Would an SSD be worthwhile?

Yup its a well worthwhile investment - I have been using Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drives for ages now and made the move last week.

My windows boost up in 20 seconds and is SNAPPY as hell.
 
Although I have yet to shell out on one, yes, I firmly believe so. The sheer number of file access's windows and some apps like to do cause seconds of seek time on normal HDs which is simply not there (too small to count) with SSD. On an 8ms average access time HD, every 125 files accessed is a second used up, that's before you even start reading/writing!
How many files used on the average web page these days? One of the reasons browsers set not to cache seem faster :)
 
Depends on what you use it for, it is great for the like of graphics designers who are using ps, dw, af's and the like. If you are a gamer then you probably really want a 64Gig and higher drive at least. Same goes for movies. If you were to have a second sata data drive then the system would run at the sata speed. So in all really depends on your money situation. But yes it is worth it if you can afford it. If could be quite for server as well come to think of it, as they can be notoriously slow to boot up and shut down.
 
I have installed a few ssd's now and all of them have resulted in a massive visual improvement, of the speed of Windows. This includes some of the cheaper end of the market, such as the Kingston value range.
 
SSDs will make applications launch faster, that's about it.

I find it odd that people don't try raid 0 with 2 or 3 hdds. The boost is significant while still maintaining a large storage area and it costs half of what a ssd solution would cost.
 
raralis said:
SSDs will make applications launch faster, that's about it.

I find it odd that people don't try raid 0 with 2 or 3 hdds. The boost is significant while still maintaining a large storage area and it costs half of what a ssd solution would cost.
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4k reads are still garbage though.
 
raralis said:
SSDs will make applications launch faster, that's about it.

I find it odd that people don't try raid 0 with 2 or 3 hdds. The boost is significant while still maintaining a large storage area and it costs half of what a ssd solution would cost.
Click to expand...

It only boosts sequential speeds though.
Random reads/writes are what makes windows feel responsive, imporve load times and prevent slowdows during multitasking, you'd need an array of tens or hundreds of mechanical drives with expensive storage controllers to approach what an ssd gives you in a 2.5" silent, lightweight package.
 
rz30 said:
If you were to have a second sata data drive then the system would run at the sata speed.
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I'm considering getting a SSD but was hoping to use it for the OS and program files in conjunction with a mechanical SATAII drive for storage. From the above do I take it that doing so will limit the performance of the SSD?
 
PieEater said:
I'm considering getting a SSD but was hoping to use it for the OS and program files in conjunction with a mechanical SATAII drive for storage. From the above do I take it that doing so will limit the performance of the SSD?
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Would also be interested in the reply to this.

For my next full build in a couple of months I am aiming for an 80GB X25-M for the OS and current games and then a normal 1TB drive for storage.
 
PieEater said:
I'm considering getting a SSD but was hoping to use it for the OS and program files in conjunction with a mechanical SATAII drive for storage. From the above do I take it that doing so will limit the performance of the SSD?
Click to expand...

Yes it will downgrade to sata speed once you start accessing the sata data drive. The sata drive will not be faster just because you have your system drive as a SSD. When you access the second data drive you are bypassing the SSD so really just back to pain old sata again.

You could by a (cheap) raid controller and a buy 2 sata drives insead of 1 and put them in a raid 0 array which should give you about 20-30% faster than a singe sata. This might be your best option really. But keep the SSD as the main drive also.
 
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wakayoda said:
raid some normal HDD's Daaaveee modern games are already above 10GB and steam cannot split games across more then one storage solution
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Steam can't do that? Damn, thats a real shame, most of my games are from there! Really appreciate the heads up though, could have been a bit of a waste to get an SSD in that case.

I guess I will just go for RAID 0 then, the performance is only going to be what, 25% of an SSD though?
 
Personally, I'm planning on buying an SSD this week, and I'm not looking for extra game performance. I use my computer about equally between games/browsing/videos/etc so just having the various programs on an SSD, even if most of my media remains on slow, spinning media, I'll be happy enough with my performance day to day.

I was thinking of installing steam on my C drive, and then mounting a seperate partition as a folder in my c:/program files/steam/steamapps, as my current steam apps directory is approx 350GB. =\ And possibly Raid-0-ing my two 500GB drives for the games drive.

Anyone have opinions on how well that'd work? I'd love the fast access speeds to affect my Steam app, but am aware that I definately can't install games on the drive, especially if I get anything below 60-80.


(for the record, I currently always use two seperate drives for C (windows, programs etc) and D (games). So if I replace my C drive with an SSD, I'll get day-to-day improvement, but game load speeds won't get much better, but that's fine.

Sorry if this is badly put together. IMO though, overall, if you have no other clear upgrade path (like me), SSDs are a fantastic upgrade.
 
Daaaveee said:
Steam can't do that? Damn, thats a real shame, most of my games are from there! Really appreciate the heads up though, could have been a bit of a waste to get an SSD in that case.

I guess I will just go for RAID 0 then, the performance is only going to be what, 25% of an SSD though?
Click to expand...

Actually you can move a game install folder onto a mechanical drive and use a symlink in windows, that way some steam games load from your ssd and others from the mechanical drive.

move the folder and make an empty one with the same name in the same place, then open up command prompt and type:
Code: 
mklink /j D:\moved\directory C:\old\location\of\directory

Easy Peasy.

@Jeeva you can do the same thing with your steamapps folder instead of an individual game directory. You can do the same thing in reverse (move game install from HDD to SSD) too if you've got something that you think would benefit. No fuss with uninstalling/installing.
 
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rz30 said:
If you are a gamer then you probably really want a 64Gig and higher drive at least. Same goes for movies.
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SSD is wasted on playing movies, normal HDs are more than capable. If you're talking about encoding, then your best bet is to encode from one drive to another (assuming your CPU isn't the bottleneck).

Zarf, hundreds of drives still wouldn't solve the basic problem of seek times :)
If apps and windows loaded in one sequential blob, normal HDs would be fine.
Isn't there a defrag program that groups files on the HD by folder? That'd reduce seek times quite a bit
 
It almost seems like SSDs are a bit of a backwards step in terms of flexibility and simplicity..

Back to the days of micro managing your files to avoid maxing out?

Hmm..
 
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