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A SSD is the single biggest performance improvement you can make.

Serradifalco

Serradifalco

Senior member
I have been reading this consistently across the forums and personal reviews. I believe in my case, the hard drive is the biggest bottleneck. With the Intel 80gb drive now selling for ~ $200, this becomes an attractive upgrade for me. 80gb is the perfect size boot drive. Right now I have 35gb occupied on my current boot drive. I do have a seperate external raid 1 storage drive and an internal game drive. Once the larger capacity SSD drives come out, I can also swap my game drive out. Does anyone else feel the same way? I guess I am just looking to be prodded to buy one! 🙂
 
Depends on bottleneck you care for to rid. Do you really think a drive that cost that much is worth shaving some time off load times for apps? Like real world tests, its not going to help games much in terms of better performance as a whole. Loading a saved game, loading a level, sure it will be noticeable.

But it will be awhile before people jump on them for a data standpoint simply because hard drives are proven tech right now, SSD are new, and have problems still (anand has has 2 SSD drives fail on him so far).

Plus, the huge change in them that is occurring since they are more affordable. Just think a few years ago the price and size vs the performance and size now. Buying one now, and in 6months to a year it being half price, 3x as slow, 3x as small would be depressing to me 😛 Unlike hard drives now they are pretty much all on par in terms of speed and size.
 
SSDs are pretty much for people who have nothing better to spend their money on at this point in time. Perhaps once the prices start to get closer to regular drives, people will start to buy them more. As it stands, it's hardly worth the money just to get faster load times.
 
You're talking like all anyone ever does is play games?

SSD's are a big deal. They do a lot to improve the end-user experience. The most frustrating part of computing is waiting for it to respond, so of course reducing loading times will be extremely significant.
 
imaheadcase said:
Depends on bottleneck you care for to rid. Do you really think a drive that cost that much is worth shaving some time off load times for apps? Like real world tests, its not going to help games much in terms of better performance as a whole. Loading a saved game, loading a level, sure it will be noticeable.

But it will be awhile before people jump on them for a data standpoint simply because hard drives are proven tech right now, SSD are new, and have problems still (anand has has 2 SSD drives fail on him so far).

Plus, the huge change in them that is occurring since they are more affordable. Just think a few years ago the price and size vs the performance and size now. Buying one now, and in 6months to a year it being half price, 3x as slow, 3x as small would be depressing to me 😛 Unlike hard drives now they are pretty much all on par in terms of speed and size.
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I refer to bottleneck in this case as the weakest link in the chain. We are all enthusiasts for different reasons. Some of us for gaming, some for benchmarking, some for tinkering, some for technology, some for work, etc. I am an enthusiast for a little bit of each one of those reasons. I realize that in 6 months there will be higher capacity, faster and less expensive SSD's. The results I have read for the current drives on the market look pretty exciting. Part of me tells me to wait and the other part tells me to go for it. Usually with the input of the forum members here, I am able to make a more informed and logical decision on which direction to take.
 
Serradifalco said:
I refer to bottleneck in this case as the weakest link in the chain. We are all enthusiasts for different reasons. Some of us for gaming, some for benchmarking, some for tinkering, some for technology, some for work, etc. I am an enthusiast for a little bit of each one of those reasons. I realize that in 6 months there will be higher capacity, faster and less expensive SSD's. The results I have read for the current drives on the market look pretty exciting. Part of me tells me to wait and the other part tells me to go for it. Usually with the input of the forum members here, I am able to make a more informed and logical decision on which direction to take.
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I agree that an SSD is the single best upgrade you can make as far as general usability. There's just something about Windows login being CPU-bound that's awesome. 😀

I regularly use several systems that are on par with my desktop in terms of components (except the SSD), and they all feel terribly slow in general usage. Judging by the rig you've got in your sig, an X25-M would be a great addition.
 
While it's true that in 6 or 12 months, there will be faster SSDs, I don't think that really matters that much.

SSDs are so much faster than conventional drives, that while hard drives are frequently a significant bottleneck, with SSDs, it's virtually inconceivable that they would ever be a bottleneck. So, while you could upgrade the SSDs more, because they're already so far ahead of other system bottlenecks, it would be unlikely that this would translate into noticable benefits.

I've made a lot of upgrades in my time, including going from an old P3-233 to a 1.5 GHz athlon. However, upgrading an old E6600 core 2 duo by replacing the 7200 rpm drive with an Intel X25-M, was by far the most impressive upgrade I've ever made.

We have some workstations at work with 15k SAS drives in RAID - and I was sorely tempted to buy a similar HD setup for home. Then I got an SSD instead - and the workstation at work feels like it's 10 years old compared to my home PC.

It's just the whole feel and responsiveness of the system that's just so much different. Browsing thousands of photos, is so much smoother, the thumbnails just pop up instantly. Working with massive excel sheets is so much smoother. Visual studio 2008 is just so much faster and smoother, even compiling is noticeably faster than it used to be (something I didn't really expect).
 
The people who are disappointed with SSDs seem to either not understand the benefits of an SSD or have unrealistic expectations of what it will do for your performance.

Sequential read speed of an SSD is fast but not earth shattering. It won't be any faster than a good pair of 7200rpm drives in Raid-0. If you are loading a game and that game is loading textures in big contiguous blocks you are going to see almost no benefit from an SSD compared to a pair of regular hard drives. Sequential transfer speed was never intended to be the main benefit of an SSD.

An SSD is faster because it can handle a considerable amount more data transfers simultaneously. Consider that if you have one file transfer from a mechanical drive and start a 2nd transfer from that same drive. Both transfers will end up being less than half as fast as the original transfer because due to mechanical limitations the drive can't read/write multiple sections of the disc at the same time and the heads can only travel so fast... Now imagine a 3rd transfer and a 4th and a 5th. Pretty soon everything will grind to a halt.

Now imagine the same on an SSD. With no moving parts it doesn't suffer from these limitations and it can easily handle multiple reads and writes simultaneously. You will benefit from this when your system is loaded down and you try trying to do many things at once. Certain games such as World of Warcraft also benefit greatly from this access pattern since the game is constantly loading small textures in a seemingly random order on-the-fly.

Boot times are quite often drastically improved because immediately after system boot is one of the few times that most people's systems will be attempting to start many applications simultaneously.
 
Performance wise I'm not sure how anyone can question or downplay the significance of the an SSD drive. If you want to argue it is too expensive now, that's fine, but a drive in an older system will do more to improve the experience than buying a faster processor etc.

I'm looking to get a decent sized drive when I get back to the US and use that in my desktop and another for my laptop. By then the prices will come down a little more and really the upgrade then is a no brainer.
 
I see a bunch of uses for new SSD, but sure, not important for most FPS gamers that use their computers just for that one thing.

I have a computer in my office downstairs that would be great with SSD. The room has a big ass parrot in it. I don't know if you know it, but nothing is dirtier than a bird. They put TONS of sticky dust stuff in the air. I have it on a 10 minute sleep timer so it's only running fans when I'm in the room using it. It comes back up in 30 seconds or so. I'm sure that'd be sped up with SSD. Too bad this stuff wasn't mainstream a couple years ago, that computer would be on a 5 minute sleep timer and a lot lot less dirty than it is. I'm building one for a friend that was clogged to hell with dog dander. He keeps it off all the time, but I'm sure with this new one he'll keep it in sleep.

Diablo 2, you get the drops faster than everybody else because every stupid video that has to load goes instantly, not sometimes when your HDD is in the right position to read the animations/videos that the game freezes up until it can display.

Photoshop/4channing/ytmnd use, you're gonna be able to open that pile of editing software a lot faster to make those stills, gifs, and audio, etc. Unlock that taskbar, beotch!

Playing music while gaming. I never do it. But when I'm SSDed up, I will.

In the future, when we get to using coreless chips, SSD is going to be practically required to keep up with them. But yeah, that isn't too relevant to paying $200-500 on an SSD today.

I probably left out half of what I was going to say. But yeah, if you're just gonna play FPS all day, you might literally never even notice the difference in performance. If you're doing work on your gaming computer, yeah, it'll take out all those 5-15 second waits when you open or close those huge hog programs and that could be sure be worth the money to a guy that doesn't see it a big deal to spend $200 on a drive when he makes a couple grand a week and uses the computer to get that cash.
 
it really depends on what you use you computer for, and what your system is equipped with. I'm pretty sure that my x2-3800 @2.5Ghz-> i5-750 @3.6Ghz beats an ssd upgrade in most cases.
 
TwinsenTacquito said:
I see a bunch of uses for new SSD, but sure, not important for most FPS gamers that use their computers just for that one thing.

I have a computer in my office downstairs that would be great with SSD. The room has a big ass parrot in it. I don't know if you know it, but nothing is dirtier than a bird. They put TONS of sticky dust stuff in the air. I have it on a 10 minute sleep timer so it's only running fans when I'm in the room using it. It comes back up in 30 seconds or so. I'm sure that'd be sped up with SSD. Too bad this stuff wasn't mainstream a couple years ago, that computer would be on a 5 minute sleep timer and a lot lot less dirty than it is. I'm building one for a friend that was clogged to hell with dog dander. He keeps it off all the time, but I'm sure with this new one he'll keep it in sleep.

Diablo 2, you get the drops faster than everybody else because every stupid video that has to load goes instantly, not sometimes when your HDD is in the right position to read the animations/videos that the game freezes up until it can display.

Photoshop/4channing/ytmnd use, you're gonna be able to open that pile of editing software a lot faster to make those stills, gifs, and audio, etc. Unlock that taskbar, beotch!

Playing music while gaming. I never do it. But when I'm SSDed up, I will.

In the future, when we get to using coreless chips, SSD is going to be practically required to keep up with them. But yeah, that isn't too relevant to paying $200-500 on an SSD today.

I probably left out half of what I was going to say. But yeah, if you're just gonna play FPS all day, you might literally never even notice the difference in performance. If you're doing work on your gaming computer, yeah, it'll take out all those 5-15 second waits when you open or close those huge hog programs and that could be sure be worth the money to a guy that doesn't see it a big deal to spend $200 on a drive when he makes a couple grand a week and uses the computer to get that cash.
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LOL. Birds are dirty and high maintenance. My Dad owned birds for many years. After seeing what he went through with his birds, I will never in my life own birds. 30 seconds to start back up from sleep mode? Do you have a Pentium 2 running Windows ME? 🙂
 
Well, ok... 20 seconds for full speed operation to be back. It's not a bad system. But if I'm in there watching the TV that is in the next room, I sit there and tap the mouse so it doesn't go into sleep, just so when I think of something stupid I wanna look up on ebay I don't have to wait. Because I'm not taking sleep off and forgetting to put it back on. That comp will DIE from that bird stuff.

That bird lays down some serious sticky dust stuff. She probably lays down a full year's worth of dust in a week or two in that one room. You can see it shoot off her wings when she flaps. I'll never buy a bird.. but she's 30 something years old now and she's supposed to live a long ass time.
 
TwinsenTacquito said:
Well, ok... 20 seconds for full speed operation to be back. It's not a bad system. But if I'm in there watching the TV that is in the next room, I sit there and tap the mouse so it doesn't go into sleep, just so when I think of something stupid I wanna look up on ebay I don't have to wait. Because I'm not taking sleep off and forgetting to put it back on. That comp will DIE from that bird stuff.

That bird lays down some serious sticky dust stuff. She probably lays down a full year's worth of dust in a week or two in that one room. You can see it shoot off her wings when she flaps. I'll never buy a bird.. but she's 30 something years old now and she's supposed to live a long ass time.
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I read somewhere few breeds can live up to 70 years.
 
You can't just view SSDs as say, a new GPU, or a faster CPU. It's not a core upgrade like that. It's something that just generally improves everything a little. It's more akin to buying a nice big crisp monitor, or that nice new mouse and keyboard. It may not make games or whatever run faster but it makes for a much better experience in general use.
 
loading piles of photos into adobe lightroom got a LOT faster when I got an SSD to use for my OS and scratch-photo-editing disk.
 
Yep, African Grey, up to 70 years. So I got another 40 years of her. D: The computers! Noooo!

Also, can't use the phone in that room because of her. If she hears an integer from 1-..12, she starts spitting out random ones from 1-12. It was once 1-4, then 1-6, then 1-9... now she knows twelve. That bitch.

THREE!
FOUR!
...
SIX, SIX, TWELVE!
NINE!

KOKO!
 
You people keep posting like SSDs are some sort of magic. All that they do is decrease load times. Plain and simple. There's nothing else that a faster hard drive can do.
 
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simonizor said:
You people keep posting like SSDs are some sort of magic. All that they do is decrease load times. Plain and simple. There's nothing else that a faster hard drive can do.
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Eh?

Everything you do on your desktop touches the disk in some way, shape, or form. Tell me this, what's the point of having a mega-fast CPU if you can't get data into and out of it?

There is no other upgrade today where you can see several orders of magnitude (3 to be precise) of difference.
 
simonizor said:
You people keep posting like SSDs are some sort of magic. All that they do is decrease load times. Plain and simple. There's nothing else that a faster hard drive can do.
Click to expand...

Yes, they do. And since most people wait for things to load when using a computer, it makes a big difference.

But that's why it matters WHAT you use your computer for.

My Mom had a couple year old laptop that she was always having problems with and complaining about. Then at Christmas I got an SSD and installed it for her in it. Now she loves it. She's reinforced exactly how much faster it is to use.

In her case, an SSD was the best upgrade I could give. She doesn't game. All she does is surf the web, e-mail, and word process. But when her computer is already awake from sleep mode when she opens the screen, and firefox pops up the instant she double clicks, it seems like a new computer.

Like people have said - if you just sit there and game, it will do very little for you. Depending on your use case however, it can be "like magic".
 
It's like going from a 4200rpm hard drive in your laptop to a 7200rpm drive. You don't have to be moving around or processing large files to see the difference. Things are just snappier.
 
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