Another "Should I go SSD if I have a WD VelociRaptor 300 GB?"

[gizbug]

Any thoughts? Would my Raptor just become obsolete then is I went SSD?

 

[CurseTheSky]

If you can spare the cash, yes. A good SSD (Intel or Indilinx-based) is far faster than a VelociRaptor. The difference won't be as dramatic as going from a 5400 or 7400 RPM drive to a SSD, though.

Depending on what you do with the drive, though, you may miss the extra storage space.

 

[CraigRT]

I have a V-raptor 150.. I'm pretty happy with the speed. SSD is my next ugprade, but right now, price/performance isnt the best esp. considering you have one of the fastest rotational desktop drives out there.

 

[Voo]

I have a V-raptor 150.. I'm pretty happy with the speed. SSD is my next ugprade, but right now, price/performance isnt the best esp. considering you have one of the fastest rotational desktop drives out there.

Well it's not about speed per se but random access times.

Just consider: If you really noticed a difference between ~6ms (raptor) and 12ms (conventional 7200 rpm hard drive) I would assume you would notice the difference between 6ms and 0.1ms as well, though it won't be that great as if you were using a 7200rpm drive..

If it's worth the money? I wouldn't use a conventional drive again for my PC, but that depends on the person and their workflow. If all you're doing the whole day is surfing the web and don't have problems with some load times especially if you do several things at once, you're probably fine with the raptor.. though in that case a 7200rpm drive wouldn't be a problem either.

 

[jlfirehawk]

I just upgraded and put 2 Intel X25-m 80GB G2 drives in raid 0 and kept my 2 VR 300gb drives in raid 0 that were my boot drives and I can tell a huge increase in speed in just about all areas of Windows and all applications, office 2010, Adobe CS4 etc. By far the best upgrade I have done in awhile. Still debating on moving from my on board NForce raid controller (Nvidia 790i Ultra SLI board) to a dedicated raid card with built in cache, but those cost more than the drives themselves and I am not sure how much faster performance I could get with dedicated controller.

 

[n7]

Your VR will feel terribly slow if you get an SSD. :twisted:

What about an SSD for the OS & perhaps your favorite games [free space permitting], & put all the other games, etc. on the VR?

That's likely what i would do.

 

[Emulex]

access time. seeking 1000's of files is like taking 5ms * 1000's of miles.

5000ms = 5s?

then lets take 1000's of files *0.01 = 10ms

crude but effective way to show you your raptor is light years slower at anything but full suquential and thats assuming your directory structure is sequential to the files its reading

 

[sub.mesa]

Not only that. Access time only determines the latency of one single I/O request; and HDDs can only process one at a time. But SSDs can process multiple I/O at a time.

So with 1000 files and 0.01ms and 64 queued I/O's that would mean that in 0.01ms you would be able to process 64 I/O's instead of 1. That would lead to:

(1000/64) * 0.01ms = 0.15ms.

Of course, this would be the most extreme scenario where the SSD is superior to HDD. We talked about I/O's with 0.01ms access time, but that does not include the transfer time. Also, current SATA 3Gbps and Windows OS is not able to saturate the SSDs in terms of enough I/O commands queued. So lots of reasons this scenario doesn't come true in regular scenario's.

Still, it shows a fundamental change: SSDs are parallel I/O devices, while HDDs are serial I/O devices - able to only do one thing at a time, at least for the mechanical part.

 

[Emulex]

one must wonder if you can dual-port sas SSD have two ports accessing at 6gb/s (mpio?)

 

[jimhsu]

Assuming you have windows 7 (or know how to use Performance Monitor), does your disk queue length significantly exceed 1 for a sustained amount of time when doing everyday tasks? If yes, then get the SSD.

 

[Concillian]

Certain activities with an SSD are about the same speed as your current hard drive. Other activities are happening at 1/10th to 1/100th of the time. The improvement of how fast the computer "feels" on some activities is HUGE.

Overall I would call rotational storage --> SSD a larger speed improvement for average computing than single core --> dual core. It's a pretty large improvement in actual and noticeable speed.

 

[smokerings]

Your VR will feel terribly slow if you get an SSD. :twisted:

What about an SSD for the OS & perhaps your favorite games [free space permitting], & put all the other games, etc. on the VR?

That's likely what i would do.

That's exactly what I plan on doing, I'll get an 80GB+ SSD for OS/few apps and the only game I play. (If you can call WoW a game and not a job...)
I will move my 500gb X 2 drives in raid-0 to become my main game/app installation drive and also use it to hold files I'm working on with stuff on my SSD(video, photos and what have you.)
And naturally the 1TB green will keep on trucking and keep storing all my media/backup!

 

[jimhsu]

If you're curious, for practical gaming, a SSD will be between approximately 0 (Crysis) to 300% (WoW) faster as far as loading times are concerned compared to a 7200 rpm drive. I've covered the reasons extensively in previous posts.

 

[ncage]

I just did. I have a velociraptor 300GB drive. Just ordered an Intel 160GB SSD friday so you probably know my opinion I HATE sythentic benchmarks. Check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Jz7IMwBt4

while this isn't a velociraptor. Its a raptor. Its going to be close.

 

[jimhsu]

I personally like the "open all of Microsoft Office Enterprise" benchmark. If it doesn't work in 5 seconds, something is wrong (usually too little free space) and I clean it up.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I can't wait for the hybrid SSD + HDD drives