Too SSD or not to SSD, that is the question

PistolPete

PistolPete

PistolPete

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Hi Guys,


I'm currently pondering over upgrading to SSDs or not.
My current system is a Q9650 (@4.3Ghz), 8Gb PC2-1066 RAM, 1x 1Gb ATI 5850 and 4x80GB Velociraptors in RAID0.

It's mostly a gaming machine, but I do a fair bit of number crunching on it too as I'm slowly putting my DVD (900+ titles) titles on my HTPC server before boxing them up and putting them in the loft.

Now currently the machine is fast enough and the disk benchmarks are pretty good, would a pair of 128GB (maybe 64GBs) be any better? The heat of the current disks is not an issue, neither is the noise but obviously I'd gain there.

Also, TRIM in RAID maybe not be an issue as the system (Windows 7 x64) is backed up regularly and could be flattened and reimaged easily enough.

I can sell my Velociraptors on, offsetting the cost a little.....but do I really need to upgrade?
 
Based on your current circumstances i think it might make more sense to wait for ssd technology to perfect itself a little more before upgrading.
 
I suspect when compressing DVD video the bottle neck is in the harddisk or is it CPU?

If hard disk then get at least one to try it out on. (use it as the compressing working directory)

BUT SSD's are not very good if you keep writing to them so It will probably need to be re-formatted quite often; but you should see a significant gain. 4x 5x?
 
Shaddow said:
I suspect when compressing DVD video the bottle neck is in the harddisk or is it CPU?

If hard disk then get at least one to try it out on. (use it as the compressing working directory)

BUT SSD's are not very good if you keep writing to them so It will probably need to be re-formatted quite often; but you should see a significant gain. 4x 5x?
Click to expand...

I think it's the CPU.
 
Shaddow said:
BUT SSD's are not very good if you keep writing to them so It will probably need to be re-formatted quite often; but you should see a significant gain. 4x 5x?
Click to expand...

But someone correct me, isn't that what the Trim firmware upgrade is for?

For my situation, I had a high spec PC, and head about the greatness of SSD's.

But I also figured SATA3 is on the horizon in the next year and these drives will soon all be SATA3 and perform like people now can only dream.

So I bought a 64GB Corsair Indillix SSD really just as a tide me over.

After some teething problems (it did not like IDE mode for some reason in my bios on AHCI mode) it has been fanstastic.

But I would say that it is only good for fast loading up programs and such, if you are going to be using it for video edition (as in writig the files to the drive as opposed to reading from it) then a Samsung F3 may be a better option.

The drive that is peaking my curiosity is the new Intel V series, as it has fantastic read specs, but pretty average write specs, but for 40GB it is clear you only will ever use it as your W7 boot drive and have no space to use it for absolutely anyhting else.

If this drive was available 4 months ago when I bought my Corsair I think I would go for the Intel as for a boot drive fast writes aren't essential..
 
TBH I couldn't really tell much difference between my Samsung 64GB Raid 0 drives and a single Samsung F3 I have now.

I sold my SSD's as they are to small in size to use. 128GB is just to small.

I'm going to wait 5 years and hope that we will have 300GB SSD drives for £100 by then.

My new mainboard has usb3 and sata 6GB/s so I will probably stick with mechanical drives for the next few years, unless there are serious advances in SSD technology.
 
Oxy said:
My new mainboard has usb3 and sata 6GB/s so I will probably stick with mechanical drives for the next few years, unless there are serious advances in SSD technology.
Click to expand...

ya if when i buy a USB3 mobo and sata3 is alive, and price/mb is reasonable i will take the plunge. to me, whilst they represent good performance upgrades, the value is questionable in terms of outright cash outlay.

bring on 150gb+ ssd with a reasonable price and i will go ssd myself.
 
I wouldn't go back to a standard drive now love the snappiness and instant response you get, have tried my old harddrives in raid to see and they feel dog slow, just used to how quick things open now.

The biggest thing for me is windows installs maybe 1 month after i could feel it all slowing down on my regular drives, 2 months and i would just get end up formatting as i like how it is on fresh install, for me its like a fresh install on the ssd and i am over 3 months down the line.
 
Buy a SSD, put the boot/OS + games on that, thus majority of the time it's just used for reading. Keep the raptors, move your paging file and temp dirs to those - that will save a significant chunk of write access wear and tear.

This is a gaming upgrade... yes 0.1ms access time to load game levels makes a big difference compared to ~6ms of the velociraptor.

For video encoding, results will not be justifiable. Especially if you want to preserve the life of the SSD and write just to the HDDs.
 
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