Noob Question about SSDs

[Xenixlor]

I used to build my computers way back in the day but have spent the last several years living in a place not conducive to having a desktop rig or even actively using a computer. I am now rejoining civilization and would like to build a new machine. SSDs were just hitting the market when I was departing previously.

In said new rig, which I intend for gaming longevity; I'm tempted to just buy something like a Samsung 750gb SSD and call it a day because I don't understand how the partitioning works between SSD/regular HD. I've noticed a lot of people use something like a 120gb SSD and 1TB 7.2kRPM in tandem, with the SSD carrying its weight for tasks such as startup, etc. My question is, how exactly does this 2nd strategy work and how does it compare to just buying a big SSD? Is there a measurable performance difference between the 2?

While my budget isn't really an issue; I obviously don't want to waste money on a large SSD if going the partition route will yield the same results.

I've been out of the game for a long time and feel like a simpleton with this stuff now. Explanations as to "how" and "why" on the above would be appreciated + any other recommendations or advice.

Thank you

 

[Deders]

If you can afford to get a huge SSD then by all means go for it but bear in mind that things like documents, video's or music won't see any gains from being on an SSD.

The most benefits are from having the operating system on an SSD as it's the IO/s from this that often grind the system down to a halt, with 4k read and writes and multiple read/writes being performed.

Having a capable SSD that can deal with these things much better than HDD's unclogs the disk access for the other disks, making the whole experience much smoother and more instantaneous.

It's rare that games or programs benefit form SSD performance but there are a few that definitely do, usually ones that have a lot of small files.

I tend to set up my 128GB SSD with my OS and a few small essential programs that I would want running if my program disk went down, then I would just install all my other programs onto the next fastest disk. Usually this is just a case of changing the C: to an E: during the install process.

 

[VirtualLarry]

There are several ways to go.

"All SSD" - the most expensive. Some people still have one SSD for OS + programs, and one for games + media.

"SSD + HDD" - the best compromise. The SSD is for OS + programs, the HDD is for games + media.

"HDD + SSD cache" - one other option, if you have a Z or H series 7 or 8 Intel chipset. This uses RAID mode on the Intel SATA controller, and requires installing SRT too. You install the OS + programs onto the HDD, then plug in a 64GB or smaller SSD, and configure in SRT for the SSD to cache the HDD. After that is enabled, most recently-used stuff on the HDD gets copied to the SSD, and then in the future, it is retrieved from the SSD. This eliminates the need for the user to manually move files between the SSD and the HDD, in order to make room on the SSD. Performance is not quite as good as using an SSD for OS + programs.

 

[BrightCandle]

The Operating system hugely benefits from an SSD. Most applications gain substantially in start time and in performance (depending on what they do) with an SSD, and these the primary things people use those 120GB SSDs for.

Games sometimes benefit from an SSD. You can load into a level faster than others with them in certain games, in some games it makes a material difference (like Wow or Arma 2/3) where assets are loaded dynamically the SSD can do that much faster and you can often see things earlier because of it. Other games like Total War the loading time reductions are dramatic and make moving from campaign to battle and back much less painful. But then there are plenty of games where there is literally zero benefit. They don't load faster, they don't have dynamic assets and there is no measurable difference to having an SSD at all.

Video writing is another area where you might care about an SSD. The additional write speeds can be a real boost to video creation especially uncompressed captured from a game. It usually requires multiple hard drives and post processing but an SSD can cope with it just fine. There is also the consideration that some video encoding (shadowplay) will only write to your C drive, and some programs/games will have bad installers that only go to the C drive as well. Your SSD if its near space might have issues with these sorts of programs.

Media and such doesn't really benefit. You can read and write that at 100MB/s on a hard drive, and while it is quicker to read/write on an SSD most of the time if your copying its going across the network, the end result being about 100MB/s on gbit anyway.

So depending on what you use your drive space on primarily will depend on what you use. I personally have a NAS for my storage needs for media so I use only an SSD in my local machine. I could possibly get away with 250GB but I have a 512GB one which I have had for a few years. It sits about 60-70% full, mostly games and programs. Some of my dev tools are pretty big as well, as are the projects I have checked out.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

You get good advice from all your respondents.

You can probably find a Samsung EVO 840 for between $240 and $300 when it's offered at the Egg or other resellers. And with a newer motherboard (even going back three generations), you can leverage full SATA-III 6Gb/s speed.

First -- my disclaimer -- I'm an advocate of the ISRT feature, because it really works well for me, even for gaming. It's fairly well-proven that you get 80% of full SSD performance by pairing a 60GB SSD (with ~500 MB/s sustained read and write specs) on an SATA-III port, and any decent SATA-III OR SATA-II hard drive with the latter connected EITHER to an SATA-II or SATA-III port of the shared controller.

For instance, I just purchased a 60GB Mushkin Chronos SSD for about $60. You can probably find a 500 GB or even 1TB HDD for maybe $80 at worst. So if you'd chosen the right motherboard, the outlay will be less than $150 -- maybe lower.

then there's a StarTech SATA-III controller for about $90 which I highlighted in another (very) recent thread on this forum. It uses a Marvell chip which offers "Hybrid-Duo" as a similar or parallel feature to the Intel ISRT feature. In this case, if you chose a motherboard without ISRT, such an add-in controller would provide the caching/acceleration feature. Further, the Marvell feature can use an SSD of ANY size for the caching, as opposed to the Intel limit of ~60GB.

Personally, I wouldn't take a minimalist approach to getting an SSD just big enough for OS and programs. Nor would I try and store all my OS, programs and data on a large SSD. A 240GB SSD would be barely enough for me; a 500GB unit would be "just right;" a 1TB unit would seem like overkill. If you can get a 1TB Samsung SSD for less than $400, it's still a viable option. If you don't want to spend even $250 on an SSD, I already explained how you get 80% of the performance for half that.

 

[Cerb]

http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/inter...110,32,33,34,111&sort=a6&t=0&S=240000,6000000

Avoiding the unbranded Sandisks, and Crucial's V4...pick yer poison.

The 2 drive method is to put things you want fast access to on the SSD, and things you can handle being slow on the SSD. Also, the more space you can keep free on the SSD, the faster it will be. It compares well in that not everything might fit on an single SSD, or at least one you're willing to pay for.

Every cache system for Windows I've seen has been LRU, so if you use much more than the cache, it doesn't help so much, or a MOU, only filling with what it's sure you use a lot, and taking a long time to do so. If you use the same blocks/files often enough, it will be almost like using an SSD. If not, it won't.

If you don't need much space, a single big SSD works well. I have an SSD and HDD, but the HDD is only media and backups. No installed programs go on the HDD, including my games, no VMs go on the HDD, etc.. It's not complicated: C: holds what C: normally holds, and D: holds arbitrary collections of mostly-non-executable files.

 

[Charlie98]

I have my system set up where everything is on the SSD, and I have a HDD as a backup (along with numerous external HDDs... nothing to chance! ) Yes, the SSD makes a difference in day-to-day computing (QuickBooks, Office, stuff like that) as well as loading new game levels. Money is an object with me, but I paid the loot for the bigger SSD (in my case, a 256GB) and couldn't be happier.

I also prefer everything being on a single drive for backup purposes... I use Acronis to back up my SSD every night across at least 3 different drives; having everything on one drive makes this simple... backup the entire C drive. I am also a fanatic about backing up my C drive and SSDs in particular because I have had my OS SSD fail unexpectedly.

Were I you, go ahead and fetch a 750GB SSD... and get a 2TB HDD to go with it... and a suitable backup program... for backup purposes.

 

[Xenixlor]

You guys are awesome, thank you for all of the useful responses. I tend to be pretty minimalist with my files and don't foresee ever going 500GB of space anyway. Even with games I usually just play one at a time and lately they've been Civilization or Simcity type games, which sound like they'd benefit from SSD based on a few of your posts. Media such as movies I tend to keep on an external because I travel frequently instead of on the desktop anyway. With this in mind, I think I'm inclined to keep it simple and just grab a 500GB - 750GB EVO. I'm willing to throw some extra money in if its a long term investment.

I like the idea of picking up another HDD for pure backup purposes though.

 

[bonehead123]

2,3,4,6 TB HDD's are so cheap right now, there is really NO reason not to get some & use them for media storage/back up ect.... and save a little cash by getting a slightly smaller SSD..... (240/256GB seem to be the sweet spot atm, at least for sale prices anyways).....

 

[Compman55]

You guys are awesome, thank you for all of the useful responses. I tend to be pretty minimalist with my files and don't foresee ever going 500GB of space anyway. Even with games I usually just play one at a time and lately they've been Civilization or Simcity type games, which sound like they'd benefit from SSD based on a few of your posts. Media such as movies I tend to keep on an external because I travel frequently instead of on the desktop anyway. With this in mind, I think I'm inclined to keep it simple and just grab a 500GB - 750GB EVO. I'm willing to throw some extra money in if its a long term investment.

I like the idea of picking up another HDD for pure backup purposes though.

Backup is not like back in the days. With an SSD there is no option for recovery unless you want to pay huge. With hard drives, a circuit board swap or the freezer trick at home would save you. That said, unless you have a server or NAS, you really do need a SSD and hard drive combo. It is not hard, it does not take extra thinking, researching, etc. This way if the SSD drops, you will have your personal stuff on the HDD.

I run just a Crucial M500 240GB, and use a server to sync my files. So if / when the SSD crashes, all my stuff is on the server. Otherwise I too would be running a second drive.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I threw in my two-cents about ISRT. ISRT is alive and working well with my Z68 system. I have a 500GB Sammy Pro sitting here in its shipping carton, still waiting to be 'given away" in a marriage with other hardware. The ISRT is working so well, that -- after cleaning up sources of event-log problems unrelated to storage -- I'm not really eager to just give it up.

I, too, wondered about the disparate technology and partitioning, but either Disk Director or True Image solves that problem really well -- automatically performing the alignment required for the SSD on the fly.

I just bought a Mushkin Chronos 60GB SSD and installed it as boot drive in my WHS server box. It was a temporary casualty of troubleshooting problems which are now obviously a problem of misbehaving drivers. This means I can go through that exercise again and it will work fine -- as soon as I add a newer controller to the mix, since I want to back away from "nFarce."

The SATA-III SSDs apparently work fine with SATA-II controllers. You don't get the near-600 MB/s throughput, but you get double what you get with an HDD, and my Mom's old system proves it with a 128GB Elm Crest SSD. [Even with a 610i nFarce chipset.]