I
have this ancient laptop, a Celeron 2.4Ghz thing with 768 Ram, but it
has a good screen and good battery life so i use it primarily as a
remote desktop terminal with O2 3.5g broadband when i'm away from the
office, which is great. but it's a slow old thing and it takes forever
to boot. i'll get a new laptop as soon as SSD's become more reasonably
priced, i.e. in about 6-9 months, but until then...
Solid State Disks
i'm
very interested in the emergence of Solid State Disks and how in my
opinion they will remove the last bottleneck in the modern PC: the
mechanical hard drive. You can have the fastest processors and RAM in
the world, and you'll still be staring at your computer waiting for
stuff to happen because the hard drive is slow.
To get your taste buds tickled, have a read of this excellent
article from Next Level Hardware showing what a 9 SSD drive RAID array can do (at cost of $7000).
Then to come back down to earth have a read of this other excellent
article by Kevin O'Brien
that shows how to build a SSD drive out of compact flash cards, at a
small cost, and still get really good performance to beat the pants off
your old laptop hard drive. I've followed Kevin's approach, but want
to document it a bit further in terms of setting up a laptop running
Vista on a 8Gb compact flash card.
Hardware
For the
laptop, I've ordered a dual compact flash to IDE adapter, 44 pin laptop
style, and a 8Gb 300x compact flash card. For my desktop i got 2x 4Gb
300x compact flash cards, and a quad CF-IDE adapter made by addonics, i
intend to use this to store the swap file and other files from my
desktop. I got the flash cards from
komplett.ie
at 36 euro each for the 4Gb cards and 75 euro for the 8Gb card. It's
important to get the 266x or 300x cards in order to get the 40+Mb/sec
transfer rates, anything less and it won't really be worth the effort.
I ordered the CF/IDE adapters from
WebConneXXion.com
at 25 euro (notebook dual version) and 37 euro (PCI quad version),
unfortunately shipping to dublin was 40 euro but hey. The hardware
bits are still in the post so in the meantime i've set to work on
creating a Windows Vista installation that can run inside an 8Gb disk.
Vista / vLite
As
you probably know, Vista is a big mamma when it comes to hard disk
space and memory requirements. But there is a great tool called
vLite
which lets you strip off the bits you don't want/need which make it a
very lean OS for an old machine, and in this case, one with limited
hard drive space. With vLite you create a new Vista install image with
your customised options and then install it on your laptop or
whatever. But that also means you can use the image to test out in a
Virtual PC environment which is great, you can configure an 8Gb hard
drive, 768Mb Ram, etc. After removing all the components i don't think
i'll need, my install ISO is only 732Mb, so far so good. It is Vista
ultimate by the way, here is my
vLite ini file
if you're interested. I installed it to virtual PC and it took up 3.12
Gb including a 1Gb swap file, so a 2.12Gb install size is fairly good
given that we have 8Gb to play with. For general use, i will need AVG
antivirus, Office 2007 (access, excel, word, ppt), Visual Studio
Professional 2008, VLC Media Player and of course FireFox. After
installing all this the drive has 5.36 Gb used (including the swap
file), with still plenty of space left over.
Results on Laptop
Well i'm delighted to say that my laptop runs like a champ now, even
though i was about to dump it! vista boots in about 12 seconds, and
applications load up very snappy. the lack of grinding noise still
amazes me. i had no idea that a 4200 RPM drive was such a drag on
system performance, it is quite remarkable. battery life seems about
10% better with the SSD, although it was a fairly inaccurate test. i
kept the screen on and a browser page reloading every 10 seconds (over
wifi) untill windows shut itself down at 3% battery, this lasted 3
hours 10 mins. the great thing about this is that i can keep on using
my laptop for another year or so and when i do upgrade i will be able
to get something thinner and lighter, and which will definitey have a
proper SSD!
Results on Desktop
I have installed the RAID card with the 2x4Gb flash cards
and i can get ~50 Mb/s continuous read benchmarks, but it took a bit of
fiddling to get the best combination of card slots.
my first
combination of slot 1 and 2 gave a very poor benchmark with a 20Mb/s
read at the start and end of the drive, maxing out at 50 in the
middle.
the Addonics support guy told me to put both cards on the same
IDE controller so use port 1 and 3 but that was even worse:
so i tried
port 3 and 4 on the back of the card and that gives a steady 50Mb/s
read benchmark, which is pretty good:
theoretically 80Mb/s should be
possible with a RAID 1 array of 2xCF v4 cards but 50Mb/s isn't bad, and
the important thing is obviously the ~1ms seek time instead of 8ms for my raptor drive. Interestingly the slot 1+2 combination gave access times of .7ms but the other combinations give 1.4 or 1.6ms, possibly due to master/slave issues with the IDE controllers.