Buying SSD + samsung f3, do i really need to?

Roksonixx · 17 Mar 2011 at 02:21

Hey, just looking for some input on my decision to purchase an SSD and samsung f3's to replace my ageing baraccuda 7200.10's

firstly, i have 3 baraccuda's in raid 0, here is what they're doing at the minute:

http://img269.imageshack.us/i/hdtunev.png/

im just wondering, is it worth buying 2 samsung f3's, or will i be wasting my money? for 180MB/s my pc seems real slow when it comes to the hard drive part of things

booting into a clean install of windows usually takes ~ 1minute30 to get fully loaded (ie desktop and no slowdown when launching firefox), and performance is poor when multitasking (ie copying a file, i then get some hangups with the mouse and a few seconds lag on windows, surely for 180MB/s thats quite unreasonable?)

i'm just wondering if im having too high expectations here...these drives are a few years old, no errors are reported and benchmarks seem fine with the drives speed, they just feel a lot slower than they used to be,

when i've got all my apps loaded onto windows, a full bootup takes a good 45 seconds longer, and i've seen the speed of some SSD's and they fly when windows boots up and loads about 20 programs in 1-2 seconds flat, however my drives are forever loading a few lightweight apps, and the whole system suffers as a result until everythings done (yes ive defragmented)

i assume this is to do with poor I/O operations per second on normal harddrives, but also game loading times are quite long too, are they not sequential? because if im understanding it correctly, at 180MB/s... i should've loaded about a gig of data in 5 seconds, yet maps for games are taking 30seconds + to load, is this unreasonable or have i missed the point?

anyway, the point is would i notice a big difference in OS speed and loading times if i went with a SSD, and is there any point in "upgrading" my 3 existing drives, to 2 samsung drives, or am i wasting my money

bifday2k · 17 Mar 2011 at 04:29

I use an SSD for my OS/App's and boot time is fast around the 20sec region, also loading of apps.

I use 1 single Samsung F3 1GB for my data and games, split into 2 partitions.

So id definatly say an SSD would be a good choice, if your sick of the boot/load times, now onto the hard drives u have, once they are released from OS duties, they should be fine with data/games, ok there not the fastest out there.

So getting 2 sammies would give you a further boost in speed of games loading/data transfer, 250MB/s+ when raided. Iv been thinking of doing it myself, but hav'nt bothered yet as i find a single sammy fast enough for my needs.

JonJ678 · 17 Mar 2011 at 11:35

An ssd will get you reduced boot and loading times, and general usage will be lower latancy. Swapping the hard drives for new hard drives is unlikely to make a noticeable difference.

Your old three disk raid 0 is backed up I hope? Your data really is gone if one of those drives fail

Chiribo · 17 Mar 2011 at 11:54

As others have mentioned you really will see an improvement in performance if you get a SSD. Your access times are rather high at nearly 14ms with the little splatters on the graph going up to 100 in rare occasions.

Simply going for a 120GB SSD should see you fine for OS and several games & apps. You should see the performance increase straight away

Mr Krugga · 17 Mar 2011 at 13:37

Raid 0 two of the HDDs, make a backup drive on the third one, 128GB SSD for OS (15%), most played games (50%), apps (30%), other (5%) - that's what I've got atm.

Move all libraries to the storage drives, simple tweaks will allow to reduce used space on the SSD.

Store music/videos/other games on the HDDs. Documents on the back up drive.

Tomtom3989 · 17 Mar 2011 at 13:42

+1 Get a ssd for you os
and only get a newer hd for your games if you feel your baraccuda's are to slow
you will really only need one f3, the only advantage to raid 0 will be game loading times are slightly quicker and also transfer rates. so up to you

Mr Krugga · 17 Mar 2011 at 13:44

Tomtom3989 said:
+1 Get a ssd for you os
and only get a newer hd for your games if you feel your baraccuda's are to slow
you will really only need one f3, the only advantage to raid 0 will be game loading times are slightly quicker and also transfer rates. so up to you

I doubt that loading times would be quicker with F3s in RAID 0. Access times are usually marginally higher in RAID setups.

Tomtom3989 · 17 Mar 2011 at 21:55

Ok perhaps i should change that slightly to marginally. But to the point for games you only really need one good drive and the f3 will do the job.