Is an SSD Drive even worth it?

[MorganX]

what's with the gigabyte pinching? if you can't spare a couple of gigs for virtual memory (mine's allocated only 1.7gb, have 12gb of RAM) you guys should get a bigger drive instead.

I have plenty of storage. Why do I need to allocate it to Virtual Memory when nothing requires Virtual Memory except low memory systems? As with Javik, we'll just agree to disagree. If you feel better having some, have it.

[spaceelf]

I have plenty of storage. Why do I need to allocate it to Virtual Memory when nothing requires Virtual Memory except low memory systems? As with Javik, we'll just agree to disagree. If you feel better having some, have it.

Plenty of things do allocate empty blocks of memory though. It can help your running applications to not have that extra wasted space.

You can have hundreds of megs of 0s too! Or have them paged out.

[NotChetHanks]

I actually cancelled my order and got this instead...

My girlfriend said I work too hard to not get what I want. I think I might marry her...

[leesmithg]

I use a hybrid drive.

It's o.k., though had to swap it out for a replacement due to 8 bad sectors found when using hard drive sentinel.

750gb cost me ?115 6 months ago, it is now ?92 from amazon.co.uk

I might in the future used SSD, when a 750gb is less than ?150 and they last more than one year.

Everywhere I find write ups and they don't seem to last very long.

They are too expensive to take the risk.

[primexx]

I actually cancelled my order and got this instead...

My girlfriend said I work too hard to not get what I want. I think I might marry her...

haha good choice. samsung seems to be the king right now until intel puts out a consumer drive with their new controller

I use a hybrid drive.

It's o.k., though had to swap it out for a replacement due to 8 bad sectors found when using hard drive sentinel.

750gb cost me ?115 6 months ago, it is now ?92 from amazon.co.uk

I might in the future used SSD, when a 750gb is less than ?150 and they last more than one year.

Everywhere I find write ups and they don't seem to last very long.

They are too expensive to take the risk.

what kind of "write up"s are you reading? even the newfangled TLC flash will last longer than you'll use the drive for. http://www.anandtech...nce-of-tlc-nand

and even the average SSD is about as reliable as the best HDDs.

[leesmithg]

haha good choice. samsung seems to be the king right now until intel puts out a consumer drive with their new controller

what kind of "write up"s are you reading? even the newfangled TLC flash will last longer than you'll use the drive for. http://www.anandtech...nce-of-tlc-nand

and even the average SSD is about as reliable as the best HDDs.

At neowin, majorgeeks, amazon to name a few.

[inactive]

After using an SSD as your boot/OS HD, you will never use a mechanical HD again. I highly recommend it.

i am sure i would agree but unless you got about a spare $100 to toss around then i think it's hard to beat a standard mechanical HD simply because they offer a lot of storage nowadays and, at least for me due to $$$ constraints, if i dumped $100 or so on a computer thing it's most likely going to be a standard HDD simply because 2-3TB+ sure as hell beats 120GB-ish SSD drive when you got a lot of data to store. SSD's are more of a luxury item if you ask me at the end of the day but for those who don't download too much then the SSD might be the better choice for the added speed increase of the overall PC.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

At neowin, majorgeeks, amazon to name a few.

Just the vocal minority who complain. It is ? for ? the very best upgrade you can make to a computer to improve its performance.

[+hedleigh Subscriber²]

The 5 year warranty on my vertex 4 allayed any fears of a malfunctioning drive for. Don't think I've ever used a hard drive for that long.

Of course I've now got a dozen of old hard drives, that are still usable. Donate them to an under privileged kids foundation every 2 - 3 years. :D

[Arceles]

Just the vocal minority who complain. It is ? for ? the very best upgrade you can make to a computer to improve its performance.

Not really, like I said, they are great for startup times but once in it... its the same as the mechanical drive. I'm not saying that they are bad... but they are not exactly the panacea either.

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

Not really, like I said, they are great for startup times but once in it... its the same as the mechanical drive. I'm not saying that they are bad... but they are not exactly the panacea either.

What amazes me is how 90% of the people in this thread can be saying that SSD is significantly better and that there's still a few folks who insist that it only improves boot times.

If you boot your PC and literally do NOTHING with it aside from read email and go on Facebook then yes, there will probably very little improvement for you. If you do ANYTHING that is IO intensive, then you will notice a significant speed boost.

Moving Battlefield 3 from my 1TB mechanical drive onto the SSD improved my loading times by something in the order of 6x.. it went from taking about a minute to load the game, to about 10 seconds. Similarly loading any big application (like Photoshop) only takes seconds, and doing anything IO intensive like crunching large video files or audio files will take significantly less time.

[leesmithg]

Just the vocal minority who complain. It is ? for ? the very best upgrade you can make to a computer to improve its performance.

They were not bitchy complaints.

They were not happy with having to return the goods after a months usage.

My hybrid though improved my HDD I complained about here last year, by 60%.

Booting to total start-up 40%, then I have 30 visible start-up items.

My mobo hand book allows me with an SSD be able to boot in 6 seconds, though I never turn off my system, it is in sleep when not used, that takes 4.

[primexx]

At neowin, majorgeeks, amazon to name a few.

The most reliable SSD ever was the Intel ones with their own controller, with a failure rate of ~0.6% (compare that to ~2% for average SSDs and the best HDDs).

Even if you assume they only sold 10,000 units through Amazon (a laughable assumption) that's still 60 defects.

Intel X25-M: 5 <4 star reviews out of 61

Intel 320: 17 <4 star reviews out of 61 (same controller but with smaller flash cells so presumably less reliability than the X25-M)

Samsung 840: 16 <4 star reviews out of 222

Samsung 840 Pro: 8 <4 star reviews out of 119

I picked a small capacity model for each - which would be subject to more wear + tear than larger capacities

that's 46 reviews that's 3 stars or lower, from four different models and two different manufactures, and it's still well within the expected number of defects for just one model and with our absurdly low sales assumptions. PLUS there's likely a bias toward negative reviews.

the anecdotal evidence just doesn't stand up against the actual data that's been reported.

[rmorris003]

i love my corsair performance 3 128 ssd on my amd fx 8150 3.6 8 core, my pc is overclocked to 4.10 aswell with 16gb ram and is pretty fast windows takes only a couple seconds to boot.

[stereopixels]

Not really, like I said, they are great for startup times but once in it... its the same as the mechanical drive. I'm not saying that they are bad... but they are not exactly the panacea either.

I have a Corsair GT SSD in my desktop, which I use for development and gaming, and the performance improvement over the platter drive it replaced (WD Raptor) is very noticable, not just for start up time, but for loading software too; Visual Studio, SQL Server Developer and Adobe Fireworks load almost instantaneously, and my load times, particularly in games like Skyrim are far better than they were. If you're not noticing a significant improvement over an ordinary platter disk then I would look elsewhere in your system for the bottleneck.

[TheLegendOfMart]

I've got the Samsung 830 and I've never looked back, going back to mechanical HDDs you REALLY notice the lag times of clicking the icon and the program loading.

[Arceles]

What amazes me is how 90% of the people in this thread can be saying that SSD is significantly better and that there's still a few folks who insist that it only improves boot times.

If you boot your PC and literally do NOTHING with it aside from read email and go on Facebook then yes, there will probably very little improvement for you. If you do ANYTHING that is IO intensive, then you will notice a significant speed boost.

Moving Battlefield 3 from my 1TB mechanical drive onto the SSD improved my loading times by something in the order of 6x.. it went from taking about a minute to load the game, to about 10 seconds. Similarly loading any big application (like Photoshop) only takes seconds, and doing anything IO intensive like crunching large video files or audio files will take significantly less time.

Guys... I develop things in OpenGL and OpenCL, and also play games for sure (Props to Crysis 3... what a beautiful game) and seriously, it looks as if any of you really don't know how to keep your computer top notch without adding "addons" such an SDD. my HDD has win7 and that's where I develop most of my things, my SDD is on Win8 where I have all the games, speed differences? sure, startup times, loading times get by quite a lot reduced, but once again, once you are already in it... it's the same. VS2012, Labview, Matlab... my current developing tools.

[Zlain]

Guys... I develop things in OpenGL and OpenCL, and also play games for sure (Props to Crysis 3... what a beautiful game) and seriously, it looks as if any of you really don't know how to keep your computer top notch without adding "addons" such an SDD. my HDD has win7 and that's where I develop most of my things, my SDD is on Win8 where I have all the games, speed differences? sure, startup times, loading times get by quite a lot reduced, but once again, once you are already in it... it's the same. VS2012, Labview, Matlab... my current developing tools.

So you mean once the programme is up and running, there is no noticeable speed difference?

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

Guys... I develop things in OpenGL and OpenCL, and also play games for sure (Props to Crysis 3... what a beautiful game) and seriously, it looks as if any of you really don't know how to keep your computer top notch without adding "addons" such an SDD. my HDD has win7 and that's where I develop most of my things, my SDD is on Win8 where I have all the games, speed differences? sure, startup times, loading times get by quite a lot reduced, but once again, once you are already in it... it's the same. VS2012, Labview, Matlab... my current developing tools.

Dude - I've been into computing since before the days of Windows 3.1 - frankly it's a little presumptuous to assume that just because we're buying "add-ons" like SSD's, we're unable to maintain our computers properly or some nonsense. I maintain a lightweight, clean install free of crapware and I install only the core applications I need. But the simple fact is a good SSD can read and write at 4-8x the throughput of a mechanical drive. It improves the speed of just about everything you do on your desktop. It's not rocket science.

If prices were even on $/GB who the hell would bother with a mechanical drive any more? And the fact that even with the prices as they are, enthusiasts are lapping them up says all you need to know. Price is the only barrier stopping wider adoption.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

Dude - I've been into computing since before the days of Windows 3.1 - frankly it's a little presumptuous to assume that just because we're buying "add-ons" like SSD's, we're unable to maintain our computers properly or some nonsense. I maintain a lightweight, clean install free of crapware and I install only the core applications I need. But the simple fact is a good SSD can read and write at 4-8x the throughput of a mechanical drive. It improves the speed of just about everything you do on your desktop. It's not rocket science.

If prices were even on $/GB who the hell would bother with a mechanical drive any more? And the fact that even with the prices as they are, enthusiasts are lapping them up says all you need to know. Price is the only barrier stopping wider adoption.

This - a million times.

My installation of a single SSD wipes the floor with the 2x7200 RPM drives in RAID0 that came before it. And that wasn't an old install vs a new install, it was me taking the exact same install (back-up and restore) onto the SSD.

[Arceles]

Dude - I've been into computing since before the days of Windows 3.1 - frankly it's a little presumptuous to assume that just because we're buying "add-ons" like SSD's, we're unable to maintain our computers properly or some nonsense. I maintain a lightweight, clean install free of crapware and I install only the core applications I need. But the simple fact is a good SSD can read and write at 4-8x the throughput of a mechanical drive. It improves the speed of just about everything you do on your desktop. It's not rocket science.

If prices were even on $/GB who the hell would bother with a mechanical drive any more? And the fact that even with the prices as they are, enthusiasts are lapping them up says all you need to know. Price is the only barrier stopping wider adoption.

Mechanical drives exist because there is the need of huge quantities of permanent storage, note how a harddrive can retain data by far longer than you may expect, that's why sensitive HDDs are literally melted to avoid any kind of data rescue on them.... and by the way, I'm a guy that has seen the whole MSDOS era, then 3.1 and so on... no need to compete here, I kind of understand the situation you are trying to explain... but I'm not lying, am I?

So you mean once the programme is up and running, there is no noticeable speed difference?

Exactly, truth be told though, loading times are SUBSTANTIALLY reduced.

This - a million times.

My installation of a single SSD wipes the floor with the 2x7200 RPM drives in RAID0 that came before it. And that wasn't an old install vs a new install, it was me taking the exact same install (back-up and restore) onto the SSD.

That doesn't disproves my point, startup times are reduced, not less not more.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

That doesn't disproves my point, startup times are reduced, not less not more.

That RAID wasn't just put in place to improve start-up performance but day to day running too. Software installation/patch installation, file processing of large image, video and sound files all are improved.

As well as this, noise is reduced, heat is reduced and power consumption is ruduced.

There are a number of benefits to having an SSD only system, performance being just one - if you are willing to stomach the cost, which clearly you aren't, which is fine - but I doubt that any system you can build with spinning platter drives will never beat an SSD based system of the same specs in performance.

[+Red King Subscriber²]

So you mean once the programme is up and running, there is no noticeable speed difference?

Well at that point, SSD doesn't do anything - it is all in RAM. Someone needs a faster CPU it seems.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

Well at that point, SSD doesn't do anything - it is all in RAM. Someone needs a faster CPU it seems.

Systems are constantly reading and writing to disk - you are never operating entirely in RAM.

[Arceles]

That RAID wasn't just put in place to improve start-up performance but day to day running too. Software installation/patch installation, file processing of large image, video and sound files all are improved.

As well as this, noise is reduced, heat is reduced and power consumption is ruduced.

There are a number of benefits to having an SSD only system, performance being just one - if you are willing to stomach the cost, which clearly you aren't, which is fine - but I doubt that any system you can build with spinning platter drives will never beat an SSD based system of the same specs in performance.

I didn't considered the mechanical advantages, on that you are right... on another note, I already have a SDD (Samnsung 830) and it's great but it's not the definitive solution to everything, considering that they have a very short life span against a "well taken care of" HDD. I still however say that once loading times are done... there is noting much faster that the RAM where the current data is after loading.

Systems are constantly reading and writing to disk - you are never operating entirely in RAM.

Yes and no, please do not affirm things that are not entirely true.