Hi,

 

I’ve recently upgraded my PC, including adding a new internal M.2 2TB SSD drive. I’m considering continuing to use my current 250GB SSD as a boot drive. According to my current understanding, Dragon needs to boot from my boot drive, but I could move my user profile to the new 2TB drive.

 

My questions are:

1.      Is my understanding of how Dragon uses multiple drives correct & if so, can someone point me in the direction of a guide (or a post here) that can explain what I need to move to the new drive (e.g., user profile, etc.)?

2.      What would be best practices to installing (part of?) KnowBrainer on a boot drive or a separate drive?

3.      According to Jerry at mtechlaptops’ post here (https://www.knowbrainer.com/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=7&threadid=35806&enterthread=y), moving my pagefile (virtual memory) to my new drive may help boost Dragon’s performance. Is there anything else I should consider adjusting on my PC to optimize a dual-drive set up?

 

4.      I’ve also purchased a 1TB SSD drive that I could use to replace my 250GB SSD as a boot drive. Is there any benefit to doing this or is 250GB enough for a boot drive?

 

Thank you in advance for any help you can give me. My apologies if I’m asking questions that have been answered in other posts. I did a search but was unable to find answers to my specific questions, but this might be user error. Additionally, since this is my first post, if there's anything I should be doing differently, please let me know. Thanks.

 

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Win10/x64, Intel Core i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz, 32/32GB RAM, Dragon Professional Individual 15.61.200.010, KB 2017, Logitech headset / SpeechWare USB 3-in-1 TableMike, Kensington Expert Mouse® Wireless Trackball mouse

Here are my two bits. If you are already booting from an SSD drive, then you're doing about the best you can for overall performance. If the 250 SSD drive is NOT on the motherboard, and if you can install your new M2.SSD drive ON the motherboard, you might be able to get a small improvement in speed because the M2 motherboard I/O channels can be faster than the off-motherboard. And your M2 drive might be somewhat faster than your old 250GB non-M2 drive. But that's a lot of work for very little performance. And to make matters worse, motherboard channels are not always faster. I boot one of my machines off an M2 SSD drive on a PCIe card and it has higher disk IO speeds than the M.2 on the motherboard. So for disk speed, I would recommend forgetting about the possible differences in your scenario.

If you want to explore using the new drive, you can uninstall Dragon and reinstall it on the new M2 drive. That way Dragon itself will load from the M2 drive. But your data files will still be stored on the C: boot drive. Again, I would advise forgetting about that idea too - it's not going to make a difference in Dragon speed.

As with all modern drives, the boot speed from disk is not worth thinking about. The OS loads the windows runtime and other files (10x the size of your app files) into each new process that it creates, all in a flicker of an instant.

The best idea to pursue is #4, booting from a 1TB SSD drive (hopefully using an existing M2 socket on your motherboard). That way you'd get higher M2 socket bandwith, a (hopefully) faster M2 SSD disk, AND a "roomy" boot disk. The concepts underlything this recommendation are that SSD disks that are nearly full slow down significantly. And depending on your software life and how many apps you have installed, 250GB is NOT a lot of room for a boot drive. For example, my C: drive is on a 1TB drive and is currently using 361GB. And I store all my data on other drives - that 361GB is mostly app files and local OS/app temp files.

I wish I had installed a 2TB boot drive instead. Which brings me to my next bit of advice. If you are going to do all this reinstallation and disk drive work, I would 1) check how much space is being used on your C drive, 2) buy a new M2 drive that is WAY bigger than your used C drive space, and then clone/image your C drive to the new big drive and get into the bios to tell it which drive to boot from. That will give you all the speed you're ever going to get from better drives.

You might be able to speed things up by adding more RAM (but you haven't talked about that).

After that, you might as well build a new computer from the ground up. And even then, you won't see a big improvement in Dragon speed. (I've done that three times in the past decade, and the only things that made a significant difference were - (1) new generations of motherboards + new generation of CPUs + new generation of SSD disks and (2) a kind of RAM disk software SSDKeeper, which batches up I/O requests to avoid excess wear on your SSD disks and caches heavily used files in memory - I could feel the difference with that piece of software. Unfortunately, they changed their pricing model to make it unaffordable for normal users.

Finally, I would recommend that you not worry about Dragon boot speed. The time it takes to boot Dragon has almost nothing to do with IO speed, and almost everything to do with the Dragon code setting up its internal data structures. The OS can easily load 100x (or probably 1000x) the size of the Dragon binary and voice files from the disk in a flicker of an instant. It's Dragon itself that takes forever to set up its internal environment. If you can boot Dragon in anything close to RW's 10-12 second Dragon boot times (I hope I remember those timings correctly), then that's as good as you can get.

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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

Thank you for your detailed and helpful response.

 

               Just to clarify, both of my hard drives are on the motherboard. My motherboard is older and has one PCIe ×16 slot available and 6 SATA slots available. The outdated (And almost completely full) boot drive is a 250GB SATA SSD drive. My new 2TB M.2 SSD drive is already installed and connected through a PCIe ×4 adapter card. Even with the adapter, the read and write times from the M.2 drive are supposed to be five times faster then my SATA SSD drive.

               After installing the M.2 drive (of course), I read online similar information to what you expressed expressed about the channels on the motherboard potentially not being able to take advantage of the full speed of the M.2 drive, depending upon how the motherboard is wired. The comment I read said the only way you can tell is (of course) to try it out, which I have not done yet. I guess this is what makes our lives interesting, right?

               Also after installing the M.2 drive, I discovered that I most likely cannot use the M.2 drive as the boot drive because the BIOS can’t read it (the motherboard developer’s website even indicates that this is an issue for many of their motherboards & I'm guessing that mine is old enough to probably be in that camp). I need to update the BIOS and see if it recognizes the M.2 drive then, because that would solve my boot disc problem (which was my original plan). But more than likely, I won’t be able to boot from this drive.

               If using the M.2 as a boot drive doesn’t work, I’m going to take your advice and upgrade the 250GB SATA SSD drive to a 1TB SATA SSD drive. At that point, my question about what to move to the M.2 drive becomes important.

               I hadn’t mentioned RAM, but part of my upgrade was to max out my motherboard’s RAM at 32GB.

               I’m fine with the boot times for my OS & Dragon. I'm more concerned about speed while Dragon is running.

               My long-term plan would be to build a new machine & it may be happening sooner than I think it is. Thank you for your advice, kkkwj, on what to look for. This sort of thing helps me immeasurably.

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Win10/x64, Intel Core i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz, 32/32GB RAM, Dragon Professional Individual 15.61.200.010, KB 2017, Logitech headset / SpeechWare USB 3-in-1 TableMike, Kensington Expert Mouse® Wireless Trackball mouse

Kevin, didn't I post a video demonstrating it? If not, should I repost it?

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One thing I found is that I like to keep my boot drive reserved just for programs, Windows etc. and I like to keep it small. My present PC is a 1 GB C Drive and a 2 GB D drive but I actually have about 300 MB on the C drive and like it that way. That way I can do a Macrium Reflect image of the drive and keep it as small as possible. I store them on my D drive and always keep the last 3. Keeping them small need to take them less space and drive. It's awful of me to try things and that system drive and restore to the previous fully functional settings if a problem occurs.

Doug, forget about swapping and upgrading hardware to make Dragon run faster; it won't happen. Save your effort and time and invest it elsewhere. Dragon is single-threaded and CPU-bound in its operation. If you want to make it "run faster" try moving the slider bar in options to "fastest speed/lower accuracy." That will make it respond to your utterances faster, but depending on a dozen things, you might lose a bit of accuracy.

Sabrent has a -40% off sale on their 2TB Rocket M2 drives right now. An EXCELLENT deal. https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Internal-Maximum-Performance-SB-RKTQ4-2TB/dp/B08D29JQ24

Yes, some motherboards are too old to boot from M2 drives. I had to upgrade my BIOS too (ASUS/AMD motherboard) to get it to boot from M2 on the motherboard. Another issue can be the security stuff in Win11 - UEFI. If you want UEFI (fast boot, secure boot, etc.), then you can't use the legacy setting in the BIOS. For my two bits, your machine sounds maxxed out. I'd say save your time and effort and put it elsewhere.

FWIW, I'm with Msradell on keeping your boot drive as small as possible; programs only, and so on. I've done that for decades because a smaller C drives reduces the backup times when I image the disk. But the trend for apps is to store a lot of their data in the user/roaming/appdata folders on the C drive, so I feel like I'm losing ground on trying to keep it small.

RW - I can't remember if you posted a video or just said it in a post, but for my two bits, your times were (and are) the gold standard for fast Dragon boot times. So I'm happy telling anyone that there is NO WAY that reading from the disk can take up 12 seconds - that's all CPU Dragon setup time. As I type, I recall that you're also the world Dragon export on recognition times too - I remember you saying that if the Dragon recognition time is anywhere close to .85 of the speaking time, that's as good as you can expect.

On the whole Dragon-speed-up thing that people have, I want to say, "Consider the end-to-end time that you spend thinking a lot and speaking a little, and you'll see that your overall working speed is absolutely dominated by your thinking time and not the Dragon recognition time (excluding making corrections to botched dictations). So if you want to "speed up" overall, work on your thinking and related processes, not on your hardware." Or something like that; it is what I do.

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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

This is correct on all accounts. Consider that Dragon always starts the race handicapped, as it always has to wait for your input coming in, and whenever it manages to get the job done in about 85% of the time it took you to get across the finishing line, not even Usain Bolt could do better. :-)



Same as above, as far as correctness. Given the above, performance (speed) and accuracy of the recognition result always tend to be better the longer the phrases are that you dictate. The higher the confidence about the recognition result, which grows proportionally along the length of the utterance, the faster the recognition process will be terminated and output will be provided. Performance and accuracy always come together, you can't have one without the other.

The overall computer capacities don't matter, it all boils down to dictation style and habits.

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