Solid State Drives - **** me!

I could never go back to mechanical now. The SATA 3 speed and silence are now key elements of my computing experience. Listening to the 2TB F4's I have in my HTPC winding up and clunking away makes me wonder how I used to put up with it.

jozza800 said:
How easy is that to set up? It is the same sort of scenario I am intending on using for my next build.
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If you know how to change the c:\ to a d:\ when a program asks you where to install a program, your pretty much there. :D
 
Robbie G said:
When the hell are BIOSes going to disappear anyway? They're so old and stupid. All that time it takes up on boot is ridiculous.
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These people who the BBC reported on seem to think that the "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface" could take just seconds to boot once BIOS systems have been replaced with it ...

/And yea my SSD is great even though it's not running at it's best.
 
Vertex 2E 60GB now under £100... to buy or not to buy. Also the Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB for £100. But I don't have Sata 6GB/s.

Might wait till around X-mas and hope you can get a 120GB for about £100.
 
The more I read the more I get reluctant to buy, id need 160gb min and that's expensicr, I do not want to have to spend ages thinking what to put where.. kinda defeats the time savung.. also i like others would want to put a lot of games on.. right now I have 2 wd velociraptor which cost 100 each..600gb in raid for 200 pound and boot is pretty quick.. nothing else is that slow either.. game loading is probably the area that annoys me most and its here people say doesn't get sped up much :/
 
Gave into curiosity and installed a Patriot 128GB as an OS & apps drive. Coming from a single WD AAKS.

I'd decribe the upgrade experiance as 'good', but having seen it with my own eyes, SSDs are a little overhyped given the cost. Things load a bit quicker alright, but it doesn't change the overall experiance too much. Put it this way, my girlfriend, who uses my desktop a lot, hasn't remarked on any difference (she doesn't know I've upgraded anything).

I've seen much more substantial performance gains by changing gfx cards, cpus, memory and even OS's. I think SSDs will catch on eventually, but nowhere near as soon as people think - unless capacities get significantly higher, and prices considerably lower. I still feel it's a luxury upgrade. Nice to have, but definately not a must have.

I think disk speed is like memory capacity. You only notice when you don't have enough - you reach a turning point where upgrading offers very little return.

My original thought was to consider a 300gb next gen SSD in the spring for my game installs. Now I'm wondering if a pair of decent mechanical drives in RAID0 might not get more value and utility for the price. If were talking games, are speed and capacity more important than access times? Any thoughts?
 
Run the ATTO benchmark to see what speeds you're getting. :)

Personally, I think SSDs have caught on already, plenty people/manufacturers seem to be going that route. I think SSDs are here to stay and what's even better is they'll only get bigger, faster and more importantly, cheaper.
 
shoot1st said:
Run the ATTO benchmark to see what speeds you're getting. :)
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Yawn, no thanks! Subjective real world usage for me! It's definately running the way it's supposed to, I'm not worried about that. Great disk :)

shoot1st said:
Personally, I think SSDs have caught on already, plenty people/manufacturers seem to be going that route. I think SSDs are here to stay and what's even better is they'll only get bigger, faster and more importantly, cheaper.
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As it stands, they're probably popular with high trans data centres and enthusiasts. No one else needs em atm unless they get cheaper and bigger. but then so will the data :(

I'd imagine it will be a long while before SSDs get a significant share of the market off HDDs. I believe they'll exist in tandom over the next 10-15 years. SSDs for speed, HDDs for storage. Some good hybrid products could really change the game.

SSDs are great, but I feel were being led to believe they're the second coming. They're not. They're a luxury untill they get cheaper.
 
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I use S3 sleep most of the time anyhow. One click of the mouse/keyboard the machine is ready, before my monitor actually. Reboot once a week or so :)

I'll wait till the price per GB halves before even considering one tbh. I have a 32GB SSD in my netbook, though I got that free :)
 
bfar said:
Yawn, no thanks! Subjective real world usage for me! It's definately running the way it's supposed to, I'm not worried about that. Great disk :)

As it stands, they're probably popular with high trans data centres and enthusiasts. No one else needs em atm unless they get cheaper and bigger. but then so will the data :(

I'd imagine it will be a long while before SSDs get a significant share of the market off HDDs. I believe they'll exist in tandom over the next 10-15 years. SSDs for speed, HDDs for storage. Some good hybrid products could really change the game.

SSDs are great, but I feel were being led to believe they're the second coming. They're not. They're a luxury untill they get cheaper.
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I know what you mean regarding 'yawn', it's not really my cup of tea either. I just ran it when I first got the drive to make sure it was set up and running correctly i.e. I was getting somewhere near the speeds I was supposed to be getting.

I think that once SSDs become cheaper and larger they will definitely replace mechanical HDDs, and I don't think that'll take 10-15 years to happen tbh, it'll be a couple more years at most.

Atm, I think the ideal partnership and cost/peformance balance is to use a SSD for the OS and apps and to use mechanical drives for storage.
 
For me it was mind blowing its the best upgrade I have ever done with my computer to give back so much performance. I have upgrade the CPU, RAM etc but all give a little extra performance, but the upgrade from a 74gb rapters HDD to a C300 64gb was amazing, best upgrade for the money.
 
You're still slightly better (and will get more speed) with a many drive raid (raid 0 is cool but obviously suicide if you're not anal with backups, raid 5 hardware can be cheapish). 3+ (modern) drives in raid 5 on a hardware card will still toast the SSD's for everything but speed of access. It's annoying having to wait for another BIOS to post, yes but everything else works wonderfully.

Currently running a vertex2 120Mb and a single, none raid F3. The addition of 4 smallish F4's (on a perc 5/i) is looking like it will make the cut for the final upgrade this year, backups on the F3.
 
My 500GB SATA OS drive isn't using 100GB as it's OS, apps and games only, I've still not got an SSD even though I've hinted at it for ages, just...prices!

£180 for the Patriot 120GB seems good though, I could clone my SATA on to it and there'd be no need to change my storage methods at all either. Just turn off the necessary services to prepare for the SSD and job done!

I'm mainly in it for the almost instant boot times, instant app loading and response times :p
 
I'm still feeling that moving to SSD will be fruitless other than the noise and power usage.

It'd be pretty hard for any single SSD (or even RAID 0'd SSDs) to match the speed of my 6-disk RAID5 array.

Not to mention the fact I'd lose one frigging humongous amount of storage space.

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My computer still takes nearly a minute to boot on my Intel G25 M 160GB, but 90% of that time is slow posting times of the Motherboard.

Gotta love the SSD though - no waiting around for programs to load ever.
Click MSN - its open, click skype, youve signed in, click internet and its there. Pure bliss and what you want from an expensive computer.
 
The response time will still be faster with an SSD. To be fair, a 6 disk Raid 5 is not a typical desktop scenario so 'replacing it all' with an SSD is a different proposition for you, paradigm.
 
manishpatel80 said:
For me it was mind blowing its the best upgrade I have ever done with my computer to give back so much performance. I have upgrade the CPU, RAM etc but all give a little extra performance, but the upgrade from a 74gb rapters HDD to a C300 64gb was amazing, best upgrade for the money.
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For me, it's the other way round. Having already had decent components, access times were already decent, and load times were good enough that I wouldn't have noticed any delays unless loading certain games or copying large amount of files.

If I were to recommend to a friend, I'd advise them to spend the extra money on cpu or gfx, or even an IPS monitor - there are much better returns there. I'd even make sure I had a decent case before I splashed out on SSD.

Now if we were upgrading from a slow 5400 rpm drive, well yea, I'd probably be pretty stoked with the SSD's speed. However, a good £40 HDD is still fast enough to knock out most bottlenecks.

I'm very happy with the SSD, but I'd be honest enough to admit that's it's not for everbody, even at the cheaper price of £150 that I paid.

As a matter of interest, what was your old drive manishpatel?
 
paradigm said:
I'm still feeling that moving to SSD will be fruitless other than the noise and power usage.

It'd be pretty hard for any single SSD (or even RAID 0'd SSDs) to match the speed of my 6-disk RAID5 array.

Not to mention the fact I'd lose one frigging humongous amount of storage space.

/snip huge image
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Raid-5 using onboard really works ok?
 
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