If you still haven't jumped on the SSD bandwagon - now is the time!

[Ketchup]

I guess the only times I don't see the improvements of the SSDs I bought last year are when I can actually see the system waiting on other things. Bear in mind this isn't a long wait, but I can actually see that the hard drive activity light is blank, and I know that that second was actually spent thinking

I couldn't honestly tell you that I don't notice a difference with the SSD (this is coming from a WD Black, which I consider quite fast for a hard drive). But I don't leave the same apps open all day long (on my home PC), so maybe that's the difference.

 

[KingFatty]

After upgrading my 4 computers at home from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10, I have to say the SSD is huge benefit there. Two computers had hard drives, and it was painful to do the upgrade compared to the other two that had SSDs.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Uh, can you elaborate on this?

We used to have regular HDDs in our work machines, whatever crappy HDD that usually comes with prebuilt office PCs and not the typical higher end one you'd buy for at home. So the "startup lag" of turning it on for the first time was brutal. You know how when you first turn on a windows machine, it's dog slow for a while at first and hard drive is thrashing like crazy, well try opening all the stuff you need to work during this lag period, every app takes a good 5-10 minutes to load.

With a SSD, this startup lag is pretty much non existent, and when you do open an app, it opens right away, so you can then move on to the next app. When you have 30ish apps to open it makes a HUGE difference. Outlook was the worse, it took a good 10-20 minutes for that to load. I always did that last and I'd go make my coffee while I wait, but Keurigs are much faster than the computer was before we got SSDs.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

We used to have regular HDDs in our work machines, whatever crappy HDD that usually comes with prebuilt office PCs and not the typical higher end one you'd buy for at home. So the "startup lag" of turning it on for the first time was brutal. You know how when you first turn on a windows machine, it's dog slow for a while at first and hard drive is thrashing like crazy, well try opening all the stuff you need to work during this lag period, every app takes a good 5-10 minutes to load.

With a SSD, this startup lag is pretty much non existent, and when you do open an app, it opens right away, so you can then move on to the next app. When you have 30ish apps to open it makes a HUGE difference. Outlook was the worse, it took a good 10-20 minutes for that to load. I always did that last and I'd go make my coffee while I wait, but Keurigs are much faster than the computer was before we got SSDs.

Seconded.

My work laptop has to be turned on and left to its own devices for about 20 minutes before the HDD stops crunching and it's actually responsive.

 

[sm625]

Hopefully this drives the price of old X25M 80GB on ebay down to under $20...

 

[Nec_V20]

I saw the PNY 120GB SSD for $39 but it got sold out in a day or so. Although these slower drives are only good for laptops or netbooks. Their performance is not that far above a high performance desktop drive except for loading like a browser with thousands of small files and dozens of webpages in the cache. For most other things the hard drive keeps up just fine.

I am wondering, instead of raid 0 why not use windows dynamic disks to create a larger drive, seems it allows you to span drives and dont have the problems raid does as the system still sees the drives as individual drives.

You need to read up a bit about spanned volumes before you even think about using them.

The bottom line is that in a spanned volume if one of the disks containing that volume fails then you lose everything.

In some ways you are not wrong, and in some ways you are dead wrong.

Some of the ways in which you are not wrong. Two games I like to play are X3 Albion Prelude and Diablo III Reaper of Souls. I have the two games installed on both my old machine (X58, i7-990X, installed on a Seagate 3TB Harddrive) and on my new machine (Z97X, i7-4770K, installed on a Toshiba Q-Series SSD).

On my monitor I can see both machines and when I start the games there is next to no difference starting and running the games from either the HD or the SSD.

There could be games which might take advantage of being installed on an SSD.

Booting my machine however is a completely different story and I would NEVER go back to booting from an HD ever again.

This having been said, if you load a lot of stuff at boot then whether it be HD or SSD the boot process will be slowed. Especially Skype loaded at boot causes a significant delay. I like to keep my system as clean as possible at boot and just load in what I need when I need it.

Booting from an HD is a torture for me nowadays.

The best advice I can give is to buy a 120 or 128 GB SSD as the OS drive and just install the stuff on it that you really cannot do without.

This makes it easy to back up and restore in the event of a crash.

I have a piddly little Lenovo NetBook with a 32-bit Atom CPU, yet I can reboot (not just cold start) the machine faster than my friends girlfriend can boot up her brand new Toshiba Satellite laptop from the HD.

 

[Nec_V20]

After upgrading my 4 computers at home from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10, I have to say the SSD is huge benefit there. Two computers had hard drives, and it was painful to do the upgrade compared to the other two that had SSDs.

It's a bit late but a piece of advice.

NEVER INSTALL A WINDOWS VERSION BELOW AT LEAST SP1

Microsoft is notorious for using the first implementers as "gamma testers".

 

[Ketchup]

It's a bit late but a piece of advice.

NEVER INSTALL A WINDOWS VERSION BELOW AT LEAST SP1

Microsoft is notorious for using the first implementers as "gamma testers".

Considering that there will be no SP* from 8 on out, you are going to be waiting a while then.

 

[Pantlegz]

It's a bit late but a piece of advice.

NEVER INSTALL A WINDOWS VERSION BELOW AT LEAST SP1

Microsoft is notorious for using the first implementers as "gamma testers".

It took almost 2 years for Windows 7 to get it's only SP. I don't recall any reason not to jump on windows 7 on release. And while I skipped windows 8 because I hated the UI, I downloaded Windows 10 on day 1 and so far it's worked they way I expect it to.

I thought this "rule" was for their server products.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I thought this "rule" was for their server products.

Mostly for Windows 95, 98, Me (which didn't get a service pack) 2k, XP and Vista, iirc.

For 2k and XP, waiting until SP2 wouldn't be unreasonable either.

 

[corkyg]

Please, let's get this thread back on topic. It is not for OS discussion - that is another Forum. This is SSD vs HDD. As Ketchup79 originally posted. Thread derailing is a no-no!

 

[fuzzymath10]

Hopefully this drives the price of old X25M 80GB on ebay down to under $20...

People take for granted how cheap this type of upgrade is. I have a mix of used and new SSDs and as long as you get a solid model, the only major issue for older used drives is capacity, since 64/80GB is fairly borderline. I think the sweet spot is the 160GB G2/G3 drives.

It's not necessary to have 500MB r/w speeds, since very few situations would benefit unless you move/copy big files around. It's being able to push even 20MB/sec when the system is peppered with tons of small r/w activity and when a spinner is struggling to hit even 1MB/sec. (look at your resource monitor when you start up; ironically the resource monitor itself will take awhile to appear on a spinner if you try).

Although I was a fairly early adopter with 2 new X-25Ms in 2009 (the first of which was C$385), I now look for used drives where possible.

Last year, I got a 160GB Intel 320 (G3) for C$60 on kijiji. Brand new 120GB SSDs would have been over C$100 including tax. Being stuck on SATA2 and 150MB/sec writes is a non-issue. I also got lucky with an open box 512GB MX100 for C$200 around the same time which saved me about $50.

 

[Nec_V20]

Considering that there will be no SP* from 8 on out, you are going to be waiting a while then.

So there is no such thing as Win 8.1?

And as there has no and never will be such a thing as Win 9, I think my advice is more that prudent.

 

[Ketchup]

People take for granted how cheap this type of upgrade is. I have a mix of used and new SSDs and as long as you get a solid model, the only major issue for older used drives is capacity, since 64/80GB is fairly borderline. I think the sweet spot is the 160GB G2/G3 drives....

This is very true. Computer manufacturers do a good job at making them look like a very expensive upgrade. Very likely since:
a. Since many HD manufacturer's don't do SSDs, the computer manufacturer doesn't want to risk losing the deals they have with them.
b. Even though SSD prices keep getting better, they will still be a smaller drive on a spec sheet for more money.
c. Theoretically, a hard drive could last for, let's say 50 years. In other words, something has to go wrong for a hard drive to die. An SSD has has a wear pattern, and it is established that they will have a much shorter life, even if nothing going wrong. Better than they had when first introduced, but still there. I would not want to be the manufacturer known as having the lowest quality because all my drives die faster than anyone else's. (I know Apple puts SSDs in all their high-end laptops, but that market already knows that if you keep a device more than a year you will not be as cool as you were when you bought it.)

It's good to know that we are seeing prices go down and performance go up, considering that several major markets haven't adopted these yet.

 

[Nec_V20]

It took almost 2 years for Windows 7 to get it's only SP. I don't recall any reason not to jump on windows 7 on release. And while I skipped windows 8 because I hated the UI, I downloaded Windows 10 on day 1 and so far it's worked they way I expect it to.

I thought this "rule" was for their server products.

Win 7 was the first Windows version since Win NT 4.0 that I felt a confidence in out of the box.

This was because Win NT4.0 had the development of the Win NT 3.x (there were no versions of Win NT below 3) and the main difference between Win NT 3.51 and Win NT 4 was that the graphics driver had been moved to Ring 0 (Kernel mode) as opposed to Ring 3 (Application mode).

Win 7 was what Vista would have been if Intel had not discontinued their Itanium 64-bit line in favour of going more in line with what AMD was doing with their 64-bit processors.

So all of a sudden Microsoft had to make what they thought would be an extension to their 64-bit OS (and I was a long term alpha and beta tester of Longhorn) into the mainstream 32-bit product (which was thought of as a compatibility mode) because Intel had no 64-bit mainstream CPU.

Win 10 is because Win 8 is, was, and will be a expletive deleted.

Really you want to make a tablet based single tasking, touch based, GUI the model for a truly multitasking desktop environment?

Which moron at Microsoft (oh excuse me Ballmer was in charge so I can understand because the lunatic was running the asylum) thought that this would be a good idea really should be certified.

If you look back at my posting history (not necessarily here) I said that Win 8, well before it came out, was not just a disaster on par with Vista, but rather it would be a disaster far exceeding Vista.

Two two word phrases doomed the concept of Win 8 on the desktop

1) Screen plaque

You might put up with smudges on your tablet display, but on your main desktop you are going to get incredibly sick of wiping it off from finger smudges every ten minutes or so.

It's why touchscreens on a larger scale just don't sell, which leads me on to the next reason.

2) Gorilla arms.

People just don't want to use their computers as if they were Dumbledore in mortal combat with Voldemort waving their hands across the screen.

a) Human arms are not long enough to reach a comfortably readable 27 inch monitor

b) Human arms get really tired of moving many inches when a mouse can move the cursor a lot further in millimetres.

The whole concept was expletive deleted from the outset.

 

[MongGrel]

You really can't tell the difference between an SSD and a HDD? Do you only ever run one program at a time? With a HDD, you basically had to limit yourself to that, lest the whole PC get bogged down by primary storage limitations. Try burning a DVD, while scanning for viruses or malware, all while copying ISO files to a network drive. That's the thing about having an SSD for primary OS storage. It's so liberating. You no longer have to sub-consciously limit your multi-tasking to IOPS-light tasks, to avoid overloading the IOPS capability of your HDD. You just don't have to worry about that any more.

Yeah I find going to SSD for OS drive is a huge difference, thing is, I get used to it, then remember how bad it is when I have to use a computer that has a HDD. At work for example it took 45 to 1 hour to get ready for a day of work from a cold boot. We finally got SSDs, now it takes about 10-15 minutes and that time is probably more based on your own speed than the computer.

For mass storage on the other hand I don't think it makes sense to go SSD just yet unless you specifically need the performance.

+1

 

[Sabrewings]

disregard

 

[VirtualLarry]

c. Theoretically, a hard drive could last for, let's say 50 years. In other words, something has to go wrong for a hard drive to die. An SSD has has a wear pattern, and it is established that they will have a much shorter life, even if nothing going wrong. Better than they had when first introduced, but still there.

And yet, there is data that strongly suggests that SSDs, on average, have a much longer lifespan than HDDs. At least in non-write-heavy (non-server) usage. Such as corporate desktops.

And I've never seen a 50-year-old HDD operating. Have you?

HDDs are mechanical devices. Therefore, they wear out. SSDs, are made out of NAND cells, that have a limited lifespan. Therefore, they wear out too. It just happens that for most average workloads, a modern SSD will last FAR longer than a HDD would. Barring "firmware panic lock" issues.

 

[MongGrel]

And yet, there is data that strongly suggests that SSDs, on average, have a much longer lifespan than HDDs. At least in non-write-heavy (non-server) usage. Such as corporate desktops.

And I've never seen a 50-year-old HDD operating. Have you?

HDDs are mechanical devices. Therefore, they wear out.

Longest one I've ever seen is maybe 8 years personally, in constant use.

 

[cbn]

Hopefully this drives the price of old X25M 80GB on ebay down to under $20...

Thanks for the tip. (At some point comparing various DRAM-less drives to those old X25M G2 might be interesting)

P.S. Right now the cheapest one I see on ebay is going for $42 shipped "buy it now".

Not sure if that is the typical price or not?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Thanks for the tip. (At some point comparing various DRAM-less drives to those old X25M G2 might be interesting)

P.S. Right now the cheapest one I see on ebay is going for $42 shipped "buy it now".

Not sure if that is the typical price or not?

You can get larger, new drives for about the same cost so I can't imagine they're selling very well.

eBay has old Crucial V4's for more than a new BX100 at Microcenter, too. So my only assumption is that there are some people hoping to score a few extra bucks off of people who shop by name brand or who otherwise don't know any better.

 

[cbn]

This is cheap enough, that it would be worth it, even for a machine as slow as a Pentium 4 (or an AMD E-series APU).

These will also be great for old C2D laptops.

P.S. In my experience even the 3.5" 7200 rpm 80GB HDDs make for a slow system when used with desktop C2D E6550 and 2GB RAM. I can only imagine how slow 2.5" 5400 rpm 80GB HDD makes a C2D laptop (with 2 GB) feel, so having inexpensive SSD should really wake those systems up.

 

[blankslate]

Considering that there will be no SP* from 8 on out, you are going to be waiting a while then.

no more service packs but you can be sure Win 10 will eventually get to 10.1 maybe even waiting Service Release 1 or 2 will be enough to smooth out any issues for most people.

In any case unless you are an early adopter 8.1 and even Win 7 SP1 will be around for a few more years.

These will also be great for old C2D laptops.

P.S. In my experience even the 3.5" 7200 rpm 80GB HDDs make for a slow system when used with desktop C2D E6550 and 2GB RAM. I can only imagine how slow 2.5" 5400 rpm 80GB HDD makes a C2D laptop (with 2 GB) feel, so having inexpensive SSD should really wake those systems up.

This has been my experience too. even using a SATA II interface on a Core 2 Duo laptop will result in improvements in user experience. Most of the differences between SATA III and SATA II speeds take benchmarks for a person to see unless they're doing specific things on the SSD.

One person's C2D laptop I upgraded to an SSD spends more time in bios than loading Windows from the SSD.


....

 

[Ketchup]

no more service packs but you can be sure Win 10 will eventually get to 10.1 maybe even waiting Service Release 1 or 2 will be enough to smooth out any issues for most people....

Yep. I will just be disappointed (but not incredibly surprised) if 5 years down the road we are running the latest OS from Microsoft, Windows 10 SR5.

 

[Zodiark1593]

You know, I am loving my 5-10 seconds boot time from logo to doing stuff. Really nice if I need to print something in a hurry. Picked up a Radeon R7 120 GB SSD for $70.

My laptop is also rolling a 240 GB PNY Optima I grabbed nearly a year ago for $120 when the hdd went south. Cluttered now, but still as responsive as ever.