PCMark05 HDD Results
Longer bars are better
We decided to use our own, everyday use Windows XP PC as a guinea pig to answer that very question. The main hard drive is a 250GB Samsung SP2504C with 75GB taken up by Windows and applications, while music, videos, work and other files are stored on a rather larger secondary drive. The motherboard is an Intel X48 and the processor is a 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770 with 2GB of DDR 3 Ram, but start-up is a painful process that takes five or six minutes while the PC chugs into life.
The exact times for three start-ups are:
- 4 minutes 48 seconds
- 5 minutes 43 seconds
- 6 minutes 35 seconds
Part of the variation comes down to Sophos Antivirus, which performs an update at start-up. If an update isn’t needed, it cuts at least a minute off the start-up time. But no matter what, there's a lot of disk thrashing as the software loads. That’s Windows, ZoneAlarm firewall, Windows Defender, Sophos, X-Fi audio drivers and ATI Catalyst graphics drivers, plus a few other things, but honestly, it’s a fairly clean system that's just getting old. We imaged the 250GB hard drive to the 256GB SSD and start-up times plunged:
- 1 minute 14 seconds
- 1 minute 21 seconds
- 1 minute 28 seconds
So that's it - we're sold on the Samsung SSD and don’t want to give it back. If the manufacturer insists we may even make its an offer and buy the darn thing, and we can’t say fairer than that.
Verdict
Samsung, please stop messing around and sell this gorgeous 256GB SSD as a component that's available to the buying public. ®
More SSD Reviews...
OCZ Apex |
Intel X-25M |
Samsung PB22-J 256GB SSD
COMMENTS
Very pricey...
These units are now available, though they're a very pricey £575 from Novatech..
Linux footprint
One reason for Linux's smaller footprint is that shared libraries are used to a greater extent, whereas Windows programs tend to carry their own copies. This no doubt has an effect on boot time. However, I boot Debian from an IDE disk(ATA-66, I think) and I get kdm in under a minute. How can people find these times acceptable?
@Anonymous Bastard
You said it, mate. Leave aside installations of various FPS games:
XP + Visual Studio + Office + Firebadger = somewhere north of 20 GB.
Linux* + KDE** + GCC + libraries + kitchen sink = less than 12 GB.
*Fedora 8 or 10, SuSE 9.x thru 11.2, Slackware to 12.x
**I just like it.
Can't speak for Ubuntu, it drives me nuts. To each his own.
Now... which version of Emacs do you use?
Boot times
Up to six minutes to boot with a high clocked quad core?
"Windows, ZoneAlarm firewall, Windows Defender, Sophos..." plus what else? Got lots of pretty icons in your task tray, my friend - do they make you feel important or well provisioned?
A clean system that's getting old? That's utterly ridiculous. Computers running Windows do not slow down because they get old. They slow down because Windows collects cruft like a stray dog collects fleas, and the registry collects errors like the DNA of a radiation poisoning victim. This is a maintenance issue, not an age issue.
You ought to take a look in the run keys in the registry and removed all your vendor cruft-ware. Then clean out the run-on-login folder in your start menu. Then run regclean about twenty times.
Statements like "...system that's getting old" to explain those boot times do not inspire confidence, buddy.
What the hell?
1 minute 14 seconds, Jesus that's an awful boot time.
I use an OCZ Apex running Ubuntu Jaunty with a custom kernel.
My boot time recorded by bootchart is 8.4 seconds.
Maybe another 2 seconds for X & Gnome Startup and that's it.
No more disk light. Desktop fully usable.
And I use around 10% of my 60GB drive for the OS & Apps.
Only exception with the apps is the 8GB taken up by
Call of Duty 4 and Visio... The only two windows apps I still use.
