Logos 6 Speed: One Way to Always Pep Things Up

One complaint Logos 6 users often share with me is the speed of the system. So I want to give you one tip that will ALWAYS speed up Logos 6 and, with the right collection of specs in a computer, make it even fast. The tip: think carefully about what kind of internal storage you get in your computer. But first some background.

I review a lot of laptops. I worked on about five or six reviews during the summer/early fall for Notebooks.com. One of those systems was an Acer Aspire E 15 model E5-573G-56RG. Key specs included:

• Intel Core i5 5200U (4th gen)
• NVIDIA GeForce 940M with 4GB of dedicated VRAM
• 8GB of DDR3L RAM

That’s a pretty spiffy system. They’re the best specs of any of the systems I’ve tested over the last two months and they’re higher than my own Windows computers that I regularly use, a Surface Pro 3 and an older Lenovo ThinkPad T431s laptop. If you look at the list above you’ll notice one key spec I left off, the hard drive.

Most of the systems I’ve reviewed recently and my two personal computers have SSDs. That’s a solid state drive that doesn’t come with spinning platters where the data gets stored and the platters must spin to reach the bits. Think of a record player, if you know what one is. The hard drive uses a head the reads the bits on the spinning drive. With an SSD the bits get stored on fast flash memory and it’s very fast compared with the traditional hard drive.

The Acer Aspire E 15 had a 1000GB 5400rpm spinning hard drive instead of an SSD. That’s a lot of storage. My Surface Pro 3 only comes with 128GB and I can’t put everything on it. My Lenovo runs on a 500GB SSD that I put into the machine myself. I store all the programs I need but my video and picture files don’t fit. They’d fit fine on a 1TB drive, which is what I use to back them all up. It’s big and bulky, so I’d love an internal drive. However, a 1TB SSD costs $350 to $500. I will probably get one if they drop any more. I’m still not willing to fork over that much.

How to Speed Up Logos 5 with an SSD

As I shared above, Logos runs great on all my computers. I never considered how important an SSD was until I installed it on this fast Acer machine. Logos 6 runs on it like an octagenarian sloth whose imbibed too much strong drink. Why? Logos needs a fast processor, lots of RAM plus a fast hard drive. The SSDs in all of my computers make up for the fact that some of them don’t run on fast processors. I tested Logos on an HP Stream 13, a computer with an Intel Celeron Processor and 4GB of memory. It struggled to run Logos because it took forever to index the large 18GB library I own. But once indexing quit in ran reasonably well. Logos 6 ran on the Acer slightly better than the Stream, but with a fast SSD it would have run circles around anything else I own.

I could only conclude that a fast SSD has to be the one thing that speeds up Logos 6 faster than any other spec in the machine.

Here’s the point: GET A FAST SSD TO RUN LOGOS 6!

There’s more to the equation than a fast SSD. My HP Stream 13 with a slow Celeron processor proves that. It’s also a problem because the SSD is only 32GB and a large library will gobble up nearly all your free space. Windows 10 plus Office and Logos left me with barely a GB of free space. That’s not enough because Windows uses the hard drive or SSD to cache the operating system and programs we’re running. The OS puts it into memory and when it gets full, it stores some of it in a cache file on the hard drive.

To understand that, imagine you’ve got a bottle of milk. You start pour it into a bowl of cereal, but the cereal and milk start to pour over the sides of the bowl. You don’t want to lose your milk or Captain Crunch so you quickly grab a plate to catch the overflow. In that analogy the milk is the Windows 10 and the Captain Crunch is Logos 6. The bowl is the 4GB of RAM your system says it has and the plate under the bowl is the cache file that temporarily stores the overflow.

I’ve run Logos on systems with 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB of memory. The 2GB system struggles to keep up, but the 4, 8 and 16 perform similarly while running Logos.

I’ve run Logos on Celeron, Intel Core iX, AMD systems. I’ve run it on systems with integrated graphics and dedicated graphics. None of those changed the speed of Logos as much as going from a spinning hard drive to a fast SSD.