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Building a new pc , is it worth going to SSD or should i stick with SATA

Well first of all, (most) SSDs are SATA, so that doesn't really apply. But if you're going to spend ~$1200 or more, I think you should try to work an SSD in. It's a fantastic difference.
 
IMO right now SSD is overpriced and from what I hear they are not trouble free. A normal SATA drive is really cheap and not entirely slow. Sure a SSD will startup in like 20sec or something but honestly for the price I could have a better video card.
 
Do you drive fast and over the speed limit or do you cruise under it?

SSDs get you there faster - much faster - it's up to you on how much money you want to spend doing it.
 
People spend several hundred dollars on video cards that I doubt really get used for more than half the time they're on their computer.

An SSD gets used 100% of the time you're on your computer.
 
EarthwormJim said:
People spend several hundred dollars on video cards that I doubt really get used for more than half the time they're on their computer.

An SSD gets used 100% of the time you're on your computer.
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You buy a video card for gaming, ppl who game and buy these cards obviously want their games faster and use it.

the price of current SSDs for the small sizes is simply not justified to me. When they're down to less than $1 per GB then I'll consider it as an option. Sure it's faster, but not enough to get me to spend so much.
 
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cmdrdredd said:
You buy a video card for gaming, ppl who game and buy these cards obviously want their games faster and use it.

the price of current SSDs for the small sizes is simply not justified to me. When they're down to less than $1 per GB then I'll consider it as an option. Sure it's faster, but not enough to get me to spend so much.
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surprising considering you have a velociraptor. why spend the extra money compared to any other HDD? why is the next step to SSD not warranted?

anyway, tomorrow's new 40gb kingston is sub-$100 after MIR, and just a bit above before rebate. It should support TRIM in the hopefully near future. $100 is an easy decision for me, even if there is only enough room for windows and a couple of my frequently used applications
 
I would never ever go back to using a normal 7200 RPM drive after using my Intel G2 for the last months.. a difference as night and day.

Expensive? Sure, but worth every cent imho. And as a matter of fact I don't know of anyone who used a good SSD and wouldn't miss it.

And at least for me 160gb are enough for usual applications (finally Eclipse doesn't take half a day to start up), the OS, my projects and some games (I don't play as much as I used to though)..
 
Answered my own question, reference below in case anyone else needs it:



Performance Degradation Over Time, Wear, and Trim

As mentioned above, flash blocks and cells need to be erased before new bytes can be written to them. As a result, newly purchased devices (with all flash blocks pre-erased) can perform notably better at purchase time than after considerable use. While we’ve observed this performance degradation ourselves, we do not consider this to be a show stopper. In fact, except via benchmarking measurements, we don’t expect users to notice the drop during normal use.

Of course, device manufactures and Microsoft want to maintain superior performance characteristics as best we can. One can easily imagine the better SSD manufacturers attempting to overcome the aging issues by pre-erasing blocks so the performance penalty is largely unrealized during normal use, or by maintaining a large enough spare area to store short bursts of writes. SSD drives designed for the enterprise may have as high as 50% of their space reserved in order to provide lengthy periods of high sustained write performance.

In addition to the above, Microsoft and SSD manufacturers are adopting the Trim operation. In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse.

As an added benefit, the Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur. As an example, consider a single 128 KB SSD block that contained a 128 KB file. If the file is deleted and a Trim operation is requested, then the SSD can avoid having to mix bytes from the SSD block with any other bytes that are subsequently written to that block. This reduces wear.

Windows 7 requests the Trim operation for more than just file delete operations. The Trim operation is fully integrated with partition- and volume-level commands like Format and Delete, with file system commands relating to truncate and compression, and with the System Restore (aka Volume Snapshot) feature.
 
I must admit that coupling an SSD with windows 7 really does make things much more responsive, however, I'm not sure that the increase in speed is justified by the price at the moment.
 
slayer202 said:
surprising considering you have a velociraptor. why spend the extra money compared to any other HDD? why is the next step to SSD not warranted?

anyway, tomorrow's new 40gb kingston is sub-$100 after MIR, and just a bit above before rebate. It should support TRIM in the hopefully near future. $100 is an easy decision for me, even if there is only enough room for windows and a couple of my frequently used applications
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Because the velociraptor only cost me $150 when I bought it from a local place that was shutting his doors.

Anyway I personally can't see spending so much on a single drive right now. It's a personal choice. If you have money to burn then sure, like if someone wanted an extreme edition CPU. Let them go for it I guess. Me? Not happening lol
 
I would wait unless you have some serious need of performance like a workstation. Regular hard drives are hard to beat for price/performance.
 
Stick with regular hard drives until Intel finally sorts out it's software problems. Can't download firmware or software right now for your SSD than what's the point buying it?
 
I think I'll stick with SATA and will wait for the SSD market to grow before investing into it, the prices are way too high. SSD technology still needs to grow and improve, I guess its still in its early stages and the drive capacitys are too small. Thanks for your input guys , better to save money and put it elsewhere = )
 
once you go ssd - you never think about it - if you got hard drive you will think about it every time the drive light is crunching and you are waiting. trust me on that.
 
Emulex said:
once you go ssd - you never think about it - if you got hard drive you will think about it every time the drive light is crunching and you are waiting. trust me on that.
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I don't know, usually when I'm loading up an office app or a game I don't think to myself "geeze if this was 5 sec faster it'd be a life saver"

It's an exaggerated example.
 
cmdrdredd said:
I don't know, usually when I'm loading up an office app or a game I don't think to myself "geeze if this was 5 sec faster it'd be a life saver"

It's an exaggerated example.
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As was already mentioned, you thought it was important enough to get a Raptor, which also hasn't the best gb/price ration - even if you got it rather cheap. There are also lots of people who bought an i7 system, although the performance difference to their old C2Q won't be 5 seconds in 95% of the stuff they do.


And overall, I always got bored when Eclipse or Photoshoop took 15 seconds to start up, especially while doing several things in parallel a conventional drive gets to its knees pretty easy.


As long as you haven't tried one for some time and then got back and don't miss anything, I'm not convinced that you wouldn't like a SSD.. there are things you you can't measure accurately with shiny benchmarks.
 
I was considering the same thing recently. I decided to wait on SSD and bought a used Vraptor on this forum for $100.

SSD's are great and clearly the future but, as any new technology, youll be paying a premium for something fairly new to have it now. Im sure by next year or two, the prices will be significantly cheaper.

The question is, what speed is considered acceptable to you. For me, a vraptor is pretty damn fast.....I dont need anything faster atm. It already loads everything instantly, and I do a lot intensive stuff. I didnt want to pay $250 for a 50-80gb hard drive...

PS: I think this is thread #1231231245192319723 asking the same question. 😛
 
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agreed. The ssd is like buying a bmw; it will meet or exceed your expectations. plus when you tire of it; slap it in an old sata laptop and watch it take off.

another nice thing is you can keep your nearline storage on a 1TB or whatever drive and keep it spinned down more often. the ssd doesn't have wakeup lag like a drive. and some of those exotic raptor like drives have very limited spin-up/down ratings.
 
You could always use a small SSD (32 or 64 gb) and load up your OS and other commonly used programs (i.e. office, photoshop) to make things speedy as ever

then throw in a few 1 or 2 tb mechanical drives to do storage and media and what not
 
If you believe the SSD users and reviewers, then the difference really is night and day. If you have the budget for it, then go SSD. Otherwise, if you need to prioritize some components over others, it may not be best to prioritize budget for the SSD at this point in time, since their price is still a bit hefty and is sure to fall in the next year or two.

How much is a "more responsive" "faster I/O subsystem" machine worth? It depends on you. Personally I'm still very happy with a normal 7200rpm disk for my needs, so I definitely won't be buying an SSD. But this is all very subjective, so in the end, it really depends on how much you value the performance difference an SSD affords you.
 
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