Will upgrading to a solid-state hard drive (SSD) improve the performance of Cyrious Control / SQL Server?
Information
Solid State Hard Drivers are becoming more popular hardware upgrades in today's computer systems. They add a considerable improvement in speed over their previous counterparts due to using NAND Flash Memory with no physical moving parts in the drives. The performance increase seen by using these drives over the older 'mechanical' drives can be substantial. For more information about SSD technology, please visit Wikipedia.
What this means for Control
The addition of a SSD in your computer will boost overall computer performance, it will also result in quicker load times for Control particularly upon first login, creating, editing, and saving information, pulling a list of results via explorer, etc. Please note the performance increase on the server will be most visible with varying improvement on your client machines. The speed on the client machines is often limited by the slowest piece of hardware, i.e. perhaps the Processor on the client is an older (slower) generation, perhaps the network connection does not provide optimal bandwidth or is the limiting factor on whether you see a substantial improvement on your clients vs. the server.
Although this is Cyrious' opinion, I can confirm that we have seen noticeable and definitely cost-effective performance improvements by utilizing an SSD drive in our servers. We are currently utilizing SSD's provided by OCZ Technology, specifically the OCZ Revodrive Series which use a PCI-Express x4 interface. Before purchasing one of these drives is it recommended that you verify it is compatible with your system and you have an available PCI-Express x4 slot to install the SSD card.
Cost
Typical cost of an SSD drive ranges from $80-$500 for a 120GB-1TB drive. The prices can go up substantially from there depending on the size of the drive. For 99% of all users you should not need to to purchase any drive larger than 120GB for storing the Control database. If you intend on installing the operating system, other programs, etc. on the SSD then you'll need to adjust your drive size accordingly. In some cases, it is worthwhile to purchase a larger capacity drive because some manufacturers includes higher-level controllers on the higher-capacity drives which substantially increases the read/write speeds. This is true for the OCZ Revodrive models and others available on the market.
Vendors
I have provided a list of vendors which carry these and other similar SSDs.
Cautions
Please consult your preferred IT provider when upgrading computer hardware and software. The information provided here is meant to serve as a basic recommendation, please proceed at your own risk.
Source
Contributor: Brandon Readlinger, Cyrious
Post Date: 02/2012
Revised Date: 09/2014