might imagine - especially if you are used to slow IDE 5400 RPM drives !!!.)

Cheers
jimbo

What's the point?

It's smaller AND more expensive than an ordinary SSD.

Yeah, nothing wrong with just using a real SSD as your boot drive.

I've been expecting solid state drives for 30 years now. Actually, I remember one from the 80s that used batteries to keep the memory alive but the price was outrageous..
Maybe it's because I haven't experienced the joy of the instantaneous boot from an SSD but I just can't see the cost/benefit for the average user. I walk into my office, hit the power switch on my comput and by the time that I'm in my chair and have my butt adjueste, the machine is up and ready to work.

Other vendors also offer "cache" drives.

Crucial Solid-State Drives - Crucial Adrenaline Solid State Cache

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-synapse-cache-sata-iii-2-5-ssd.html

They are small SSD with special software to have the SSD act as disk cache.

The problem is they need a lot of over-provisioning because of more write cycles to replace the "hot data". The OCZ has 50% over-provisioning as an example.

Jim

Phone Man said:

Other vendors also offer "cache" drives.

Crucial Solid-State Drives - Crucial Adrenaline Solid State Cache

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-synapse-cache-sata-iii-2-5-ssd.html

They are small SSD with special software to have the SSD act as disk cache.

The problem is they need a lot of over-provisioning because of more write cycles to replace the "hot data". The OCZ has 50% over-provisioning as an example.

Jim

Click to expand...

Hi there
that's not normally a problem if the CPU has plenty of processing power and the "Pre Fetch" algorithm is working reasonably well.

To those who don't know too much about how the INTERNAL mechanisms of an OS work -- one of the things you try and achieve is while say the CPU is coding / decoding an instruction or fetching an address from memory (RAM) is to do any Pending I/O which ise performed by the I/O controller (usually the Firmware in the HDD). This is done preferably ASYCHRONOUSLY with the actual application execution( in plain English do the I/O while the CPU is doing something else) -- and what clever caching does also is to "best Guess" (the pre fetch) what block of data will be required next so this available almost instantly when required.

Very complex to do well but when it does the I/O can be really fast. The same technique is also done with Instruction Pre fetch too.

That's the whole point of a cache -- if it's just a random data store efficiency wouldn't be improved much.

(Windows 8 from what I've seen "Appears" t ohave a really good pre-fetching technique even compared to W7 which is probably why some of you are noticing some distinguishable improvements over W7. With a REAL SSD these should be even more marked.

Please if anybody from Ms Internals is on these boards - I'd love to know a bit more about this sort of stuff -- you don't have to give proprietary info away -- just the Basic OS 101 stuff).

Back in the days of my Youth I spent some time at Hursley - near Winchester England - as part of my University Course at IBM labs working on some CICS and OS related stuff -- but that was getting to be almost in pre-history days !!!

Technology and algorithms have changed but the basic OS philosophy is still common to today's OS'es.

Cheers
jimbo