Is an SSD really that much better than a HDD/SSD

[pignick]

I'm deciding between two laptops-one has a 32GB/500GB hybrid + graphics and the other has a 128GB with no graphics. (they are sealed up so changing the drives aren't an option)
From what I've read the advantages of an SSD are app loading and startup. But if my use of the laptop is mainly using Office and Web browsing (so fairly consistent use) then I gather that the hybrid drive should give me the advantages of the SSD? Are there any other advantages of the SSD that would be worth forgoing the graphics card (so i can do a bit of gaming)?
Cheers

 

[tweakboy]

Don't buy a hybrid IMO. It's new tech and I dont want the drive to die on you.

Let me give you a idea of HD vs SSD ,

My readyboot is broken so boot up doesnt use cache etc,, My boot up is 4 minutes then I would have to wait another 15 minutes for drive to thrash some more, then I use it..... with SSD

My boot up is 20 seconds Photoshop first launch is 2 1/2 seconds everything is instant and pops at you.

 

[Smoblikat]

Don't buy a hybrid IMO. It's new tech and I dont want the drive to die on you.

Let me give you a idea of HD vs SSD ,

My readyboot is broken so boot up doesnt use cache etc,, My boot up is 4 minutes then I would have to wait another 15 minutes for drive to thrash some more, then I use it..... with SSD

My boot up is 20 seconds Photoshop first launch is 2 1/2 seconds everything is instant and pops at you.

Now let me give YOu an idea of a normal persons HDD experience. Boot time 30 seconds, maybe 45, everything is ready to work within another 20 seconds after the Os loads. SSD is gimmick and too expensive, plus the more you use it the slower it gets. Total HDD time is stil under a minute, and you get MUCh more space and dont need to worry about all your programs and things installing to different folders/drives.

 

[jimpz]

I recently put an SSD in a ~6 yr old HPlaptop (intel dual core T2400) It had seemed slow for everything,. The only reason I didn't replace it was it's a '2nd' computer for around the house. Everything is quicker now, it 'feels' much faster, bootups, programs starting up & programs starting up. Probably like you, the delays in web browsing wasn't a slow computer, but waiting for the browser to start, the SSD takes care of that.

Jim

 

[Anteaus]

Boot time 30 seconds, maybe 45, everything is ready to work within another 20 seconds after the Os loads.

This is my experience also. SSDs will definitely make an impression and can make for some speedy benchmarks, but honestly is it worth the hefty premium? Thats up to you to decide. If money was no object, I'd say sure, throw a couple of those bad boys in and enjoy low boot times and perhaps some quick loading games. For the average system, once your loaded, SSD value goes down exponentially. I don't believe they are a gimmick, but at the same time they aren't required either....at least not yet. Thats just my .02 though. There are some here who are heavy advocates of SSD and say that the HDD as a system drive should be abolished. Good luck.

 

[greenhawk]

The "hybrid" the OP is talking about sounds to be the seagate XT range of drives. So they have been around for a little while and seen just as reliable as most others. Down side is the small SSD cache on them makes them mostly pointless to consider them as SSD's in any useful fashion.

while I would go for the first (gaming card), it depends what card it is and what the internal graphics of the second is. I mention this as a lot of laptop cards are crap for gaming with some of the newer integrated GPU's being equal to them.

 

[pignick]

Sorry what I thought was a hybrid is actually just a 32GB SSD cache. So really past booting and app loading I'm not going to be that much better off with an SSD?

 

[GoStumpy]

OS loads in 20 seconds.

Firefox open in another 2 seconds.

Webpage loaded 1 second later.

I'm on AT in 23 seconds from pushing the button....

Lets not forget any program opens in 1, 2, or 3 seconds........

Sorry, there is no chance in heck I am going back to a HDD for my main drive. 128GB drives are dirt cheap now (same price as a 1TB HDD pretty much), and 256GB drives are getting pretty darn cheap as well.

I have a 128GB for my main drive, and music, movies, and steam folder are on my secondary HDD... No space problems here!

Benchmarks are pointless. Real world performance is all I care about.

 

[GoStumpy]

SSD is gimmick and too expensive, plus the more you use it the slower it gets.

SSD is not a gimmick, they are 3-10x faster than a HDD...

And the more you use it the slower it gets...not quite... the close you get to completely full, the slower it gets.. IN BENCHMARKS 🙄

 

[razel]

With desktop HDDs you can rub your chin but with laptop HDDs there is absolutely no doubt when comapred to SSDs. There are also other benefits in the laptop world to SSDs. There is no fear with agressively moving or tossing your laptop around.

However, in my experience, the MOST important aspect is forcing yourself to organize your data onto an external HDDs for movies or cheap SD or USB drives for private data which are smart no brainers if you carry your laptop around and it gets stolen.

 

[Cookie Monster]

From the top of my head, SSDs not only make startup dramatically faster but loads programs fast, shuts them down fast, saves files fast, installs things fast (on the SSD), transfers file between SSDs real quick, wakes up and sleeps real quick etc etc everything generally feels much more responsive than a HDD. With modern day SSD controllers, they maintain most of the performance for a very very very long time.

And the best thing is, is that they are dirt cheap and have enough space to install almost all the applications outside a few exceptions like having 500GBs of games installed for example. A combination of SSDs for OS/games/applications + HDDs for storage is the best storage system (for performance and price) you can have for a 2012 PC.

 

[GoStumpy]

As well, having your photos, music, movies, etc on a spare drive is safer.. easy to reinstall programs, not easy to re-download 20gb of music and 10k photos!

I prefer those on a separate drive anyway!

 

[pignick]

From the top of my head, SSDs not only make startup dramatically faster but loads programs fast, shuts them down fast, saves files fast, installs things fast (on the SSD), transfers file between SSDs real quick, wakes up and sleeps real quick etc etc everything generally feels much more responsive than a HDD.

But wouldn't a cached SSD provide the faster startup, program loading, waking up? And installing things and transferring files would be things you would only do occasionally so the SSD wouldn't affect general useage?

On that note, would an SSD make web browsing faster (assuming that the connection isn't a bottleneck)?

 

[hhhd1]

For laptops SSDs are better, not only for speed, speed is secondary to the main benefits of SSD in a laptop

1. no vibration, no heat, .. easy to hold close to your body.
2. not subject to mechanical damage due to external vibration.
3. much lower power usage, saves battery.
4. lighter, every 10grams you can scrape of can have an affect on carrying for long periods.

it all boils down to what is the main purpose of the laptop:

1. mobility --> SSD
2. desktop replacement and gaming --> Larger HD + GFX

 

[Krynj]

Yes. The difference is night and day, even compared to a 10,000 RPM drive.

I have been using an SSD as my OS drive for 3 years, and there's no way I could ever go back. Anybody that's used one for any amount of time will say the same thing.

They're not just for enthusiasts either, IMO. SSDs really shine when you've been using the same Windows install for over a year, and it still boots up as fast as it did on day one. Enthusiast or casual user, nobody likes sitting there waiting for stuff to load.

 

[Blain]

If I were buying a laptop, it would be 100% SSD (pre-installed or I install).
* Faster operation
* Lower power draw
* Isn't damaged if laptop is dropped knocked around

 

[tweakboy]

Now let me give YOu an idea of a normal persons HDD experience. Boot time 30 seconds, maybe 45, everything is ready to work within another 20 seconds after the Os loads. SSD is gimmick and too expensive, plus the more you use it the slower it gets. Total HDD time is stil under a minute, and you get MUCh more space and dont need to worry about all your programs and things installing to different folders/drives.

Ive done 53 seconds long time ago , I used a application that timed your reboot,, very neat, so it was official. it runs as you reboot and very detailed app too.

But I broke the readyboot like a idiot would. I deleted it, now 55 seconds is taking 4 minutes plus more thrashing then ever......but SSD doesnt use readyboot so, ya it took that 4 minutes and I boot up in 20 seconds and can launch photoshop in 2 seconds immediately no need to wait for HD thrashing,, theres no thrashing in SSD baby! whoever gets it falls in love with it! Unless its a OCZ lol then its a love and hate relationship. thx

 

[exar333]

Yes. Get an SSD for OS or OS + apps that can gain from a SSD and use a traditional drive for storage. /thread

 

[Cerb]

A hybrid drive is little more than a marketing gimmick. It helps most for things that are so commonly done that you should really just change your habits to take advantage of today's cheap RAM, instead. Consider it a 500GB HDD that might boot up, or start a couple applications, a little quicker, over time.

IMO, the real questions are:
1. Do you need the internal drive space?
2. Do you find yourself waiting on HDDs a lot?
3. Will you benefit much from the AIB graphics?

If you can answer no to 1 and 3, go SSD. If you can also answer yes to 2, then don't even have second thoughts about it. Personally I'd be concerned about loss of utility from IGP more than anything else, since drives can always be swapped out later.

But wouldn't a cached SSD provide the faster startup, program loading, waking up? And installing things and transferring files would be things you would only do occasionally so the SSD wouldn't affect general useage?

A caching SSD might, but that's not what the Momentus XT is. It caches, but not the same as using an SSD to caching tends to be done. It's primarily a read cache of common files/blocks. It has to learn, and updates to programs, and changes in habits, can upset it. The difference can be benchmarked, but is still more marketing than anything else. Given an array of choices, I'd go with a Scorpio Blue, myself, for a few hundred GBs. Don't need hundreds of GBs? Don't even get an HDD, then.

3. much lower power usage, saves battery.

Care to show much power savings in an SSD that isn't expensive? The only ones I know if that use significantly less power cost 2x or more that of common ones of the same size. 2.5" HDDs are not exactly power hungry, these days, and tend to have power consumption that is right in line with high performance SSDs.

 

[hhhd1]

Care to show much power savings in an SSD that isn't expensive? The only ones I know if that use significantly less power cost 2x or more that of common ones of the same size. 2.5" HDDs are not exactly power hungry, these days, and tend to have power consumption that is right in line with high performance SSDs.

One thing you need to consider before looking at any reviews that discuss power consumption:

SSDs, unlike mechanical disks, are idle 99+% of the time,

harddisks are idle 0% of the time in case of random read/write, while delivering very low throughput.

so you need to compare idle power consumption of SSDs to a harddisks average load power consumption.

I have upgraded a laptop of a friend from a Hitachi Travelstar 500gb 7200 rpm to a crucial m4 128gb, and the laptop battery gained like an extra 30~45 minutes, from ~2 hours, to ~2.30 hours .

--

according to this:
http://www.storagereview.com/hitachi_travelstar_z7k500_review
7200rpm:
idle power usage: 0.89w
read power usage: 2+w

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6090/plextor-m5s-256gb-review/10
samsung 830 idle at 0.38w

some tools that run on laptops reports that the whole laptop power draw is under 4~6watts at idle, not sure how accurate this is.

 

[WiseUp216]

SSD at home, HDD at work. The HDD at work really tests my patience.

I was mildly skeptical until I purchased my first SSD in May (Crucial M4). I could never go back.

 

[thelastjuju]

If you don't regularly use heavier applications, intensely modded games.. or anything where you're just sitting there waiting for things to load.. there is no real need for an SSD. For me, I have some games so modded out, one favorite of mine used to take 7-8 minutes just to load on an HDD, but a mere 30 seconds on an SSD. But I realize I'm in the minority here, and very few people will be taking advantage of the benefits of SSD technology like that.

If all that will be loaded is lightweight stuff like Firefox, Word or Excel files, or MP3's and AVI's, the SSD won't help you there, because the load times are already minimal to non existent here.

If you want to eliminate boot times, you don't need an SSD drive.. simply hibernate or use advances sleep modes to get around that. If you're running Windows 7, it shouldn't take more than 10 seconds to hibernate in on an HDD.

 

[steve wilson]

OS loads in 20 seconds.

Firefox open in another 2 seconds.

Webpage loaded 1 second later.

I'm on AT in 23 seconds from pushing the button....

Lets not forget any program opens in 1, 2, or 3 seconds........

Sorry, there is no chance in heck I am going back to a HDD for my main drive. 128GB drives are dirt cheap now (same price as a 1TB HDD pretty much), and 256GB drives are getting pretty darn cheap as well.

I have a 128GB for my main drive, and music, movies, and steam folder are on my secondary HDD... No space problems here!

Benchmarks are pointless. Real world performance is all I care about.

I agree totally with what you are saying. Would never go back to a HDD now.

 

[beginner99]

A caching SSD might, but that's not what the Momentus XT is.

And he never said anything about a momentus XT. Sorry, but some guy that didn't read the first post or else has no clue brought that into play. The OP is talking about some new laptop models that ship with a small ( 8-32 gb) ssd-cache. I suspect they use Intel SRT but never researched about that.

Anyway, just search for reviews on such model and a lot of them ship misconfigured (= cache not enabled!) or other broken in some other way. After reading these reviews I can say Stay away from them for now. Laptop suppliers haven't figured it out yet.

Hence go for the ssd. If space is too little, 2.5" external 1 TB HDDs are pretty cheap.

 

[krumme]

Even for light usage an SSD is a wonder for spead. Using a computer for office, webbrowsing and the like, the speed lies in the usage of ssd not the cpu.

When i put a slow ssd in my wifes old coreduo laptop, she noticed the improvement. She later had an quad core sb, with vertex3 ssd and sorts like that, and she have never, ever mentioned it feels faster 🙂 For ligth office usage an slow core2duo and an AMD dual core APU of the cheapest sort, is just enough, but the ssd upgrade is very important.

Always buy quality products like fx. Samsung to be on the safe side. Some MSATA for ultrabooks is still so slow it affects owerall feeling of speed, but most ssd today, even the cheapest is good enough for office and the like, - and an different world to using an HD.

An SSD is the most easy recommendation one can do for a pc today.