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

[SunSamurai]

I would say that if you didnt differentiate between SATA and SSD, you are probably not going to appreciate the performance difference.

 

[xboxist]

The $ per Gb makes me cringe, but I've still decided to use a 128Gb SSD in the system that I will be buying/building in the next three months.

 

[cytg111]

Is there any point to striping two 160G G2's ? or is the increased bandwith just wasted on most applications? (think development, eclipse/intellij idea and thousands upons thousands of small sourcefiles, database access etc.) .. will i ever saturate the 200mb/s+ of a single drive anyway?

 

[jvroig]

Don't SSDs already approach the bandwidth limit of SATA II? Isn't this why they'd be the ones that would most benefit from the new SATA 6Gb/s? http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667

 

[exar333]

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

This.

64GB-80GB is more than plenty for the O/S plus critical programs that you really want to be quick (Office, Photoshop, WoW, etc.) and then have a mechanical drive handle the big stuff. This is exactly what I did recently and have been very happy with it.

 

[jimhsu]

To me, an SSD is the first step towards removing the I/O bottleneck in computing. To show how bad the I/O bottleneck is, I usually show people this page: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait

Consider the fact that the internet is "only" 5 times slower (80ms in terms of latency) than your mechanical hard disk (15ms). To show how bad this is, it is actually faster (latencywise) to access data over 1 Gbps ethernet (<1 ms) from a computer with a SSD, than it is to access a local 7200 rpm hard disk. Consider that memory (83 ns), which is typically the source of "latency" when people talk about the FSB, is two hundred THOUSAND times faster than the disk. Then consider that SSDs help close that gap to one thousand times (~65 microseconds).

Another way to look at it is for each seek (15 ms), you have a modern CPU (3 GHz) waiting for nearly 45 million cycles. Those five seconds you spend waiting for Word to load translates into having the CPU idle for billions of cycles. And yet people justify spending nearly a grand on CPU upgrades, but not $200 or so for a SSD OS drive.

That should be reason enough. Learn to look at latency, not bandwidth.

 

[SunSamurai]

People can justify it depending on what they do.

Youre not going to care about SSD if you're placing and coping large files. (100MB~) all the time. 1. becuse of cost, and laster 2. Becuse it may not be worthwhile if your HDD RAID is faster for large files.

Right now Im on an iPhone EDGE connection that takes 800ms for each file loading on a page yet my dialup take 300ms for each. Thing it the iPhone is 8 times faster when it actually gets something to download. Its almost like dialup is the very slow throughput but fast accessing SSD. Im all for the "SSD" (dialup) when browsing forums but when it comes to big files I want my phone. Obviously SSD is going to have the best of both worlds and is going to be basic cable, but you get the idea. As you mentioned is exactly why, and is also why defraging was a good thing back in the day.

 

[sailingtaz]

I've a three year old laptop with SATA I bus. Took over 2min to load Win7RC, domain profile, Outlook and browser. With a SSD, it takes about 30 seconds. Win hibernate awake takes 5~10 sec instead of 30~40 sec. Everything app loads nearly instantly (1~5 seconds.)

Yes, SSD per GB cost is high, but it gave my laptop new life and I won't get a new laptop for another year or two. So in that respect, it was worth it for me.

 

[BadOmen]

My first computer as a kid used a CASSETE TAPE for storage.
I think waiting a little bit more for SSD to get cheaper won't kill me.

 

[chrisf6969]

The way to go right now IMO is to get a 60-80Gb drive for OS and app, then a 1Tb+- drive for your data and anything that won't fit on your SSD.

I've gotten spoiled by my system with an SSD. Now its painful when I work on other PC's and have to wait for apps to install, load, etc.. I forget how fast my PC is... then yesterday I was going around upgrading firewalls & virus scanners on all of our work PC's and I was waiting minutes for everything, when I've gotten used to doing everything nearly instantly. Even large installs go by super fast.

As prices come down I'm going to upgrade a few other people in the office with SSD's, as its the biggest single upgrade for a PC I've experienced. Its like going from 256Mb of ram to 4Gb.

 

[exar333]

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.

So it's OK to pay extra for a top of line GPU ($400+) because you "need it" but it's NOT OK for someone else to spend $150-300 on a fast SSD because they "need it"?

I love to game on my rig too, but you need to understand some people do work on their machines, or do other things that require something rather than what the CPU or GPU can provide for. I can attest I was critical of the SSD too, but after spending a modest amount on my G2, it's been night and day. I can't remember this big of a jump in performance since upgrading from my 486DX2-66 to my Pentium-166MMX.

 

[pjkenned]

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

That's really the way to go. SSD's cost so much right now that, while great for OS/Application loads, storing large files on them is very costly. Getting both a SSD and a 1-2TB 7,200rpm drive is the best of both worlds (right now).

 

[RebateMonger]

Buying an SSD right now kinda' reminds me of a friend, years ago, who got enamoured of SCSI hard drives. He spent a lot of money on a SCSI controller, a hard drive, and even a SCSI CDROM drive.

The next year, he called me and said he was looking for a big IDE disk to replace his SCSI, which was nice, but the latest IDE disks were nearly as fast and had ten times the space.

I'm not saying this analogy is 100% appropriate, but I'd examine your storage space needs and future plans before investing lots of money in an SSD for a desktop PC right now.

As always, Your Mileage May Vary.

 

[MJinZ]

The $ per Gb makes me cringe, but I've still decided to use a 128Gb SSD in the system that I will be buying/building in the next three months.

$/GB is a useless standard for measuring a primary hard disks.

Primary HDs are not for storage. It's like measuring a car based solely on how many people or cargo it will carry.

$/ Mb/Second, $/Life-span etc.

OK.

 

[Voo]

I'm not saying this analogy is 100% appropriate,

Probably because it is way off? We're not discussing about buying a raptor or another drive of the same technology but something completly different. And I'm sure you didn't want to imply that next year HDDs will be in the same league as current SSDs.
Also you can always use a big conventional drive for storage (probably everyone with a SSD does), so I think I don't get your point.


Sure next year SSDs will be faster and cheaper than the current generation, but the same goes for processors and almost everything..

 

[sailingtaz]

I don't see $100 as lots of money for a SSD boot drive. Just use your existing HDD as the storage drive.

 

[taltamir]

I would say that if you didnt differentiate between SATA and SSD, you are probably not going to appreciate the performance difference.

stop calling a spindle disk SATA.
SATA is an interface, both SSD and spindle drives use SATA.

btw, as a gamer I also love my SSD. It significantly cuts down loading screens (on the few games I can fit on it)

 

[Ben90]

stop calling a spindle disk SATA.
SATA is an interface, both SSD and spindle drives use SATA.

btw, as a gamer I also love my SSD. It significantly cuts down loading screens (on the few games I can fit on it)

I really only play T1 games so i have to wait for other people to load anyways. In these scenarios upgrading your PCI-e or DVI devices would be a better upgrade path for me. A lot of people dont even understand the benefit of having a great USB in addition to a great 1366. Its what every competitive gamer needs. Make sure you invest in a good 4 pin molex as well to keep everything cool.

Raid SATAs is enough for me currently

Lol i dont even know what i just wrote

 

[kalrith]

I think it all depends on what you're spending. I personally won't be getting one until the prices come way down, but I also try to spend very little on upgrades.

 

[exar333]

Is there any point to striping two 160G G2's ? or is the increased bandwith just wasted on most applications? (think development, eclipse/intellij idea and thousands upons thousands of small sourcefiles, database access etc.) .. will i ever saturate the 200mb/s+ of a single drive anyway?

Currently, you can't run RAID and TRIM concurrently for G2 drives. You get one or the other. Hopefully this gets ironed-out soon.

 

[Barrok]

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.

Lol I beg to differ, when I play team fortress 2 the only time my SSD helps me out is on load. After that my video cards keep me in business. So for gaming video cards will help 100% of the time in games, and SSD's basically non existant (just load)

I am still deciding if my SSD purchase was worth it (supertalent 128gb) It's hella fast but I think my two gtx 280's made more of a difference as far as gaming was concerned. The SSD was more like the finishing touch on the system.

 

[semo]

Ignore all the "price/gigabyte ratio bad" naysayers. SSDs are not for storing stuff but for improving performance. HDDs are for storing stuff.

If you are buying a desktop, get the SSD and the cheapest TB 5400rpm drive you can find for storage.

Once again:
SSD --> performance
HDD --> mass storage

You can't use price/GB to compare those 2 parts. price/GB only makes sense when comparing storage devices. It&#8217;s like saying that a top of the range GPU card has a horrible price/GB of memory compared to DDR3 modules. It&#8217;s irrelevant. You use FLOPS (or FPS or whatever) count to justify buying an expensive graphics card and you should use IOPS to justify the price for SSD and when you put IOPS results of SSDs and HDDs on a graph, the HDD can&#8217;t even be seen on the graph. Same goes for the latency

 

[pcslookout]

Ignore all the "price/gigabyte ratio bad" naysayers. SSDs are not for storing stuff but for improving performance. HDDs are for storing stuff.

If you are buying a desktop, get the SSD and the cheapest TB 5400rpm drive you can find for storage.

Once again:
SSD --> performance
HDD --> mass storage

You can't use price/GB to compare those 2 parts. price/GB only makes sense when comparing storage devices. It&#8217;s like saying that a top of the range GPU card has a horrible price/GB of memory compared to DDR3 modules. It&#8217;s irrelevant. You use FLOPS (or FPS or whatever) count to justify buying an expensive graphics card and you should use IOPS to justify the price for SSD and when you put IOPS results of SSDs and HDDs on a graph, the HDD can&#8217;t even be seen on the graph. Same goes for the latency

Yep but hopefully in the future say 5 to 10 years from now we can all use SSDs as our main storage drives as well!

 

[sailingtaz]

Yep but hopefully in the future say 5 to 10 years from now we can all use SSDs as our main storage drives as well!

I'm hoping it's sooner than that!

On a separate note, will we ever see NAND embedded directly onto motherboards? No need for current HD housing form factors. Just throw chips into slots for more storage a la DRAM.

 

[pcslookout]

I'm hoping it's sooner than that!

On a separate note, will we ever see NAND embedded directly onto motherboards? No need for current HD housing form factors. Just throw chips into slots for more storage a la DRAM.

I am too so it will be a nice surprise if it is! Lets hope so!