Mechanical hard drives were small once too.
Would an SSD be worthwhile?
- Thread starter Soylent Red
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Mechanical hard drives were small once too.
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Oh true, but they're not now. Just wondering whether i want to go back to faffing and worrying over file sizes. Especially as someone pointed out that games are like 10Gb these days.
I went from Raid0 with 2x7200rpm disks to an SSD and windows is considerably faster now, amazing how much faster web browsing is. Its the access time that makes the biggest difference, my raid0 matches the SSD for sequential read and write, but at 512k read/write the SSD is pulling ahead, and on 4k random's the SSD is over 20 times faster! (intel 80gig SSD).
Movies and music dont benifit from the 4k sequential performance, so all my media is still stored on the Raid0 hard disks, but windows and my every day apps are on the SSD and its the biggest improvement I've seen since I went from Pentium IV to Conroe.
Im not really fussed about boot speed, but overall windows is a lot snappier now.
Looking forward to when SSD's are reaching mechanical disk sizes (and prices) but for now, an 80Gig SSD offers a lot of performance, and an acceptable price.
Movies and music dont benifit from the 4k sequential performance, so all my media is still stored on the Raid0 hard disks, but windows and my every day apps are on the SSD and its the biggest improvement I've seen since I went from Pentium IV to Conroe.
Im not really fussed about boot speed, but overall windows is a lot snappier now.
Looking forward to when SSD's are reaching mechanical disk sizes (and prices) but for now, an 80Gig SSD offers a lot of performance, and an acceptable price.
It's about 85, somehow. I keep planning on backing up games I don't play to disc or some such, but I never get round to it. I would delete them, but I download in Uni accommodation, and then my home connection is utterly awful, so I tend to keep stuff far longer than truely neccessary.
@Zarf - Thanks, that sounds perfect. I was just going to mount an entire partition, or disc even, as a folder. This seems much more flexible. =D
I've got 2 samsung 64GB ssd's in raid 0 and the operating system generally feels a hell of a lot faster. Web browsing is especially noticable.
Good thing with upgrading hard drives as well is that they don't rely on any other part of the system really so you don't have to worry about it when you upgrade your mobo and ram etc.
Definitely recommend you get one!
Good thing with upgrading hard drives as well is that they don't rely on any other part of the system really so you don't have to worry about it when you upgrade your mobo and ram etc.
Definitely recommend you get one!
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My PC is on 24/7 with my apps loaded. I've told firefox not to cache and I have no pagefile. I still suffer HD stutter, I think SSD is my next step.
Keeping all 16 gig of World of Warcraft in memory at once is quite a challenge
. SSD's have their uses, but they arnt for everyone. And yes I love "S3 sleep/standby". Sure PC uses 10 watts or so in standby instead of 1-2W, but its awake and "booted" in 1-2 seconds 
I use standby a lot, but I still love my SSD.
You really should have a pagefile, some apps ignore windows and request one anyway, and those apps will generally run much slower if you dont have a pagefile. Thing is, even if you do have a page file, apps will "reserve" a few blocks, but rarely if ever actually page memory out if there is spare ram to take first.
I have a normal pagefile on my hard disks (none on the ssd) and 99% of the time the hard disks are not even spun up, they just sit there sleeping until I want media off them.
Well you can buy TB SSD. For only a slightly astronomical price
Its not that bad, OS and games/apps you feel are too slow.. put them on the SSD for performance. If the game/app doesnt suffer with loading performance (perhaps its a small game and 99.9% fits in ram) then slap it on a standard hard disk.
I have an 80 gig SSD Boot disk, and a Raid0 of 7200 rpm hard disks, and its quite simple to manage it. Very little micromanagement required.
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I did have a pagefile until a few days ago, was running it on a ram disk, 1GB out of 4 but just got the spare 2GB working so plan to change the ramdrive to 2GB out of my 6. I'm at the inbetween stage of changing the ramdrive size, hence no pagefile. But, when I did have one in ram, The system wasn't any better than it is without.
i was thinking of getting one but decided they arent really worth it for me, i have too much stuff on a bootable partition so will have to hold off till they come down in price and go up to 150gb at least, id still need a mechanical drive for storage tho
for now ill stick with my 1.5tb seagate on my new build, but was thinking of a ssd for (C)
for now ill stick with my 1.5tb seagate on my new build, but was thinking of a ssd for (C)
Why reserve physical ram as ramdrive, and then waste it with a swapfile.. Swapfile is assigned at will by apps but in the vast majority of cases it goes unused until physical ram is depleated. So a large ramdrive just increases the chance of paging, and even if the pagefile is in ram, its still a much slower process than simply accessing the phyiscal ram in the first place.
As I said, my pagefile is on my magnetic HDD rather than my SSD because 1) SSD space is limited and expensive, 2) the pagefile is only used by a very small number of applications if you have enough physical ram to avoid it.
As I said, my pagefile is on my magnetic HDD rather than my SSD because 1) SSD space is limited and expensive, 2) the pagefile is only used by a very small number of applications if you have enough physical ram to avoid it.
Anandtech said it's the single best upgrade he's ever done. We'll just have to take his word for itTrouble is I'd need at least 120GB and that's £300 at the moment, and the one I want is out of stock everywhere.
Why do you need 120GB, you can create a second Program Files, and Program Files (x86) on the D drive (install SSD & magnetic disks).
Then install speed sensitive apps on the SSD, and apps that really dont matter on the D drive.
Web browsing / web cache on SSD really makes a huge difference, big games that windows cant get cached and have many random uncontrollable elements (such as mmorpgs) absolutely love SSDs, on the other hand, shooters with relatively small fixed levels load a level and then you play, the hard disk makes almost no impact in performance after the initial loading.
Of course if none of your apps really thrash the hard disk, thats a fair enough reason not to get an SSD... cant replace a bottleneck which doesnt exist
Giving another example, I wouldnt bother installing photoshop, on an SSD, once its loaded its far more taxing on the CPU than the disks. Same with media encoding/decodeing, and/or media files. All my movies, and songs that I keep on the computer are on my old hard disks, not the SSD.
Why do you need 120GB, you can create a second Program Files, and Program Files (x86) on the D drive (install SSD & magnetic disks).
Then install speed sensitive apps on the SSD, and apps that really dont matter on the D drive.
Web browsing / web cache on SSD really makes a huge difference, big games that windows cant get cached and have many random uncontrollable elements (such as mmorpgs) absolutely love SSDs, on the other hand, shooters with relatively small fixed levels load a level and then you play, the hard disk makes almost no impact in performance after the initial loading.
Of course if none of your apps really thrash the hard disk, thats a fair enough reason not to get an SSD... cant replace a bottleneck which doesnt exist
Giving another example, I wouldnt bother installing photoshop, on an SSD, once its loaded its far more taxing on the CPU than the disks. Same with media encoding/decodeing, and/or media files. All my movies, and songs that I keep on the computer are on my old hard disks, not the SSD.
by that logic i would really not need an SSD, good to know
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I did it to see if there was an improvement over having it on the HD, and there clearly was, tho not having one at all seems to be the same, which would make sense.
Windows seems to use the pagefile whenever it feels like it and long before physical ram is used up.