It's heresy but .............

[Hagar]

............. I do not see the benefit of an SSD with the current cost per gigabyte.

Pros, fast boot and program loading (for programs on the SSD). Quiet

Cons, restriction on disk usage, low capacities (unless you can afford 240Gb+, a full SSD slows down). Slightly flaky requiring OS and bios support to operate optimally as well as significant user input.

All for up to 40x the cost of a decent hard disk where you can without too much thought load whatever you want.

Once the program is loaded with a decent amount of ram on board, there is little real world advantage running from an SSD. You can get a lot of extra processor and ram for half the cost of a big SSD. Fast boot times will be addressed by improvements to OS and bios, I am not convinced that saving a minute once or twice a day is very important. Intelligent caching and even RAM disks may improve the program usage. Quiet I can understand, the hard disk is the noisiest component in my PC but even that does not persuade me to invest.

Maybe down the road with a 5x premium on a HDD say 25p per gig. I would consider them half reasonable but only when 500Mb is a common size.

On the above criteria, I shall decline at this time.

 

[suitheist]

Its really about the snappiness of the desktop experience; having everything open instantly. It wipes out those irritating system stalls where something is just clearly taking far too long to do anything. This may be just me, but it's the short delays of sub 1 min on small tasks which I find most annoying.

Of course, if that and boot times etc does't interest you, then you are probably right not to buy one.

 

[|Thomas|]

This has been discussed many a time and it seems to boil down to the type of user you are. If you're the sort of person who leaves their computer on all the time with everything cached to the ram then it's going to make no difference. If however you're like me, who turns his computer off regularly and uses a large range of apps then an ssd is fantastic .

Another example. Last weekend I bought an i5 2500k to replace my ageing athlon II x4 620. I bought it because the whole world said it was the best thing since sliced bread, and my motherboard is on its last legs anyway.

Honestly, I noticed no performance gain from using it over my 620. It's not that there isn't one, it is clearly an infinitely better CPU in every way, but I just don't use CPU intensive tasks. Sadly the new motherboard was broken anyway so it all went back, and I'm now back running my 620 .

The moral of the story: everyone uses a computer in a different way. For me, an SSD was some of the best money I've ever spent, but I totally appreciate for some it would be pointless. The i5, even with a working motherboard, would have gone down as one of my worst upgrade choices, but I totally see why people love them .

All in all, if your computer is fast enough for what you want, good times!

 

[amjl2000]

i remember when a 4gb hdd cost £150.
just sayin'

ssds are under £1 per gb (well, one is), so for me to put a bloated 20gb install of win7 costs £20. I pay more for other bits of computer which in my mind don't make as much difference.

each to their own though

 

[Hagar]

i remember when a 4gb hdd cost £150.
just sayin'

ssds are under £1 per gb (well, one is), so for me to put a bloated 20gb install of win7 costs £20. I pay more for other bits of computer which in my mind don't make as much difference.

each to their own though

Likewise my first HDD was 40Mb and probably cost the same as a 60Gb SSD, but that is by the by.

I do not leave my PC on as I only use it evenings and weekends at home. However I am probably the type of person who does not gain a huge amount from an SSD as I do not game, I use VM's a lot ranging from MSDOS to flavours of Linux. I browse and I code for a hobby.
My computer is fast (in my opinion) and loading VM's is snappy enough, rarely more than a few seconds. I do not get stalling at all rarely seeing the dreaded hourglass or blue circle, except sometimes during the router connect on boot that is probably down to the router rather than windows.

 

[Vegeta]

It costs a lot of money compared to a normal hard drive but it's not exactly a huge sum of money for a 60gb SSD when people easily spend £300-£400 on a graphics card or over £100 on a psu. If spending a extra £80 is really going to bother you then don't spend it. Doesn't bother me and I enjoy the benefits. Normal computers annoy me now waiting with every little thing.

I've got a I5 2500K @4.4ghz with 4GB of DDR3 ram and a GTX 480. Going all the way back to my old AMD Athlon 3800X2 with a 8800GT and 4GB of DDR I have not noticed any single slight performance increase operating in windows until I got this SSD.