How spoiled are people with SSD's?

[techs]

About three years a go my friend in IT had me build her a low cost machine based on a Pentium Dual-Core 1.8 (the dumbed down Core2 Duo) on an Intel ICH7 mobo.

So, 6 months ago she wants to upgrade to a faster CPU. She had a choice between a two hundred dollar Core2 Duo at 3.2 Ghz or an SSD.

I sold her on the SSD. Intel 80 gb G2. She was ectastic! She then gets another Intel SSD for her Core2 Duo laptop.

Now she is calling to complain she can still see the Welcome screen on Windows 7 on the desktop, but she doesn't see it on the lappy.

Whine, whine, whine.

Let me get this straight. She cold boots to Windows 7 in 10 seconds and the Welcome screen flashes by in about a second. And she's complaining???

I have to admit, that's my kind of girl.

 

[996GT2]

About three years a go my friend in IT had me build her a low cost machine based on a Pentium Dual-Core 1.8 (the dumbed down Core2 Duo) on an Intel ICH7 mobo.

So, 6 months ago she wants to upgrade to a faster CPU. She had a choice between a two hundred dollar Core2 Duo at 3.2 Ghz or an SSD.

I sold her on the SSD. Intel 80 gb G2. She was ectastic! She then gets another Intel SSD for her Core2 Duo laptop.

Now she is calling to complain she can still see the Welcome screen on Windows 7 on the desktop, but she doesn't see it on the lappy.

Whine, whine, whine.

Let me get this straight. She cold boots to Windows 7 in 10 seconds and the Welcome screen flashes by in about a second. And she's complaining???

I have to admit, that's my kind of girl.

Looks like it's time to upgrade her to RAMdisk

 

[VirtualLarry]

Let me get this straight. She cold boots to Windows 7 in 10 seconds and the Welcome screen flashes by in about a second.

Call me dubious. I installed Win7 64-bit HP on a system with a SF1200 SSD, and it still took 20 seconds (after BIOS had finished) to cold-boot. No-way you're booting in 10.

 

[techs]

Call me dubious. I installed Win7 64-bit HP on a system with a SF1200 SSD, and it still took 20 seconds (after BIOS had finished) to cold-boot. No-way you're booting in 10.

Ok, Dubious.

hehe.

She has about the cleanest install you will see. Then turns off every unnecessary process. Oh, and I am not counting the bios time.

I need to check, but my AData pos SSD probably boots to the desktop in under 20 seconds on my Clarkdale dual core 3.2 ghz. I will do a timed boot and get back to you.

Edit: Took 16 seconds from the first splash screen appearance til all systray icons were loaded.
And I have a bunch of stuff loading above and beyond Windows.

 

[greenhawk]

And she's complaining???

Some would think that you are a true nerd in that you appear to be missing the message between the lines. She just wants to talk

(yes, to you )


You might just have to buy a V2 sandforce based SSD and ask her to test it for you . You will have to be over their each week to check up on how it is going of course

 

[Martimus]

Yeah, I can't believe how fast my computer boots. It takes maybe 5 seconds and that is completely booted with everything running. My old computer I would turn it on and go make a sandwhich or something, so this is night and day.

I thought my laptop was fast, since it boots in like 15 seconds, but this seemingly instant boot amazes me.

I do feel spoiled by the quick speed. It is nice.

EDIT: I just timed it and it takes 27 seconds form the time I hit the on button to the time windows is completely loaded. It seems so fast.

If you take out the time I spend in BIOS, it only takes between 10-11 seconds to boot up.

 

[86waterpumper]

Ssd speed is way overrated and hyped. I have a F3 1tb samsung short stroked to 200gb on my desktop machine, and I recently built a htpc. I put a owc 40gb ssd on it. Both of these are amd rigs, both running win7 64 bit and while the ssd does boot up faster and scores a 7.5 on windows experience it is nowhere near worth the extra money that was spent.
I know the benchmark and speed differences on paper but I have not seen any breakneck speed out of it so far enough to warrant the price these things are. All of these people saying things are "instantaneous" either got some golden sample drives, or are easily impressed.

 

[jjmIII]

I have to admit, that's my kind of girl.

Pics

I have to admit...my Wife never even notices all the upgrades I do to her machines. She just laughs at me and says 'yes, it's waaay faster'.

 

[Weenoman]

Where do these SSD nay-sayers come from? Once you've seen how fast it is you never go back.

 

[SolMiester]

Call me dubious. I installed Win7 64-bit HP on a system with a SF1200 SSD, and it still took 20 seconds (after BIOS had finished) to cold-boot. No-way you're booting in 10.

Mine does!...Obviously the boot needs to wait on hardware, however after POST, Im on login screen in under 10sec....I flying coloured dots doesnt even finish, before the screen has changed!

 

[Martimus]

Mine does!...Obviously the boot needs to wait on hardware, however after POST, Im on login screen in under 10sec....I flying coloured dots doesnt even finish, before the screen has changed!

Same here. The flying colors are on for about a half second.

 

[Tsavo]

Ssd speed is way overrated and hyped. I have a F3 1tb samsung short stroked to 200gb on my desktop machine, and I recently built a htpc. I put a owc 40gb ssd on it. Both of these are amd rigs, both running win7 64 bit and while the ssd does boot up faster and scores a 7.5 on windows experience it is nowhere near worth the extra money that was spent.
I know the benchmark and speed differences on paper but I have not seen any breakneck speed out of it so far enough to warrant the price these things are. All of these people saying things are "instantaneous" either got some golden sample drives, or are easily impressed.

People who don't lean on their drives very hard gain virtually nothing from an SSD.

 

[Drsignguy]

To date, I think a SSD is the single biggest improvement you can make to any system. It has made my P67 platforms much better, made my P45's noticeably snappier and my Laptop much better to do work with along with a memory upgrade. And since it's a Pentium 4 1.73Ghz, It is not the speediest of lappys so it needs any help it can get. With the SSD upgrade, I can now sit in front of the machine and wait a few seconds to load up as opposed to what I had to deal with before. It made a noticeable improvement and That is exactly what I was looking for. So the money is very well spent IMO.

 

[dualsmp]

Who boots anymore? Ok I guess some with laptops, but for a desktop sleep mode is your friend. Coming out of sleep mode by the time I pull the keyboard tray out I'm at the login screen. Probably around 3 seconds with a clunky old 5400 RPM drive. Who needs a SSD?

 

[stevech]

Right. My desktop win7 with SSD does a sleep. Reboot once a week if I remember.

The frustrating part I have is the 5 second wait for USB enumeration before my mouse starts working. Odd, but sometimes after a cold boot this delay isn't there. It might also be a delay to spin-up drives on the server-in-the-garage to find the shares on the LAN; but I avoid having a mapped drive letter to a network drive as it slows things down.

My other PC (office/work/docked) Laptop also has an SSD. That's huge. Battery life when on planes, boot up times fast, runs faster despite all the crapware my employer requires, etc.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I am very spoiled with my SSDs. Now I pretty much can't stand that extra delay when I start applications on non-SSDed machines. Of course that only happens at other people's houses now that all my computers- my desktop, two HTPCs, and netbook- have SSDs.

 

[marmasatt]

Pics

I have to admit...my Wife never even notices all the upgrades I do to her machines. She just laughs at me and says 'yes, it's waaay faster'.

That's funny. I get that all the time. They so don't appreciate upgrades, lol. I get that, and also sometimes a sarcastic "It's supposed to be faster, right? Yeah, it's faster." Just to bust balls........

 

[Emulex]

its like those folks with family cars that take more than 4.6 seconds to go 0-60 . how on earth can they deal with that?

 

[86waterpumper]

People who don't lean on their drives very hard gain virtually nothing from an SSD.

I'm not sure what you mean lean on their drive? I use it for the typical things, I run a bunch of steam games, I run photoshop, virtualbox, plus various other office apps etc. No I do not constantly render 3d, host a file server off it, or encode video nonstop if that's what you mean. If a file transfer is very big at all, a modern technology spindle drive can catch up. I guess in some database or server situations I could see the benefit, but most aren't going to be using these for that anyway with their puny size. The technology is cool and I'm not saying it's not somewhat faster but in real world use it's not fast enough to be a oh wow that was instant kind of deal by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[nanaki333]

Ssd speed is way overrated and hyped. I have a F3 1tb samsung short stroked to 200gb on my desktop machine, and I recently built a htpc. I put a owc 40gb ssd on it. Both of these are amd rigs, both running win7 64 bit and while the ssd does boot up faster and scores a 7.5 on windows experience it is nowhere near worth the extra money that was spent.
I know the benchmark and speed differences on paper but I have not seen any breakneck speed out of it so far enough to warrant the price these things are. All of these people saying things are "instantaneous" either got some golden sample drives, or are easily impressed.

i never actually heard of that until you pointed it out. i have a couple of unused spinpoint drives i think i may try that on today! wonder if it can speed up a 300GB velociraptor too!

i still love my SSDs though.

 

[semo]

Where do these SSD nay-sayers come from? Once you've seen how fast it is you never go back.

Maybe they think they are too cool to be impressed. "So what" type people. SSDs are faster in both light and heavy loads and it is noticable by even the most novice users (at least from my experience).

Some people get used to SSDs' performance sometimes or they don't notice the random long pauses that you may get on an HDD PC (you wouldn't notice these things on an SSD because they handle multi tasking much better than HDDs). With an SSD, you can do a full virus scan and not notice a slow down while using the computer. No HDD (even in RAID) can replicate this.

 

[pcunite]

SSD made a big improvement in my ThinkPad SL510, boots crazy fast and handles everything with ease. My workstation which has 8GB ram and no swap file and which I almost never reboot the difference there is not as striking and more so after everything gets cached.

 

[stahlhart]

Where do these SSD nay-sayers come from? Once you've seen how fast it is you never go back.

I was one -- had absolutely made my mind up to stay with spindle for this build; I was leaning towards RAID 0 with F3s. Then one day, while I was still putting the list together, for some unexplained reason, I just said "eff it" and went for the G2. Best decision I ever made.

 

[Bauss]

Wow. There are a surprising amount of SSD non-believers here.

It's true that if you never do much copying, loading, or editing work, and SSD won't seem like much of an upgrade. Where SSDs really benefit power users is in their access latency and massive parallel capabilities.

When I do any audio editing work, there are no pauses or glitches ever experienced. It's truly amazing to watch. Also, apps and files open instantly.

Even better is re-containing HD videos. Going from an 6GB MKV to M4V file takes less than half the time it used to, and no longer slows my whole system down. I can now be in a VM, copy large files, and be playing back a 30 track recording, and still see no slowdown whatsoever. Worth every cent.

If you don't value these things, or don't have any use case that is bottlenecked by HD speeds/latencies, you'll see less of a benefit. For those of us who are, we finally get to use our computers the way we've always wanted.

 

[Tom]

I'm an SSD nay-sayer. More so in laptops than desktops.

Not because I doubt the speed is "noticeable". But because with some exceptions like the video files example, it isn't significant.

Sleep mode is faster boot than an SSD, and costs nothing.
Faster anti-virus scanning ? That's worth how much ? $0.

Anyway the bottom line is-
1. They cost too much for what they deliver.
2. They aren't proven to be reliable enough as primary storage. Which means they require the use of hard drives anyway, so at best they are redundant.
3. For a laptop they require compromises in storage space/ or optical drive functionality.

For some purposes I can see SSDs make sense, for a boot drive in a desktop, or for a special purpose notebook.

I just don't agree with them being universally recommended.