What are the benefits?
- Thread starter Edie00773
- Start date
Man of Honour
Speed, there are no moving parts in an SSD so there's no real delay in locating an individual piece of data. With a mechanical HDD you have to wait for the heads to move to the right place and then for the right bit of data to come under the heads, that can take several milliseconds, the equivalent random seek on an SSD is measured in nanoseconds.
Now if you add that up over lots of potentially parallel requests it makes a big big difference.
Now if you add that up over lots of potentially parallel requests it makes a big big difference.
Soldato
As above, and this decreases boot times and load times in games/other programs. They are perhaps a luxury, but most people with them [including me!] would not go back now we've got them 
Also best to have an HDD for storage too, as like you say the SSDs are expensive, great as boot drives though.
Also best to have an HDD for storage too, as like you say the SSDs are expensive, great as boot drives though.
Don
Speed in two areas..
Firstly, the one that makes the biggest difference is the speed it takes to access a file, it's practically instant on a SSD. If you're accessing loads of small files at the same time (like when Windows is doing stuff), an SSD will zip through them in no time at all. A hard drive takes ~9ms per file it seeks out, add hundreds of these up and you'll notice the difference between them.
Secondly, the speed that they can read a large file. A typical top of the range hard drive can read a file at 130MB/s (picking this number out of the air), top end SSD's can read at 550MB/s
They generate next to no heat (if any?) and no noise.
The single best upgrade I've done to my PC in about 6 years
What many people do, is have a 60-120GB drive and use that for Windows/Programs, then have a normal hard drive as the second drive and store all user files/music/photos/desktop on there, since they generally don't need the benefit of super fast file access.
It's all covered in this sticky
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18040306
Firstly, the one that makes the biggest difference is the speed it takes to access a file, it's practically instant on a SSD. If you're accessing loads of small files at the same time (like when Windows is doing stuff), an SSD will zip through them in no time at all. A hard drive takes ~9ms per file it seeks out, add hundreds of these up and you'll notice the difference between them.
Secondly, the speed that they can read a large file. A typical top of the range hard drive can read a file at 130MB/s (picking this number out of the air), top end SSD's can read at 550MB/s
They generate next to no heat (if any?) and no noise.
The single best upgrade I've done to my PC in about 6 years
What many people do, is have a 60-120GB drive and use that for Windows/Programs, then have a normal hard drive as the second drive and store all user files/music/photos/desktop on there, since they generally don't need the benefit of super fast file access.
It's all covered in this sticky
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18040306
Last edited:
Soldato
Plus theyre much much more shock resistant than mechanical HDD's.