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Deciding if an SSD is worth it....

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if you dont mind waiting a bit, you could get a SSD cheaper after rebates when they come on sale...

I've gotten 96GB Kingston V+100 for $100 after rebate, just got a HyperX Kingston 120GB for $120 after rebate

I've heard Intel rebates are solid and quick... christmas sales, there were 160GB Intel 320 for $170 after rebate
 
speedy2 said:
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.
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That is for the best of the best I sent you.

You could get the dual core for $135 IIRC, 8GB for $48, MB $100, Win7 $100, SSD $130 = $383. This IMO would be the best route for now, and if you needed to you can add more RAM later as I put the 2X4GB sticks, and if the PS is bad you can get one later as it seems to be ok for now, and maybe it is fine, but if the new rig has issues you can always get a $60 PS later shouldn't be that big of an issue, plus sell those old parts on HeatWare as others are looking for replacement parts I am sure....
 
Short answer, yes. Spend as much as you can comfortably afford. Even if you aren't running a particularly powerful system now, you can rebuild around your new SSD. This was my strategy, and I only wish I could have afforded a 128GB M4, or bigger.
 
Yes. SSD should be the center piece of any build. Deal with a crappy graphics card for a few months if you have to. HDD to SSD is like instantly catching up on 50 years of technological evolution that has left HDDs in the prehistoric age since their birth. You can buy that 32 core 500 GHz CPU if you want, but it's just going to be just as idle as an 8088 and spinning an hourglass icon while your disk queue is full.

If you order a HDD, order some 8 track tapes and punch cards to go with it.
 
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bryanW1995 said:
So-so. It's a sandforce drive.

Not bad, but I'd still pay the extra $20 US for the samsung assuming the exchange rate is 1:1.
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IIRC(too lazy to look right now).. that drive uses the Phison controller. Not Sandforce's 1200 series controller.

PS. you're definately right about it being "so-so" though. I bought.. tested.. and returned 2 of them.
 
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That sandisk has gotten a lot of good press lately. I'd definitely pick it over most of the others mentioned here. I'd still pay the extra few bucks for the Samsung, however, b/c Sandisk has never once released a firmware update and you can be confident that Samsung will continue to improve their drives.
 
Ok. I'm at least getting the SSD and Windows 7. Might hold off on the RAM unless I can get it real cheap used. Otherwise, I won't dump anymore cash into the aging CPU and mobo, but I'll still have a pretty capable machine for what I need to do.
 
exdeath said:
Yes. SSD should be the center piece of any build. Deal with a crappy graphics card for a few months if you have to. HDD to SSD is like instantly catching up on 50 years of technological evolution that has left HDDs in the prehistoric age since their birth. You can buy that 32 core 500 GHz CPU if you want, but it's just going to be just as idle as an 8088 and spinning an hourglass icon while your disk queue is full.

If you order a HDD, order some 8 track tapes and punch cards to go with it.
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Uhm, no, just no.

Moving from a 500GB SATA2 HD (WD 5000AALX something) with 150MB/sec sequential transfer rate, to a 30GB OCZ Agility SSD, was ... somewhat faster. Not mind-blowing, and even with the HD, I was never sitting there waiting with an hourglass icon for anything.

Sure, an SSD offers a moderate improvement in speed (for everyday tasks), and a more substantial speed upgrade for a limited few specific tasks (virus scanning, PAR2 re-building, etc.), but it's really not essential, in the manner in which you make it out to be.

If I were a gamer, I would most definately stick with a HD, and get a bigger GPU, than to pay the high price for an SSD, and let my FPS suffer so.
 
paperwastage said:
if you dont mind waiting a bit, you could get a SSD cheaper after rebates when they come on sale...

I've gotten 96GB Kingston V+100 for $100 after rebate, just got a HyperX Kingston 120GB for $120 after rebate
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That would be my advice too. Keep your eyes on the lookout.

At $1/Gb, I thought it might be a good time to play around with the Kingston HyperX, but it disappeared from my cart as I was entering my Shoprunner password. They sold out quick. 🙂 Recently TigerDirect had the AData S511 120Gb for $145AR, also uses SandForce SF-2281 controller with 25nm Synchronous NAND, but Adata's support leaves me a little cold. Both are very fast, when they work.
 
VirtualLarry-- my first SSD experience was with a 30GB Vertex (first-Gen), and my experience largely paralleled yours. I did a comparison between a 150GB VR (same machine), and asked a few colleagues to do a blind compare/contrast. Neither they nor I could perceive a difference, and I actually sold the drive.

I gave SSDs another shot a few months later-- an Intel G1 1.8" drive, and the experience was quite different. Since then, I've migrated almost every system I have to SSDs, and stuck with Intel for reliability. I still have two first-gen 60GB Agility drives that I use for VMs, but Intel's reliability and consistency have kept me loyal.

I agree that SSDs are not an absolute necessity in general, but can be a tremendous upgrade for certain people-- and certainly a worthwhile upgrade for almost all, price aside.

For the OP, Adobe CS programs love RAM, but an SSD will help. I routinely work on (CS5) Illustrator at 2560x1600, while running a few VMs in the background (SSDs absolutely rock for VMs, BTW), various Office apps, PS, InDesign, Bridge, and a bunch of browser windows. I have a Q9300 with 12GB of RAM and a 160GB Intel 320 with W7 x64. The SSD shines when I have to launch and open various files-- with an HDD, I might think twice about opening up PS to check on a source file, since the wait would be a serious interruption to my workflow. With an SSD, I just do it. Over time, your workflow changes subtly, and that's when the lack of an SSD is painful.
 
After 1 year of use and all the updates, with a modest amount of apps and desktop clutter, my 50GB SSD with win7 ultimate (32bit) still has 25GB of free space. 64 bit takes more, which is why you dont want to use x64 unless you absolutely need more than 4GB of ram.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Uhm, no, just no.

Moving from a 500GB SATA2 HD (WD 5000AALX something) with 150MB/sec sequential transfer rate, to a 30GB OCZ Agility SSD, was ... somewhat faster. Not mind-blowing, and even with the HD, I was never sitting there waiting with an hourglass icon for anything.
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Uhm Yes. We established in your thread at the time that you went about everything arse about face.

Instead of spending your budget on a single 128GB Crucial m4 SSD which was achievable, you bought 4 very small, very early controller drives and hamstrung them further by removing their TRIM support by putting them in R0. It's no wonder you felt you didn't see a massive improvement.

R0 does nothing for random read/write. Sequential is for large file transfers or reading/writing large files. General system responsiveness and tasks such as Windows update and stuff like that, its all about random. A HDD will give you ~0.5MB/sec random read/write, my Samsung 830 gives me ~25MB/sec read and ~90MB/sec write. You cannot say this does not result in a monumental increase in general system speed. After POST, my system takes ~12 seconds to boot. No HDD can do that.

An SSD is a must for any experienced user. HDD's are still a vital component but only for large capacity cheap storage.
 
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So for a gaming box, how useful is this?

These drives just don't sound like they have a lot of space to me... Do you guys usually just move a hand full of Steam games from your D drive to the C drive when you want to play them? Is it a constant juggling act or am I making it out to be a bigger deal than it really is?

I assume in order to really benefit for games the game must be installed on the C drive, correct?
 
NTAC said:
So for a gaming box, how useful is this?

These drives just don't sound like they have a lot of space to me... Do you guys usually just move a hand full of Steam games from your D drive to the C drive when you want to play them? Is it a constant juggling act or am I making it out to be a bigger deal than it really is?

I assume in order to really benefit for games the game must be installed on the C drive, correct?
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My games are on a green drive. while level load times would be faster on ssd in-game there is no differences. However the huge difference comes from all-day usage with multitasking. The pc is much more responsive. No stuttering or waiting for a task to complete for unknown reasons.
 
As beginner99 has just said, the difference when gaming is down to load times. The actual gameplay will be no different. Where as the game may take 30-45 seconds to load on a HDD, it may take 5-10 seconds on a modern SSD.

People with 128GB drives do move games in and out of their Steam folder depending on what they're playing at the time. I personally rarely play games so it isn't an issue to me.

The games must be installed on the SSD. If the SSD is your OS drive then it will be C. If you add another SSD or have a HDD as OS and SSD as something else, this would be something else.
 
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Thanks for the quick responses, I have a second question...

My mobo SATA is 3GB transfer... is that good enough or do I need to upgrade to 6GB controller in order to get full benefits of a SSD drive?

Thanks!
 
Newegg had the 90GB Corsair Force Series 3 for $90 AR a few weeks ago. I'm still kicking myself for not jumping on that for my Win7 HTPC. It's sitting at $120 now which is still pretty good. Since you're on SATA 2 you can snag a used 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 from ebay for ~60-70 bucks but they're not as bulletproof as offerings from Intel and Crucial. Other suggestions to drop the price is the 80GB Intel X-25M G2 drive (G1 doesn't have trim, stay away).

To answer your last question, SATA2 (3Gbps) is still plenty fast. Yes it will limit the newest SATA3 (6Gbps) SSDs but for your rig, SATA2 is just fine.
 
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NTAC said:
Thanks for the quick responses, I have a second question...

My mobo SATA is 3GB transfer... is that good enough or do I need to upgrade to 6GB controller in order to get full benefits of a SSD drive?

Thanks!
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As I said in my post above, system responsiveness and general performance comes from high random read and write. In this respect, an SSD is nowhere near saturating a 3Gbps connection. The only difference really between the two is sequential speeds would not reach beyond ~280MB/sec like they do on a good 6Gbps SSD and controller. But when was the last time you sustained a transfer on a file large enough to notice that ~280MB/sec was slow?

You will be absolutely fine with a 3Gbps connection and would notice very little, difference between that and a 6Gbps setup.
 
Once again, thanks for the quick and helpful response! 🙂

I might go this route, I've been very intrigued by these SSD drives.
 
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