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justdoit
11-24-2009, 11:53 AM
Hi,
I'm thinking about buying an SSD Drive.
From what I've heard they seem to be faster but with small writing accesses it should be slower.
Do you have any experience in using SSD compared to 'normal' (sata) drives with like 7.2k upm etc.?
Will the import speed go up from e.g. 80h/s to 600h/s or mor just to 120h/s?
Will there be any rise of the speed?
Thank for sharing your experiences and thoughts.
Bye

netsrak
11-24-2009, 01:12 PM
I think this thread can be interesting: http://forums.holdemmanager.com/showthread.php?t=20952&highlight=SSD%2A

Patvs
11-24-2009, 06:16 PM
First of all there are big performance differences in SSDs.
There are slow SSDs and fast SSDs, just as with normal harddisk.

If we compare a fast SSD (Intel X25-M G2 Postville) with a fast (recent model) 7200 RPM harddisk (Seagate Barracuda, Hitachi Deskstar, Western Digital Caviar Black and Samsung Spinpoints F1 and F3)

The results look like this:

http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee183/Fire-Wizard/CrystalDiskMark-1.png

Pic above is the Intel X25-M G2 Postville SSD.
Pic below is a recent 7200 RPM harddisk.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/images/CrystalDiskMark22.png


The sequential speeds will mostly affect the speed of copying large files, unrarring large files, etc.
The 512K and 4K speeds have an impact on: overall Windows performance, boot time (and shutdown time), startup time for any program... (and READ speeds are a lot more important than WRITE speeds) and PostgreSQL performance: showing graphs, vacuuming, database backup/restore, purging hands, etc.

So what about... import speeds? The import speeds rely on the 4K/512K speeds, but unfortunately also on the size of the .txt files you're importing.
When importing MANY small handhistory files speeds will go up, example: 40h/s (old 7200 RPM) vs 80h/s (new 7200 RPM) vs 160h/s (SSD). But when importing larger .txt files (there are some examples on the forum of people that want to import 5000 x 1.2 MB files, datamined hands) speeds decrease rapidly (both on the 7200 RPM and SSD).
And it's even worse when importing 500 x 12 MB files. (sometimes the import will just grind to a halt)

I don't really know if this is caused by PostgreSQL, HoldemManager import, the database algorithm, the harddisks, settings in the postgreSQL.conf file, etc. and is something I'll experiment with some more next month.
I have a Samsung Spinpoint F1 and 2x OCZ Vertex SSD in RAID0. And had SQL on a old 7200 RPM Maxtor harddisk before that.

justdoit
11-24-2009, 06:24 PM
ok tyfi!
would be cool if you can find out whats the source because fast imports are nice ;)

but def its not like that if you run a ssd or a hyperdrive (hd with ram) you have importspeeds of 300-600h/s?

Patvs
11-24-2009, 06:48 PM
I have 6 GB of RAM, which is just not enough to install my PostgreSQL database on a RAMDisk. I would love to test that though, only import 50k hands maybe.

Fusion-iO ioDrives ALREADY use PCI-Express 2.0 ports and are 5x as fast as a SSD. (and 10x times more expensive than a SSD) In 24 months, there will be Fusion-iO drives that use PCI-E 3.0. (the smallest ioDrive costs $1500 now)
In two years we'll have a SSD vs "ioDrive HD Yes or No " discussion and regular harddisks are obsolete.

Don't buy the SSD just for PostgreSQL...... buy it to match your overall system performance. Anandtech had a fun quote: "Waiting 31 seconds is agony in the PC world. Worst of all? This is on a Core i7 system. To have the world’s fastest CPU and to have to wait half a minute for a couple of apps to launch is just wrong."

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/thessdrelapse_083009193318/19853.png

Intel difference in sequential speeds:
X25-X series = 170 MB/s read / 35 MB/s write
X25-M G2 series = 170 MB/s read / 70 MB/s write
X25-E series = 250 MB/s read / 170 MB/s write

justdoit
11-24-2009, 06:51 PM
lol yeah
interesting decision coming up as it seems.

justdoit
11-24-2009, 08:57 PM
you seem to have knowledge in that area so you might know if it makes sense to buy a quad core to improve that speed h&m+postgres (or for poker purpose in general) or is there a core2duo basicly the same?
and another question does hm and postgres run fine under a w7 64bit? would you recommend there 8gb of ram or are 4 enough?
ty

netsrak
11-25-2009, 04:26 AM
When buying a new computer you should use the newest technology:
1. Quad Core CPU
2. 8 GB RAM
3. Windows 7 64 Bit

Just my thoughts. I think Pat will give you more details later.

Patvs
11-25-2009, 07:19 AM
It works great on Windows 7 x64.
RAM: 8 is a bit overkill. Although I have had rare situations where my 6 GB of RAM was not enough. (and those situations involved copying 100.000 handhistory .txt files from one folder to the other) :)
I'd say 4-6 GB is recommended for ALL people that buy a new computer now.
(which requires a 64 bit version of Windows)

The trick is to buy/build a "balanced system".
DDR3 RAM memory has a maximum bus speed of 1066-2000 Mhz (and transfer rate of 6400 MB/s), the fastest ATI 5970 videocard is 4000 Mhz (fastest PCI Express 2.0 slot 8 GB/s), X58 socket mainbords 6400 MT/s, the Intel i7 920 processor 4x 2.66 Mhz,.... but the fastest SATA harddisk is limited by the maximum 300 MB/s of the current SATAII ports.

Most prebuild systems have a fast CPU/RAM but have a slow videocard/harddisk, many people think "just adding more RAM" to their system will solve all their problems, many gamers wrongly think only buying a new videocard will solve theirs.

The question for you (and everybody else) is not if you should buy a dualcore or quadcore system, but WHICH quadcore system you have to buy.

Take a look at his! The following Intel CPUs all have the same "clock speed":
Q6700 4x 2.66 Ghz (8 MB L2 cache)
Q8400 4x 2.66 Ghz (2x2MB L2 cache)
Q9400 4x 2.66 Ghz (2x3MB L2 cache)
Q9450 4x 2.66 Ghz (12 MB L2 cache)
i5 750 4x 2.66 Ghz (8 MB smart cache)
i7 920 4x 2.66 Ghz (8 MB L3 cache)

To must consumers they look the same, but performance wise they all perform very differently, based on the chip architecture, available L1/L2/L3 cache, energy efficiency, etc. The MAIN difference is the i7 is the only one that supports hyper-threading. (My computer is running around 1200 threads now - you can see this in TASK MANAGER - Performance). The i7 has 4 cores.. and each core runs two threads. So the i7 has 4 (physical), and 8 (logical) CPUs.

The new released Intel i5 only has 1 thread per core just as the Qxxxx series.
The early 2010 release i9 will have 6 (physical) and 12 (logical) CPUs and the i9 is compatible with the X58 chipset motherboards, that's why they're more expensive.

Do you really need 8 CPUs? Eh... No. Do you need hyperthreating? No... Hardly any program supports it. In fact I've played games that didn't support it at all, and I had to turn it off in the BIOS just to be able to play it.
The i5 750 is the best CPU on the market today. That leaves one final problem: the 300 MB/s maximum transfer speed of the current SATAII harddisks will always be the main bottleneck of your system (and the NEXT generation SATAIII which only supports speeds up to 600 MB/s will not solve that).