Deciding if an SSD is worth it....

[Bill Brasky]

That's what I need to do. Does Windows 7 have something built in to do that, or do I need a certain program?

Windows 7 does have a built in imaging program, but it sucks and can be finnicky. For example, I just put a SSD in my laptop. First I used Backup and Restore in W7 to make a disk image on an external hard drive. After I installed the SSD, I went to restore from the image and it gave me an error. I ended up reinstalling from scratch anyway.

Use a stand alone program like acronis true image or something similar.

 

[Mars999]

You may want to check out your PS it maybe getting weak...

 

[speedy2]

You may want to check out your PS it maybe getting weak...

I guess I could always get a new one. They're usually not too expensive for a good quality one anyway.

 

[VirtualLarry]

An SSD is nice to have, but after finally breaking down and getting one for my own rig, I would say that it's not essential. I'm running a 30GB OCZ Agility (1) SSD as my boot drive. I used to have two of them in RAID, but after a week or two, the RAID-0 array was benchmarking WORSE than a single SSD. (Because of no TRIM support.)

If I had it to do over, I probably would have picked up the 120GB Sandisk Ultra SSD (Sandforce 1st-gen), instead of the OCZ Agility (Indilinx).

There's very little that I do, personally, on my PC, that an SSD accelerates. I don't do much with PAR files, or BitTorrent, etc. Windows Updates go pretty fast though.

 

[speedy2]

An SSD is nice to have, but after finally breaking down and getting one for my own rig, I would say that it's not essential. I'm running a 30GB OCZ Agility (1) SSD as my boot drive. I used to have two of them in RAID, but after a week or two, the RAID-0 array was benchmarking WORSE than a single SSD. (Because of no TRIM support.)

If I had it to do over, I probably would have picked up the 120GB Sandisk Ultra SSD (Sandforce 1st-gen), instead of the OCZ Agility (Indilinx).

There's very little that I do, personally, on my PC, that an SSD accelerates. I don't do much with PAR files, or BitTorrent, etc. Windows Updates go pretty fast though.

I plan on using this system for Photoshop and other photo editing. Whether I use some sort of scratch disk setup or just dump the photos I want to edit at the time on the SSD, it will make a big difference. 25MB RAW files seem to take forever to dump, convert, and then save. If I can gain a little speed in that process it would help a lot over time. Especially if I'm editing 500+ photos. If someone here does do photo editing with large files and doesn't see a gain in this area....please tell me. I already have a decent CPU and other components. I figure if the SSD, OS, and RAM are my only areas of improvement, I might as well do them. Or if my money is better spent on a few 1TB or 2TB drives, I would do that too. I am going to need a lot of storage as time goes by anyway.

 

[Mars999]

I plan on using this system for Photoshop and other photo editing. Whether I use some sort of scratch disk setup or just dump the photos I want to edit at the time on the SSD, it will make a big difference. 25MB RAW files seem to take forever to dump, convert, and then save. If I can gain a little speed in that process it would help a lot over time. Especially if I'm editing 500+ photos. If someone here does do photo editing with large files and doesn't see a gain in this area....please tell me. I already have a decent CPU and other components. I figure if the SSD, OS, and RAM are my only areas of improvement, I might as well do them. Or if my money is better spent on a few 1TB or 2TB drives, I would do that too. I am going to need a lot of storage as time goes by anyway.

IMO if you are doing massive photo work then go for 16GB if you can support it and a 8-10GB RAM disk and do not use a SSD to do a lot of writes to... From what I have read people you have used SSD's to do a boat load of writes to with huge video formats have worn them out in a year or two's time...

BTW RAM disk is way faster than any SSD

 

[speedy2]

Hmm.. Well this mobo only supports 8GB of RAM.

 

[bryanW1995]

IMO if you are doing massive photo work then go for 16GB if you can support it and a 8-10GB RAM disk and do not use a SSD to do a lot of writes to... From what I have read people you have used SSD's to do a boat load of writes to with huge video formats have worn them out in a year or two's time...

BTW RAM disk is way faster than any SSD

I have also read this about RAM disks. You could setup a 10GB RAM disk and 6 GB for everything else and probably never miss the extra ram. As far as wearing out an ssd, it's certainly possible to do it in a year or two with that usage pattern, but the newer ones are built a LOT better and are more apt to be able to handle that type of load over an extended period of time. Stick to an intel 320 seris, with maybe samsung 830 or crucial m4 as the 2nd/3rd choices here and you should be fine.

 

[BFG10K]

- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

That's a very old and very slow drive. You don’t need an SSD to see a big performance gain over that. The Caviar Black in my signature will blow it away, and I got the drive back in 2008.

Here’s an interesting article showing the historical performance progression with mechanical HDDs: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/15-years-of-hard-drive-history,1368-10.html

It’s worth noting that fastest drive in their tests (Raptor 150 GB) is actually very slow by today’s standards. My Caviar Blue outran it back in 2007, and my Caviar Black from 2008 is ever faster than the Blue. The modern 1 TB/per platter drivers are even faster.

 

[speedy2]

Thanks. That's the info I need. I'm not up to speed on what drives are fast or slow. Or how the tech has changed.

EDIT: Wow looking on Newegg at drives. A 1TB Caviar Black is $249.99 People in the reviews are saying they spent $99~ before the flooding. Didn't know the prices skyrocketed that much!

 

[bryanW1995]

But ssd's are still a LOT faster then raid 0 velociraptors or any other conceivable hdd setup. I held out for years bc I primarily play games, but I'm still extremely happy that I made the jump.

 

[speedy2]

But ssd's are still a LOT faster then raid 0 velociraptors or any other conceivable hdd setup. I held out for years bc I primarily play games, but I'm still extremely happy that I made the jump.

Yeah. I understand that. I would still like a system drive to be SSD. HDD prices are high now. I'd rather wait until they come down to get my large storage drives and maybe go for the SSD system drive now. In the long run, I think I will enjoy it a lot more than an all HDD setup. Time to tweak the cart at newegg, or maybe buy some of the stuff here on anandtech.

 

[fastamdman]

I can tell you from personal experience that I just bought, well I had my GF buy me for xmas a crucial m4 64gb and I absolutely love it.

The load times of my games are DRASTICALLY lower, almost non existent, application times, boot times, everything are SO fast.

This is one of the BEST upgrades anyone can make to a system, you guys have NO clue how fast it is until you actually have one. It's the biggest "seat of your pants" upgrade you can have. It's like adding a supercharger and nitrous to your car at the same time. It's simply amazing.

 

[Mars999]

Yeah. I understand that. I would still like a system drive to be SSD. HDD prices are high now. I'd rather wait until they come down to get my large storage drives and maybe go for the SSD system drive now. In the long run, I think I will enjoy it a lot more than an all HDD setup. Time to tweak the cart at newegg, or maybe buy some of the stuff here on anandtech.

I agree 100%, DO get a SSD for a system drive and programs. Games, ect... That is why I recommend a 120GB if you can, or at least a 64GB. You can alway add more later!

But you really need to get more RAM and make a RAM disk for all that gfx work, and save the SSD from all those writes and huge files will shorten its life quicker.

IMO
Get 8GB of RAM since you MB only supports that I was told, and make sure it 1.5v IIRC, and a 64GB to 128GB SSD and make a RAM disk and your rig will feel new.

BTW Win7 64bit and get Home IMO since you can't use more than 8GB and sounds like you don't do anything with networking anyway.

 

[speedy2]

Thanks Mars.

Here is the RAM I plan on getting

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231181

It's the same as the 3 1GB stick I have in the system already. So that would put me at 7GB total.

Here's a power supply I thought about getting. Just to be safe.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817371016

And the SSD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167049


And of course a copy of Windows 7 is $99.99

Total with shipping is $378.77

If anyone can tweak all this to keep quality/performance but save me some more cash, I would appreciate it. I will even consider stuff being sold on here. Thanks again for everyone's help.

 

[fastamdman]

Poor choice on the power supply IMHO. I would grab a cx500, or a tx650v2 or i guess a cx600, but thats just me.

As for the SSD, I would go with the 64gb crucial m4. It's not the cheapest thing in the world but its reliability and speed is second to none. There is a reason why it has always been rated so high. The firmware updates for them are amazing, the reliability is amazing and the speeds are just epic.

I kinda feel bad though you are spending 378.77 and getting like...nothing lol. You could almost buy a much nicer setup for a little bit more. Hell if you went used and saved a bit of cash + sold your system, you could probably step up to a used 2500k sandy bridge system

 

[speedy2]

I wanted to do a new system. That's why I would like to spend as little as possible upgrading this one.

I would rather put more of my budget toward my camera gear. I had planned on spending more on the PC and less on the camera. But, I think I'm gonna be happier spending more on my camera/lenses.

 

[Mars999]

Poor choice on the power supply IMHO. I would grab a cx500, or a tx650v2 or i guess a cx600, but thats just me.

As for the SSD, I would go with the 64gb crucial m4. It's not the cheapest thing in the world but its reliability and speed is second to none. There is a reason why it has always been rated so high. The firmware updates for them are amazing, the reliability is amazing and the speeds are just epic.

I kinda feel bad though you are spending 378.77 and getting like...nothing lol. You could almost buy a much nicer setup for a little bit more. Hell if you went used and saved a bit of cash + sold your system, you could probably step up to a used 2500k sandy bridge system

Dam it you beat me to it!!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139028

ssd

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226152

as you only have sata 2 ports no need for sata 3 ssd drives

 

[Mars999]

Ugh on that RAM, here is the thing you are paying $70 for a stick of RAM that is outdated and its killing me to watch this go down... I am looking to see if you can throw in a new MB/CPU for close to this price....

 

[speedy2]

haha. It's killing me to. But, for $350ish I dunno what else I can do. I mean, it will still be a nice system for what I need to do. But, I get what you're saying.

 

[paperwastage]

Windows 7 does have a built in imaging program, but it sucks and can be finnicky. For example, I just put a SSD in my laptop. First I used Backup and Restore in W7 to make a disk image on an external hard drive. After I installed the SSD, I went to restore from the image and it gave me an error. I ended up reinstalling from scratch anyway.

Use a stand alone program like acronis true image or something similar.

I've been using Clonezilla, and it works out really well... (one system with a W7 plain 60GB SSD, another system with a W7+ubuntu dualboot 96GB)

quick too (when you backup/restore to another HDD)... ~150MB/s read/write to restore/save a disk-image... and you can use compression... my first system had roughly 40GB in use, image was roughly 30GB in size

 

[Mars999]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115074

or a dual core I would get the quad core IMO

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115090

MB

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131712

RAM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233143

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233144

I would get the 16GB kit I have that one works great....

Now, with this build you have new rig, for around $365 or so depending on what you do with dual core or quad core and 8GB vs. 16GB, but then you can get the 64GB SATA Crucial SSD or still get the Mushkin 120GB SSD for $130, and skip the Power suppy for now, and get your copy of Win7 $99 extra than what you were paying already and IMO you will be floored by the extra $100.... over what you were going to do

 

[bryanW1995]

Poor choice on the power supply IMHO. I would grab a cx500, or a tx650v2 or i guess a cx600, but thats just me.

As for the SSD, I would go with the 64gb crucial m4. It's not the cheapest thing in the world but its reliability and speed is second to none. There is a reason why it has always been rated so high. The firmware updates for them are amazing, the reliability is amazing and the speeds are just epic.

I kinda feel bad though you are spending 378.77 and getting like...nothing lol. You could almost buy a much nicer setup for a little bit more. Hell if you went used and saved a bit of cash + sold your system, you could probably step up to a used 2500k sandy bridge system

If reliability was my primary desire, I'd get an intel over anything else, even the m4. And his speeds on the m4 won't be very good since he's using sata II connections, plus it's only 64gb so it will be pretty slow, anyway. Ditto for the intel drive, but even if the m4 were faster that extra 16 gb really comes in handy in a drive that small.

I agree on the psu. I didn't check prices, but that antec unit you linked isn't as good as the units that fastamdman listed.

 

[speedy2]

Ok. I like those components. But, putting the SSD, 16GB ram, win7, mobo, & CPU...It totals $616 That's close to doubling the price of the upgrade route.

 

[bryanW1995]

I don't know about the complete system upgrade advice, but I would definitely get this ssd over any of the others that were linked:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147161

It's their older version, but samsung is rivaled only by intel in reliability as a company. Not the fastest drive by any means, but that extra space over the intel 320 series is well worth it to take the slightly higher risk with samsung. I'd probably get the 80gb intel instead of the patriot/ocz/any sandforce ssd, however.