ssS.. L.. OW

[Janmanden]

(Wtf.. Logged me out and now the editor is teasing me, arrrrggggrrrh. I think I know this feeling. Aigh, It's PAIN!!)

 

Hmmmm..

 

My computer is really sssssloooww and it shouldn't be.. Run one application no problem.. Gaming, easy. Run five different browsers, a few ftp sessions, some graphics and Visual Web Developer and it's full of coffee breaks switching from one application to another and with overlapping artifacts from the previous one until the next screen refresh.. If it was memory problem it would be easy to fix, but I am never really close, but maybe it's time to switch away from XP to 7.

 

Either Core i7 sucks at multi-tasking or triple-channel memory is overrated or my disk is slow or Bitdefender is hogging me.. I feel that turning on Bitdefenders Game Mode increase the responsiveness of the system a good bit, not all of it, but I think that mode is too permissive for the paranoid part of me.. It is a small part, but there is a vicious internet out there and while I generally seem to steer clear of it I like having some freedom too with belts and buckles..

 

I wonder what the effect of going for a full SSD will be in regards to having some AV suite constantly scanning the disk. I've already got a hybrid disk, the Seagate Momentus XT, that combines the 500GB HDD with a 4GB SSD cache, it's a small cache but it's still helping a bit and in some ways it's fast, but all it's really done is to wet my appetite for more. I've seen some statistics showing that the durability of SSD's is somehow measured in disk read/writes and thus having a Security Suite that do that for a living would kill such a disk pretty fast, but maybe that's in the past?

 

Price is too high for my needs. Having a SSD for just the OS or games.. Feh, I need all or nothing and nothing is too little.

 

Currently I am considering whether I should pick another hybrid with a larger SSD cache.. Something like the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid SSD 1TB.. Which is stil quite expensive, but half the price per GB than the cheapest SSD.. But then again I could combine 4 128GB's SSD's for 500GB of SSD for about the same price, more or less much more.. Brrrrr.

 

Tough choice.

 

Anyone got any experience with the OCZ RevoDrive or other hybrids?

[Rosbjerg]

I don't have any experience with hybrids, but I fear that, as with any new technology, mixing old and new rarely works as well as intended.

 

Full on SSD is really great though, I have Win7 on a 60gb hdd which works like a charm.. I would go full SSD if I was you, I think it's worth every penny.

[Gorgon]

Yeah go for SSD, I couldn't live without it now.

[WDeranged]

Yeah, go full fat SSD, it's the single most noticeable upgrade I've done in years.

[Janmanden]

Thanks for the replies. I do kind of worry that the RevoDrive would just be a delay of the inevitable total switch when I realize it doens't quite work as intended like the Seagate Momentus XT already proves to me in painfully slow ways.. Not really that slow, but when SSD do work it's blazing fast compared to the HDD aspect.

 

So.. Another thing that bothers me is that ultra-slow av-scan.. I assume that it's done in a few minutes with SSD?

[Humanoid]

Get an SSD, sure, it's the biggest single upgrade one can do to their machine. SSD durability is also not affected by reads, just the writes, and when it "dies" due to wear it is still accessible in read mode. In typical desktop usage scenarios this time to "death" is well over a decade.

 

BUT!

 

Yes there are catches. You are on WinXP which is double-handicapping you with its addressable memory limitation (unless you're using the buggy WinXP-64) so you're probably stuck with ~3GB usable RAM, and in terms of upgrading. WinXP is not SSD-aware - a surmountable issue, but a chore when the OS can't do automatic housekeeping on the disk.

 

Further, and perhaps more fundamental, is why you feel the need to have your disks scanned with that kind of regularity. There's a certain point past which security software becomes indistinguishable from malware due to its impact on the user experience - it's easy to become so paranoid about security that it ends up hampering your system's usability more than any virus could ever hope to.

 

You might also want to consider a hardware firewall perhaps, so you can ditch the somewhat cumbersome BitDefender. Unfortunately it's going to turn out to be a bit of a shopping list following all the above advice but I maintain the trade is completely worth the cost in terms of the control and pure usability that you gain.

 

 

---

 

No one with a decent library of games really buys an SSD to house *all* of them, just a number of select ones. It's also trivial to create symbolic links to transparently move an existing installation to the SSD. This is particularly useful for Steam (it baffles me how after all this time it's still incapable of putting your games anywhere but in the Steam directory) where typically you wouldn't want or be able to fit the entire library on fast storage.

[Janmanden]

Good advice, but yes I know..

 

I don't really want to do regular scans, but .. Geez, never really thought about it that way before, but this hybrid thing is messing with my head. Somtimes I notice the slowness more than usual and I think "****, something is hogging me.." add to that, I know it's silly, but that exclamation point that Bitdefender use to remind me to do a scan actually stresses me out a bit.. And I always feel it was a complete waste of time, because the scan only finds and removes the same 30 harmless cookies.. It's a good thing it's quite effectively blocking anything from getting on the computer, but better safe than sorry I guess. Somtimes I bite that apple..

 

I am contemplating, actually preparing for a switch to Windows 7, because I got 9GB's of unused memory(!!)..

[WDeranged]

I can guarantee that switching to Windows 7 x64 and an SSD would be something of a minor revelation, virus scans do indeed take a matter of minutes and the whole experience is really smooth.