How much improvement will I really notice with ssd?

[desura]

So I'm running Win 8 on a 3tb Seagate hard drive. Pretty recent drive.

Everything is fast. It feels as fast as the SSD's I've used. It's actually faster than the MacBook air I own, which is completely ssd.

I have a 32gb "readyboost" sandisk SSD installed in the system. I haven't enabled the readyboost, but with just the hard drive, it's so fast that I'm not sure if it's necessary.

How much an improvement will I really notice? The more recent hard drives are like 5x faster than the ata100 hard drives of the past, which seems to be more than enough.

 

[Ayah]

with everything on an ssd: since you haven't told us what you normally do, anywhere from insane difference to only when you turn on your computer.
less of a difference if you're just caching with an ssd

 

[desura]

with everything on an ssd: since you haven't told us what you normally do, anywhere from insane difference to only when you turn on your computer.
less of a difference if you're just caching with an ssd

gaming and photo editing. plan on doing autocad-esque work in the future.

 

[Berryracer]

SSD is like day and night. Once you use a *good* SSD you will never be able to go back, your brain will start operating at that SSD speed and you no longer can wait for anything since SSDs do everything instantly

but getting a good SSD or bad SSD make a world of diffference.

For example, I just had a Kingston HyperX 3K SSD that was horrible at write speeds. too slow I think a 7200 RPM HDD would beat it.

so make sure you get an SSD and whatever you do, do not get an SSD based on the SandForce chipset

Get the best, the Samsung 840 Pro series

 

[desura]

SSD is like day and night. Once you use a *good* SSD you will never be able to go back, your brain will start operating at that SSD speed and you no longer can wait for anything since SSDs do everything instantly

but getting a good SSD or bad SSD make a world of diffference.

For example, I just had a Kingston HyperX 3K SSD that was horrible at write speeds. too slow I think a 7200 RPM HDD would beat it.

so make sure you get an SSD and whatever you do, do not get an SSD based on the SandForce chipset

Get the best, the Samsung 840 Pro series

But disc-based hdd's have made significant improvements. My 3.5" 3tb is transferring data at 5x the rate of old ata HDD's.

And right now it feels just as fast as the ssd's I run in my laptops. I'm thinking that if I enable the SSD, at best I'll get like a 30% improvement in program loading times. But if the loading time is like 2 seconds (like it is right now), that's not a big deal

 

[beginner99]

But disc-based hdd's have made significant improvements. My 3.5" 3tb is transferring data at 5x the rate of old ata HDD's.

And right now it feels just as fast as the ssd's I run in my laptops. I'm thinking that if I enable the SSD, at best I'll get like a 30% improvement in program loading times. But if the loading time is like 2 seconds (like it is right now), that's not a big deal

The thing that makes ssd feel fast is random access time and speeds a thats were hdds still and always will sucks really bad at.

For me it's about "snappiness" of the system. With hdds you get random stutters and hickups were you are just waiting for it before you can do anything. The newer the system is the less this is a problem. The problem is this is very hard to quantify. In fact a hdd based system can feel just as fast as an ssd-based one for hours of usage if the hdd never runs in such a bottle-neck which just depends on too many factors to reproduce. An example is when you right-click on something and it takes forever for the context menu to appear, but not always.

If you don't mind these stutters and lag and hickups of a hdd based system, then there is no point in getting and ssd.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

beginner99 is correct. The issue isn't transfer speeds, it's random access.

Hard disk access times are measured in milliseconds. SDD access times are measured in microseconds. It really is a night-and-day difference as berryracer said.

 

[dma0991]

Haven't owned a performance HDD like WD Black or Velociraptor. I have a 320GB WD Blue in my secondary PC versus a 120GB Corsair SSD in my primary PC. Used both PCs and the difference to me felt like night and day.

 

[BrightCandle]

There is a way to simulate the difference. If you load a program, then close it and immediately open it again the second time its noticeably faster. The os cached the files read from the last load and thus the hard drive was used a lot less.

An ssd always feels like the second warm start, and for some applications that write a lot on startup its even better than the warm start effect.

 

[Berryracer]

There is a way to simulate the difference. If you load a program, then close it and immediately open it again the second time its noticeably faster. The os cached the files read from the last load and thus the hard drive was used a lot less.

An ssd always feels like the second warm start, and for some applications that write a lot on startup its even better than the warm start effect.

'very good example. with an SSD you get the same feeling as if you were to launch the program the 2nd time after it was cached in RAM. everything is readily available for instant SWAT-OPS action with an SSD ()

 

[thelastjuju]

All an SSD did for me was eliminate long load times.. Anything that used to take 10-30 seconds to load had its load time reduced to 1-10 seconds. unfortunately, this dosen't really help me with anything other than boot time and a heavily modded game I have that would otherwise take 7 mins to load (only 1 min on SSD)

Lightweight apps, like firefox, dreamweaver, ms office suite, etc.. already load in 1-2 seconds on a HDD and there is no room for an SSD to improve on these types of minimal load times.

The real problem with using HDDs today is how easily they get bogged down by malware/spyware/gunk. SSDs can accumulate an enormous amount of this type of gunk without resulting in the type of lag and stuttering a HDD will have.

But just to be clear, we aren't in the IDE era of HDDs anymore.. HDD speeds are continually increasing and technology is far from obsolete.. and as long as you aren't using some gimped 5400rpm "Green" drive, and your system is gunk-free and squeaky clean, you should not be plagued by stuttering, lag, and random delays at all. I still use HDD's in my HTPC and work PC, and never experience anything of the sort.