How much will an SSD help?

Gundog48

Gundog48

Gundog48

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13 Sep 2009
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Maidstone, Kent
I have recently upgraded my PC heavily and am now trying to round off the edges. The thing that really sticks out as a bottleneck is my single Hitachi Deskstar 500Gb HDD. I am struggling to find the full specs, but from what I gather it has a 16Mb cache and obviously spins at 7200RPM. This drive has about 50Gb of free space and the OS, programs and files are all installed in a horrible mangled mess. I use my PC for gaming, video editing and encoding and personal everyday use. I am aiming to achieve quicker boot times, make my system more responsive and make it more effective for gaming and video editing. Here are the results of my HDD benchmark as well as the rest of my specs:

Screenie2.jpg


An SSD upgrade is on the cards but ideas such as which one to get, what files I should move onto it etc would be greatly appreciated. But my main question is what kind of a difference in visible performance would I get. In terms of general snappiness, gaming, video editing and boot times (my current best boot time is 62 seconds, what should I be looking at with an SSD?)
 
a decent SSD should boot around the 20sec mark, whats your budget for this upgrade? could do with a ssd plus new storage drives too tbh, and what mobo is it?
 
I installed the OCZ 60gb for my boot drive and this takes 25 seconds, I have installed games and programes which don't get much use on a Samsung 1tb drive, still going through my programs to install.
 
95thrifles said:
a decent SSD should boot around the 20sec mark, whats your budget for this upgrade? could do with a ssd plus new storage drives too tbh, and what mobo is it?
Click to expand...

The motherboard is a Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H, it has SATA III as I assume that is what you was wondering! As for budget... well, I am a hardware reviewer, albeit a 14-year-old hardware reviewer, and have got in nicely with Crucial (they have sent me 2 kits of RAM to review directly after the other) so I am hoping to get an SSD to review when they release a new one. If that fails, I would be looking at a £100-120 budget for the SSD, plus whatever a quality storage drive will cost. Hopefully I can spot something on the MM for a good price or get some more review samples coming in!

On that note, would you happen to know if Crucial will be releasing a new SSD in the coming months? ;)
 
not aware of anything, you could tryt blagging one of these off em then, link, even if it dunt need reviewing you might be able to get discount if you deal direct
re mechanical drive Id look at this or this to take advantage of your SATA III
 
Programs (on the SSD) will load quicker. They will be more responsive (loading plugins, paging, and make the computer feels snappier.

I have a similar config (although I do not do video editing but coding).

1) SSD 60GB for the OS and programs (including visual studios and libraries). not even 1/2 full, so plenty of space left.
2) Using the old Barracuda 500GB for junk and windows restore points). First restore point took almost 180GB.
3) using a 1TB F3 for code, storage and games.

Not sure how much you will benefit setting up your software temporary cache on the SSD (I'm sure your video editing software, as a few gigs required of temporary storage for encoding videos and what not). But beware of performance degradation and wear levelling with excessive and constant writing on the SSD.
 
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