Beginner's Question - Should I go for SDD

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I have just refreshed my son's PC. It started off when the MoBo died (bad capacitors) and I intended to get it up and running as cheaply as possible.

But as usually, upgraditis took over and it is now spec'ed much higher than I originally intended.

At the time I did consider putting in a 128GB SDD alongside the original 320GB HDD.

But in the end I decided to just go with a newer SATA III 1TB.

I'm now having reconsiderations, but still not convinced what benefits an SDD would bring.

Here is my thinking :-

I appreciate that they are faster, but that is for loading and once the programme is in RAM the disk speed is of little relevence.

When talking speed increase we are talking a boot taking 15 seconds rather than a minute, or a program loading in 5 secs rather than 15 seconds. Orders of magnitude bigger but in absolute terms saving you a few seconds waiting.

From what I've read, contrary to what you would normally excpect, SDDs are less relaible than HDDs.

The small size is inconvenient - making you put thought into what you store where, juggling things around when you run out of space and tidying up (TRIM) to keep performance decent as the disk fills.

And I would expect to pay around the £80 mark (maybe a little cheaper). Would I be better adding an extra £30-£40 to upgrade the graphics card from HD4870 to something like a HD7850 instead.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Last edited:
Okay, supplementary question.

SATA II vs SATA III

I get the impression that with mechanical drives SATA III is a bit of a marketing spin, because whilst the MoBo and the HDD may have SATA III interfaces, the tecnology simply can't move data that fast can't even fill SATA II bandwidth.

So the net result for mechanical drives is that the performance of SATA II and SATA III drives is practically the same.


But is the same true for SSD?

Cheers,

Nigel
 
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