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Wucked

Wucked

Wucked

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Just thought I'd pop my head in here and post a semi-troll thread. Well more of an opinionated rant crossed with a question really...

It seems to me that SSD's are a waste of time and money. Yay its a new(ish) consumer technology (actually been around in the server market for over a decade) and yes its faster than mechanical drives, oh and it makes my epeen twitch slightly.. But, and this is a big one... Its...

1. Poor value for money
2. Only really works properly with Vista +
3. Unreliable

So lets take a quick look on ocuk... Hmm. About £200 for 128GB of SSD storage? But I could buy 1x 3TB, or even 4 x 1TB mechanical HDD's and still have change for that! In fact with a 4 x 1TB solution I could quite happily run RAID 10 and waste a couple of them for a fault tolerant porn library, just for the sake of it, and still be better off...

So my **** loads a few seconds slower than yours, but once it loads it runs at exactly the same fps (talking games here but same for many other apps too). So why should I bother getting an SSD? The only real use that I can see for them right now is in laptops, where they have a weight and power consumption advantage on top of speed, which I admit is great for working away from the mains...

Flame away! Tears of rage if possible please, they are especially tasty. Salty keeper.
 
It's all down to personal opinion.

I personally have just gone the SSD route and am very happy with performance, which is purely what I bought it for. I didn't buy it to have loads of space to play with, I bought it for speed.

I didn't want to fanny about with a raid array which, by your own admission, would be slower, take up more room in my case, draw more power, generate more heat and create more noise than a single SSD.
 
meh, each to their own.

i've got an ssd, and stepping up from a raid 0 setup it's much faster, stuff installs quicker and an the whole runs great.

so what if you don't get a lot of storage at the moment, that's 1/2 the point in that you put the stuff you want to load fast on the ssd, then big stuff on hard drives.

best of both world that way ;)
 
philtorrens said:
I think you'll find current Flash memory is more reliable that any mechanical HDD.

And as for value for money - it's still new Tech so that's to be expected. Once it's becomes mainstream then prices will drop considerably.
Click to expand...

I think you'll find (not that you really care, but still...) that I've got legacy systems running DOS from the early 90's that are still using their original HDD's. So considering that current Flash memory is at best only a few years old, its still unproven how accurate manufacturers reliability claims are. And honestly I've heard and read sooo much bull from manufacturers and vendors over the years that I don't believe anything they say anymore.

Yes its a new tech and its expected that there will be a premium for it, but this stuff? In its current form its several orders of magnitude more expensive, ridiculously more so.

I kind of respect the argument that goes "I bought it just for the performance...", that's all fine. But I still maintain that for any reasonable purchaser its largely pointless.
 
I agree with the OP SSDs are such poor value for money for anything other than faster booting. If that's important to you then by all means spend the cash, but it just seems like such a waste to me.

But then, this logic applies accross a lot of new tech - very few people "need" it, few people willactually "use" it to its potential - but some people enjoy the thrill of knowing they have the latest/fastest thing etc.
 
AtticusFinch said:
I agree with the OP SSDs are such poor value for money for anything other than faster booting. If that's important to you then by all means spend the cash, but it just seems like such a waste to me.

But then, this logic applies accross a lot of new tech - very few people "need" it, few people willactually "use" it to its potential - but some people enjoy the thrill of knowing they have the latest/fastest thing etc.
Click to expand...

I'd argue that SSD is better for laptop users right now as they use less power and have greater shock resistance...
 
Wucked said:
1. Poor value for money
Click to expand...

Define value for money.

In terms of cost per GB then absolutely - it sucks. But if you are using a SSD to store a load of files then you are doing it wrong.

The main benefit of SSDs for desktop users is super low access times, and very quick random reads and writes. These charatertistics means that all applications/files load up faster when run off the SSD - this means that your PC "feels" faster as you are not waiting for things to happen as often as you were with a mechanical HDD. With a modern mid/high end PC there are many instances in general operation where the mechanical HDD is the performance bottleneck - an SSD helps reduce these bottlenecks.

As for value-for-money with a mobile system the SSD has other features that can justify its price. Especially silence, low heat output, low power consumption and resilience to movement/dropping.

Wucked said:
2. Only really works properly with Vista +
Click to expand...

Well it works fine in XP, you just can't use TRIM. If you use a drive with aggressive garbage collection (like the modern kingstons) then it shouldn't be much of an issue.

Anyway Vista was released in 2006 - i'd don't think it's fair to condemn SSDs (relatively cutting edge tech) just because they don't work optimally on systems using a 10 year old OS.

Wucked said:
3. Unreliable
Click to expand...

Compared to mechanical HDDs?

Wucked said:
So lets take a quick look on ocuk... Hmm. About £200 for 128GB of SSD storage? But I could buy 1x 3TB, or even 4 x 1TB mechanical HDD's and still have change for that! In fact with a 4 x 1TB solution I could quite happily run RAID 10 and waste a couple of them for a fault tolerant porn library, just for the sake of it, and still be better off...
Click to expand...

As I mentioned above, you pay a premium for the speed of an SSD, just like with any high-end tech. Even with a super-fast RAID 10 array the access times and random read/write speeds would not touch SSD.

If large storage space is what you need then mechanical drives will be the king for some time to come. Hence why most people run a moderately sized SSD (for boot drive and key apps) alongside one (or more) mechanical storage drives (often in a RAID array) for cheap, reliable storage.


Wucked said:
So my **** loads a few seconds slower than yours, but once it loads it runs at exactly the same fps (talking games here but same for many other apps too).
Click to expand...

If you buy an SSD and you are primarily a gamer then you are certainly barking up the wrong tree.

However, many here use their PCs for a lot apart from gaming and many of these applications make heavy use of the storage drive. In these applications the extra speed of an SSD provides a definite, tangible performance increase.
 
cmndr_andi said:
With a modern mid/high end PC there are many instances in general operation where the mechanical HDD is the performance bottleneck - an SSD helps reduce these bottlenecks.
Click to expand...

This! My iMac is so nicely specced, but it has the most awful hard drive I've ever used. Definitely a bottleneck to the whole system. As proved, an SSD will turn this into a fantastic machine.

As people have said, it depends on your usage. Personally I can't wait till I have an SSD.
 
@ cmndr_andi

If you actually read the OP properly you'll see that I already recognise they are good for mobile devices. I don't contest this.

Define value for money? Well its certainly not just value per GB. Its also little things like for the same price as a single SSD I can run 4 x 1TB drives in RAID 5, getting near RAID 0 performance (not that much slower than SSD tbh) along with about 3.5 times more space, fault tolerance, and still have change left over.

Mechanical drives operate and perform equally well across all operating systems, regardless of age. Oh and not just Microsoft OS either. Its yet another detractor from SSD value for money tbh.

I'm not primarily anything, but this is a consumer level website and the most common user here is most likely to be a gamer. For professional use most of the time I'd still argue for cheap and reliable mechanical HDD RAID storage over SSD's.

Its only if I was running some really heavy mission critical database activity, like the back end of Eve Online or something, that I'd start to consider solid state storage. But that's way beyond the scope of this discussion.
 
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while my raid 5 raed speeds are higher than my ssd, my ssd is much "faster" due to the low seek times. Purely use it for OS/standard apps, anything else its too expensive for the amount of storage. But it wasnt that long ago that mechanical HDD's were a couple of quid per gb. For anything other than an OS/apps drive I dont think they are worth it, but I am unwilling to build a new machine/laptop and not have an SSD as my boot drive now as it just makes it so much nicer to use.

17 second boot time + everything loads almost instantly all the time, yes plx.
 
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