topic Re: Solid State Drives - any experience in Installation & update

Solid State Drives - any experience

Laszlo Nagy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:33:07 GMT

Hi everyone,

Does anybody have any personal or indirect experience with the speed advantage the Solid State Drives can provide for a guy using ArchiCAD, or a computer in general?
This new technology seems lighting fast compared to today's hard drives, so I am curious whether this could be part of my new notebook next year.

Here is description of it on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk

And a notebook with solid state drive options from Dell:

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1730?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~tab=bundlestab

Re: Solid State Drives - any experience

Thomas Holm — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:41:58 GMT

You could always start by testing an USB flash drive like this:
http://www.sandisk.com/OEM/ProductCatalog(1290)-Cruzer_Micro_with_Skins_USB_Flash_Drive_UFD.aspx
For now, up to 4GB. But growing.

Re: Solid State Drives - any experience

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:10:55 GMT

In my experience drive speed is of very little consequence in ArchiCAD. The main bottlenecks are in processor intensive tasks (modeling, rendering, updating views) where, as far as I can tell, the processor isn't waiting for the disk to serve up the data.

Re: Solid State Drives - any experience

Laszlo Nagy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:38:42 GMT

Well, I actually believe that solid state drive can actually give a boost. Of course this is an assumption, this is why I am asking about someone's real life experience.

For example, my notebook has tended to slow down as there were more and more programs installed. With a solid state drive, the whole operating system gets a boost, so all programs start up faster.

A friend of mine saw a video of a op. system booting from a solid state drive. XP was up and running in about 8-10 seconds!!! That's not bad, if true.

Also, I can imagine that this can be important when working with large projects that require more than the available physical memory (e.g. more than 2GB under XP). In that case the swap file comes into play, which, if stored on a solid state drive, can make the whole operation much faster.

Let me know what you think, guys.