My take on SSD Performance.

[PUN]

I have the following setup on my i7 920 @4ghz Asus P6T

80GB Intel X25M G2 with TRIM
2TB RAID 0 WD Black
500GB WD Black

Upon running AS Benchmark, I've scored 410 which is outstanding compared to my WD Black. My Windows Index score was increased from 5.9 to 7.7

My boot time remained the same...maybe even longer than before. I suspect this due to my RAID 0 setup in addition to my SSD (loading drivers, etc)

Startup programs are instantly there...no more waiting for programs to start
But once the window is up and running, I do not notice any other changes from WD Black other than opening 3 or more programs at once.

IMO, it wasn't worth the cost and time to move onto SSD. I made the same mistake of moving up from Q6600 to i7 as I did not notice much difference.

 

[Yuriman]

It seems that way now, but after using it for 3 months, I dare you to try going back.

 

[Voo]

Wow you mean that if you don't use the disk you can't distinguish them between a conventional hard drive and a SSD? Unbelievable

A bit more serious though: If you already knew that you weren't interested in heavy multitasking and had no problem with the waiting time when starting up programs, etc. etc. (*list all other interesting aspects of ssds*) - why did you spend the money?


It always depends on what you want to do and what your usage patterns are - e.g. for me boot times are completly uninteresting, if I could buy something to speed them up by 40% I stil wouldn't do it..

PS: Though I'd still use it some time and then go back to using a conventional drive - it's like driving on the highway.. you don't notice how fast you are as long as you drive on it.

 

[PUN]

Wow you mean that if you don't use the disk you can't distinguish them between a conventional hard drive and a SSD? Unbelievable

A bit more serious though: If you already knew that you weren't interested in heavy multitasking and had no problem with the waiting time when starting up programs, etc. etc. (*list all other interesting aspects of ssds*) - why did you spend the money?


It always depends on what you want to do and what your usage patterns are - e.g. for me boot times are completly uninteresting, if I could buy something to speed them up by 40% I stil wouldn't do it..

PS: Though I'd still use it some time and then go back to using a conventional drive - it's like driving on the highway.. you don't notice how fast you are as long as you drive on it.

So tell me when do you open 3 or more programs at once at the same time? Under heavy usasage, I have my winamp, IE8, Windows Live, Steam game, Photoshop with GomEncoder running. Things run identical to my 7200rpm drive with these applications. The only difference is if I click all 6 or more above applications at the same time. But I normally start one then the other and follows.

My initial thought was a single program would open much faster, but it isn't true.
Game loads, app loads are minimally noticeable. It definitely is noticeable when you open 3 or more programs, but I rarely do so (actually never), except just for fun.

Boot time has less to do with how fast your HD is. It depends on what is loaded and which bios is used, so I am not disappointed regarding the slower boot time.
However, SSD performance rave is overhyped.

 

[rcpratt]

Again, it's your opinion that it's overhyped. You knew (or should have known) the advantages of an SSD before purchasing one. You should have taken your usage patterns into account, because it doesn't sound like you did.

That said, I also guarantee that if after running on an SSD for a few months, you switched back to a 7200rpm drive, you would notice a painful difference.

 

[PUN]

Again, it's your opinion that it's overhyped. You knew (or should have known) the advantages of an SSD before purchasing one. You should have taken your usage patterns into account, because it doesn't sound like you did.

That said, I also guarantee that if after running on an SSD for a few months, you switched back to a 7200rpm drive, you would notice a painful difference.

Yes I knew the advantages of SSD before making my purchase and the difference is not noticeable for much average use, coming from 7200rpm.

I consider myself an average daily user who en/decodes, photo edit, games, etc. And one would not benefit from SSD for such use. So for those considering a purchase, save the money til the price goes down as it is not the most hardware performance booster for majority of the users out there.

 

[Voo]

So tell me when do you open 3 or more programs at once at the same time? Under heavy usasage, I have my winamp, IE8, Windows Live, Steam game, Photoshop with GomEncoder running.

Well atm? Skype, Winamp, Photoshop + Bridge, FF, Visual Studio + usual stuff, Eclipse, Netbeans (ok that's just because the JavaFX integration in eclipse is even worse than there), VM with Ubuntu, and Word.
Oh and probably Dragon Age in under ten minutes


Yep, as you see "heavy multitasking" depends on the person and coming from a single 7200rpm (no raid0) drive I also observed grave differences in opening stuff like Eclipse (that thing was horrible with a conventional drive.. all the small files, add-ons and projects it had to load).


So that's only your opinion, but if you had asked before if you would notice a grave difference for your usage pattern, the answer would probably been "no".

And anyway just try using a conventional drive again in 2 months and tell us if you still think how it is, I think that could be interesting - especially if you still think so then (remind you, I'm not an apologist for them, I have no problem if people don't think SSDs are worth the premium - there surely are people for whom this is true)

 

[PUN]

That said, I also guarantee that if after running on an SSD for a few months, you switched back to a 7200rpm drive, you would notice a painful difference.

Now THAT is what I call an OVERHYPED statement

 

[rcpratt]

Call it what you will. I haven't heard of one person that has disagreed with that statement after trying it.

 

[PUN]

Well atm? Skype, Winamp, Photoshop + Bridge, FF, Visual Studio + usual stuff, Eclipse, Netbeans (ok that's just because the JavaFX integration in eclipse is even worse than there), VM with Ubuntu, and Word.
Oh and probably Dragon Age in under ten minutes


Yep, as you see "heavy multitasking" depends on the person and coming from a single 7200rpm (no raid0) drive I also observed grave differences in opening stuff like Eclipse (that thing was horrible with a conventional drive.. all the small files, add-ons and projects it had to load).


So that's only your opinion, but if you had asked before if you would notice a grave difference for your usage pattern, the answer would probably been "no".

And anyway just try using a conventional drive again in 2 months and tell us if you still think how it is, I think that could be interesting - especially if you still think so then (remind you, I'm not an apologist for them, I have no problem if people don't think SSDs are worth the premium - there surely are people for whom this is true)

Never used eclipse, but Dragon age initial load is identical to 7200rpm and each ingame loads are slightly quicker. Other games like, L4D, Demigod, CODMW2, and Batman, all run the same. I was expecting much faster load than this.

Perfect example would be like going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm.

 

[PUN]

Call it what you will. I haven't heard of one person that has disagreed with that statement after trying it.

I'll give it a try for few months and see.
I just dont see the difference under my current usuage. On a positive note, I see almost none "Not responding" messages since the installation of SSD.

 

[bryanW1995]

I hope you're wrong, I just bought an ssd to upgrade from a wd 640 mb blue. I have an extra blue 640 lying around and was going to raid them for my storage disks, but now I'm afraid to do that.

By the way, I thought that intel drivers did not work with trim and raid yet. Are you using a 3rd party raid controller or do you have an updated firmware package? Have you verified that trim is actually working right now?

 

[PUN]

I hope you're wrong, I just bought an ssd to upgrade from a wd 640 mb blue. I have an extra blue 640 lying around and was going to raid them for my storage disks, but now I'm afraid to do that.

By the way, I thought that intel drivers did not work with trim and raid yet. Are you using a 3rd party raid controller or do you have an updated firmware package? Have you verified that trim is actually working right now?

Yes, I am using the pulled Intel firmware which supports TRIM. I've verified with crystaldiskinfo for TRIM. RAID is not supported with TRIM, so just set your drive to AHCI. I get over 410 on AS Bench oppose to less than 1/2 on my 7200rpm black.
Again, if you are using such programs like I've indicated above, you won't see much difference other than your startup programs loading faster.

 

[garritynet]

Windows experience index means crap. I get 7.4 with my 2 WD6400AAKS bare drives. No raid.

 

[PUN]

Windows experience index means crap. I get 7.4 with my 2 WD6400AAKS bare drives. No raid.

I believe 5.9 is the max you can get with any 7200rpm drives

 

[ckett]

Would you say that the general feel and response of the GUI is better on an SSD or pretty much the same with the WD Black drive?

So no dreaded hourglass symbols with the SSD....

 

[garritynet]

I believe 5.9 is the max you can get with any 7200rpm drives

It was 5.4 on Vista and on W7. I installed ASUS AHCI drivers and enabled AHCI in the bios and boom, 7.4. I have actually been fiddling with my drives because I feel that my HD Tune results and lower than they should be. My point is that Windows experiecence index means crap.

Edit: Sorry, I think it was 5.9 in vista and 5.4 in w7. I don't think anyone cares but whatever.

Sorry, I'll get back on topic. Do you feel that this is one of those things where you don't think you need it till you have it? I want to know because I just sprung for a SSD myself. I mean, now that you are no longer as limited by your HDD will you start regularly using 3+ programs at once? You have the ram, the quad core processor, the bandwidth and now you have the fast drive.

 

[dawza]

I am not trying to discount that a good SSD will be much faster than a spindle drive for certain applications, but for the most part, I did not, and still do not, see much difference between a Vertex and a VR for MOST day-to-day activity. There are certain things that are noticeably faster (i.e. saving office files is now instant, as opposed to near-instant), and nothing is perceptibly slower.

On the other hand, a 7.2K RPM HDD==>VR is absolutely noticeable to me, even during normal desktop usage.

 

[PUN]

It was 5.4 on Vista and on W7. I installed ASUS AHCI drivers and enabled AHCI in the bios and boom, 7.4. I have actually been fiddling with my drives because I feel that my HD Tune results and lower than they should be. My point is that Windows experiecence index means crap.

Edit: Sorry, I think it was 5.9 in vista and 5.4 in w7. I don't think anyone cares but whatever.

Sorry, I'll get back on topic. Do you feel that this is one of those things where you don't think you need it till you have it? I want to know because I just sprung for a SSD myself. I mean, now that you are no longer as limited by your HDD will you start regularly using 3+ programs at once? You have the ram, the quad core processor, the bandwidth and now you have the fast drive.

Honestly, I don't know any person who would launch 3 programs or more at once. The only difference you'll see is when the computer loads with the startup programs. Also, less "not responding" messages occur in some programs.
I never had problems running 10+ programs with my WD Black...so imo, $250 is not worth the faster startup programs and less error msg. Again, I was hoping for much faster single program/game load, but not on any programs that I use daily (Photoshop, Encoder/Decoder, Winamp, Live messenger, Games, IE/Mozilla, Antivirus, etc)

Some programs may load much faster (I am actually dying to try out SD on my office server program as it depends heavily on reading data) than a 7200rpm drives....but for an average daily user, it's just a waste imo.

 

[skid00skid00]

Here's a performance index for ya: run ESET NOD32, Malwarebytes, and SuperAntiSpyware full scans at the same time, while surfing 9 different storage forums at once.

There's NO - ZERO lag when opening new forum posts, and paging thru them.

 

[lothar]

I am not trying to discount that a good SSD will be much faster than a spindle drive for certain applications, but for the most part, I did not, and still do not, see much difference between a Vertex and a VR for MOST day-to-day activity. There are certain things that are noticeably faster (i.e. saving office files is now instant, as opposed to near-instant), and nothing is perceptibly slower.

On the other hand, a 7.2K RPM HDD==>VR is absolutely noticeable to me, even during normal desktop usage.

Going from a 7200RPM drive to a 10,000RPM Raptor is very noticable to you but going from a Raptor to an SSD is not?

 

[Craig234]

My performance test will be, how does it affect entering Dalaran in World of Warcraft. I have years of pent up frustration with apparent WoW disk bottlenecks.

 

[PUN]

Here's a performance index for ya: run ESET NOD32, Malwarebytes, and SuperAntiSpyware full scans at the same time, while surfing 9 different storage forums at once.

There's NO - ZERO lag when opening new forum posts, and paging thru them.

There is ZERO lag with WD Black drives as well. I could open over 300 IE browsers without any lags as they are not HD dependent once launched. It's sad that most people have misconception regarding this.

I use to run Norton Ghost backup, Norton AV, Steam Game, IE 3-4 browsers open, wimamp, and encoder/decoder.

SSD benefit only kicks in certain programs like Eclipse, mentioned earlier in the post.
Photoshop use to launch in about 5sec with WD Black, but it takes about 4 sec with SSD. Not sure if one would notice much.

 

[PUN]

Going from a 7200RPM drive to a 10,000RPM Raptor is very noticable to you but going from a Raptor to an SSD is not?

It all depends on how he uses his HD.
Like I said many times before, for an average user, SSD performance is little noticed.

If you are a heavy gamer, spend the money on the Videocard or a new monitor.
Do a lot of encoding/decoding? get a new CPU.

 

[lothar]

It all depends on how he uses his HD.
Like I said many times before, for an average user, SSD performance is little noticed.

If you are a heavy gamer, spend the money on the Videocard or a new monitor.
Do a lot of encoding/decoding? get a new CPU.

Yeah, but the average user won't notice the difference if he compared a 7200RPM drive with a Raptor either.