Still not convinced by these SSD's

Amraam · 14 May 2011 at 00:24

Well for me it was either spend £90 on a RAID controller to boost my RAID0 of my 2x 320AAKs (which are about 18 months old now), or just spend £90 on a much faster (albeit only 1/10 the capacity) new SSD.

I haven't decided exactly what I'm doing yet. I'm tempted to RAID0 the drives I currently have for my OS, and put games on it. OTOH, I could RAID1 it and put vital documents (mainly my 80GB music collection, and save my 1TB Hitachi for my HD movies etc.

JasonM · 15 May 2011 at 02:09

Providing your computer has lots of memory (8GB upwards), then diskspeed for the most part is overrated. Yes an SSD makes a big different to load times, however a Windows 7 computer that's left working most program data will be loaded by superfetch. I do have a 64GB SSD however it's used for readyboost, page file, and indexing repository (not booting).

At night I hibernate the PC and it loads very fast the next day. If I have to do a regular reboot then after 10 minuets would say most programs I'm using are cached, and PC is very responsive. As someone in this thread mentioned Superfetch (main memory access) is still faster than any SSD, plus configuration below is also covering media drives.

Edit I made a visio diagram of above. It's not on diagram but Readyboost size is 32GB, page file is windows managed. Superfetch is also not shown, but think of this of a caching layer above everything else but only caching boot and application files.

StevenG · 15 May 2011 at 12:39

Basically, Hdd's are the slowest piece of hardware in a pc (excluding optical), upgrading to a faster drive would increase the speed of the pc overall in most situations.

Ive had high end setups including raid0 over 3 drives which i admit was rather quick, upgrading to ssd's after that is quicker again (im talking about over a year ago when they were really new tech) since then the speeds, size and price are all going the right way.

i currently own a range of apple hardware, main pc using an iMac 27", the slowest thing in the pc (and most pc's will be) is the hard drive, and not to mention the noise, amazingly loud due to the fact its only 45cm from your face it was annoying me in both noise and speed.

ssd in my situation was much much faster and silent, i agree with a post above they make a lot of sense in laptops but desktops benefit just as much, im impatient and i dont like waiting not just booting but loading applications, using visualstudio, photoshop etc all big applications load almost instantly and are ready to use.

at the end of the day its up to personal choice but raid0 hdd's can be loud, take up a lot of space and ssd's being the faster option in most cases makes more sense to a lot of people.

StevenG

MumboJumbo · 19 May 2011 at 00:26

I was all set for buying an agility 3 ssd and canceled my second 480GTX SE as a result (now gone up in price too). Now i've read through this and feel it will not be worth it for me.

I game, I use chrome and I listen to music. Am I really going to see any improvement worth £200?

How many of you are saying it's amazing because you use photoshop etc?

Buchanan0204 · 19 May 2011 at 04:49

8igdave said:
I was all set for buying an agility 3 ssd and canceled my second 480GTX SE as a result (now gone up in price too). Now i've read through this and feel it will not be worth it for me.

I game, I use chrome and I listen to music. Am I really going to see any improvement worth £200?

How many of you are saying it's amazing because you use photoshop etc?

Oh dear. Look what I've started

. My £200 would be going towards another GPU for SLI if you like to game, future proof you for five years anyway. Or another monitor to make a nice dual screen setup. Great for multitasking. I spent £320 on two Vertex 2's last year and I so wish I had got another monitor or two.

Is shaving a few seconds off your boot time worth £200. If your not obsessed with benchmarks and dream about binary code, the answer is usually, "NO!"

Roll on SLI

P.S. With regards to photoshop. Photoshop is installed on my SSD's, however the images are not. I have two many images to store them on the C:. So it sort of defeats the purpose anyway. Photoshop loads instantly on HDD's once stored in cache anyway.

Troezar · 19 May 2011 at 06:40

8igdave said:
I was all set for buying an agility 3 ssd and canceled my second 480GTX SE as a result (now gone up in price too). Now i've read through this and feel it will not be worth it for me.

I game, I use chrome and I listen to music. Am I really going to see any improvement worth £200?

How many of you are saying it's amazing because you use photoshop etc?

Never used PhotoShop but an SSD is the single best upgrade I've done. All pc's I build from now on will have one. Not so sure RAID is worth it but a single SSD certainly is

MumboJumbo · 19 May 2011 at 10:03

Why must people have so many different opinions! I might just buy one anyway and sell it on if it's not great. Not really bothered about loosing 50 quid or what ever in the resale. Probably could sell it for more.

FrenchTart · 19 May 2011 at 11:29

I've still not seen much evidence to make me want to upgrade to an SSD immediately. If you've got fast mechanical drives I don't think you're going to notice much of a difference.

FreeStream · 19 May 2011 at 11:31

FrenchTart said:
I've still not seen much evidence to make me want to upgrade to an SSD immediately. If you've got fast mechanical drives I don't think you're going to notice much of a difference.

Wrong.

I had a WD Velociraptor before my SSD and the difference is light and day.

Itching to get my MBP upgraded to a SSD as it does my head in waiting for it to do stuff now.

FrenchTart · 19 May 2011 at 11:34

Concorde Rules said:
Wrong.

I had a WD Velociraptor before my SSD and the difference is light and day.

Itching to get my MBP upgraded to a SSD as it does my head in waiting for it to do stuff now.

You probably just got the speed boost from a fresh install.

I've seen a decent SSD side by side with my short stroked F4s and the loading times were the same for pretty much all games. I really don't care about boot times and didn't notice any difference for general app loading either.

I'm sure that there are cases where SSDs are great but people generally inflate the differences between SSDs and normal hdds.

Buchanan0204 · 19 May 2011 at 15:54

I think we should ask for a poll.

Q: Are SSD's worth it

1. No, far too expensive and are over hyped for not enough gain.
2. I couldn't be without mine, makes a huge difference!

Izi · 19 May 2011 at 16:28

Anyone who develops programs will tell you SSDs make a world of difference.

For Dorothy using Word I wouldn't bother. SSDs are for people who actually need to use a computer, not look at it and check emails.

FrenchTart · 19 May 2011 at 21:29

Izi said:
Anyone who develops programs will tell you SSDs make a world of difference.

For Dorothy using Word I wouldn't bother. SSDs are for people who actually need to use a computer, not look at it and check emails.

Developing programs? :rolleyes:

Can you be a bit more specific. I do lots of development and can't imagine SSDs making much of a difference to anything I do....

FoxEye · 19 May 2011 at 22:43

JasonM said:
Providing your computer has lots of memory (8GB upwards), then diskspeed for the most part is overrated.

I'm using a 5400rpm wd green, and I can't imaging I'd see much benefit from an SSD.

I have 8gb ram.
I put my machine in S3 sleep and never shut it down.
I leave browsers and other programs open and rarely close them.

I'm sure SSDs are a great upgrade for some people, but I couldn't care less about them myself (after waiting so long for prices to come down and having now resigned myself to the fact that they aren't going to).

Would rather put my money towards a new cpu when BD comes out.

Oh, and lastly, my wd green is almost silent. In fact I'm a silence freak so it probably is completely silent to most people

DragonQ · 19 May 2011 at 23:19

If you don't like Photoshop opening in a second then maybe you don't want an SSD.

JasonM · 19 May 2011 at 23:40

Originally Posted by JasonM
Providing your computer has lots of memory (8GB upwards), then diskspeed for the most part is overrated.

I may retract my statement a little. Tonight I disabled my SSD Readyboost and started loaded various applications, my computer has lost it's 'edge' there is that slight delay as everything relies on HDD only.

PS I think i'm invisible here with my Readyboost on SSD antics! Either that or no one understands me, remember they thought the first person to dive to depts of the sea was crazy when he said there was new types of fish down there!

Someone else please boot from HDD, and put a Readyboost on SSD to back up what i'm saying!!

FrenchTart · 20 May 2011 at 00:19

JasonM said:
Originally Posted by JasonM
Providing your computer has lots of memory (8GB upwards), then diskspeed for the most part is overrated.

I may retract my statement a little. Tonight I disabled my SSD Readyboost and started loaded various applications, my computer has lost it's 'edge' there is that slight delay as everything relies on HDD only.

PS I think i'm invisible here with my Readyboost on SSD antics! Either that or no one understands me, remember they thought the first person to dive to depts of the sea was crazy when he said there was new types of fish down there!

Someone else please boot from HDD, and put a Readyboost on SSD to back up what i'm saying!!

The quote button is an awesome thing.

DeathStorm · 20 May 2011 at 00:33

FoxEye said:
Oh, and lastly, my wd green is almost silent. In fact I'm a silence freak so it probably is completely silent to most people

Don't be foolish, your drive is nowhere near silent and your post only illustrates your ignorance about your own machine. Have you even tried a decent SSD?

JasonM · 20 May 2011 at 00:39

I took a screen shot of my Readyboost stats, it shows the amount of data being cached. It's showing over 10GB (look at top right corner) but can go much higher with computer use.

So all this data is regular clusters (Readyboost caches at a cluster level), that no longer will be read from HDD drive. And because i'm using an SSD i'm at SSD speeds (not memory stick speeds).

The interesting thing is most of this data came from my 1.5TB Samsung media drives as I was viewing photos in Raw. The purple/brown line is compression ratio, it's showing under 80% and RAW files are already compressed. I can tell you going back to edit/browse those RAW files is rapid fast as you would expect once data is on the SSD.

FoxEye · 20 May 2011 at 00:59

DeathStorm said:
Don't be foolish, your drive is nowhere near silent and your post only illustrates your ignorance about your own machine. Have you even tried a decent SSD?

Dude, that's some attitude you've got there.

I'm telling you, my WD green is pretty near silent. And I should know, since I'm the one sitting next to it

But hey, you'd know better, right?