Is an SSD Drive even worth it?

[+Fahim S. MVC]

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.

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

Systems don't just load everything into memory at startup and then not write anything to disk until they shut down - therefore you are never operating entirely in RAM - I'm afraid that is absolutely entirely irrefutable.

Nobody claimed that an SSD was a panacea - the only claim made in this thread is that they are better performing than spinning platter drives, noticably across the whole system.

[xWhiplash]

What is so hard about getting a SSD for the OS and Programs, and get a mechanical HDD for storage?

Win.....Win.....

All the people here complaining about not enough space in SSDs for the money, you do realize you can get both right? Even if you have a laptop and have only one internal connection, you obviously do not care about crazy speed so a USB External 1TB HDD will work for your storage needs.

So....getting an SSD is an add-on because people cannot manage computers properly? Really? We did not write the OS and programs, we do not control the disk IO for those programs. ANY disk IO is better with an SSD.

Really, SSDs have short life compared to well taken care of HDDs? Yes, they have a limit on how much you can use, but HDDs are not guaranteed to last years and years. I have one HDD that is 10 years old. But I have had one HDD that died ONE MONTH after purchase.

Anything that requires mechanical parts can fail at any time.

[dead.cell]

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.

Answered all the questions I was going to ask, thanks! (Y)

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

Answered all the questions I was going to ask, thanks! (Y)

Glad I could help :)

[the evn show]

Removed

[MorganX]

Systems don't just load everything into memory at startup and then not write anything to disk until they shut down - therefore you are never operating entirely in RAM - I'm afraid that is absolutely entirely irrefutable.

Nobody claimed that an SSD was a panacea - the only claim made in this thread is that they are better performing than spinning platter drives, noticably across the whole system.

I agree with that. Right now that is a physical reality.

[Arceles]

If you're building "hello world" 3-file applications then sure: there's no gain. The difference in build time for the full android source on a fast raid set of SSDs vs a typical enthusiast 7200 RPM drive set is measured in hours! A full build of vim or ruby or apache goes from ~10mins down to a 1.5 minutes. If you've got good test coverage and proper mocking then it can reduce your TDD turn around time from 15-45 seconds to 3-5 seconds.

Compiling and testing software is one of the best ways to demonstrate how awesome SSDs are because it's all random access to thousands of tiny files.

Nah... not hello worlds, particle filtering, while not too extensive code... I still need enough power.

[spaceelf]

One thing no one in here has mentioned that I've noticed is random access.

Fragmented files on a HD get read as slow as .1 megs a second (so much for benchmarking at 90+ eh?) where on a decent SSD it's likely to be 80/90 megs a second

Sequential is obviously much faster on either, but with the SSD you don't have to constantly defrag it to keep that speed up.

[hagjohn]

Of course they are worth it. I have a 120G SSD for the OS and program and a hard drive for storage.