So SSD really improve computer performance significantly?

[Papa Hogan]

Thanks for your post, John Connor. Stay here, I'll be back.

 

[ShintaiDK]

SSD is the single biggest upgrade since 3D accelerators.

 

[FeuerFrei]

Speaking of performance enhancements, how fast do SSDs boot a fresh install of Win 7 Pro??
I'm elated my WD Black SATA 6gb/s mechanical drive does it in 33 seconds on a desktop with UEFI.

Disclosure: I've never used a SSD.

 

[Cerb]

With AHCI or RAID on, it should take longer to reach the point where Windows boots, than for Windows to boot, and without many USB devices connected, the logo should rarely ever reach the point where the dots fuse together. I'm not too worried about how much faster something I do 1-2 times a month takes, so I haven't bothered trying to measure it.

 

[Puffnstuff]

How fast windows boots depends on many factors including how many start up programs you have. I have a boat load of them and a spinner took forever to boot but I can have my login in just a few seconds now with a ssd.

 

[SeanFL]

I have a few windows machines that boot 8-15 seconds with the SSD drive. That's down from 30-90 seconds with a HD if my memory serves me right. I do have the SSD addiction now.

 

[Fred B]

I have a few windows machines that boot 8-15 seconds with the SSD drive. That's down from 30-90 seconds with a HD if my memory serves me right. I do have the SSD addiction now.

I boot xp from a Quntum bigfoot in 25 seconds , not bad for a drive that only reads 7MB 😉

That is the funny thing , with disk only seqentieel is better in time for hd , and acces times from 10.000 rpm hd disk .But nothing comes close to the acces times of ssd.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

By far the biggest noticeable improvement was in how long it took to reboot Windows after an update. And this is comparing one of the slowest Samsung SSDs to conventional hard drives.

 

[Carfax83]

While and SSD is a worthy upgrade, I think that fast hard drives like Raptors are still viable, provided you have a lot of memory; especially fast memory. With the page file turned off, SuperFetch caches plenty of data so that much of your programs and files can be accessed very quickly.

I've considered moving to SSD many times, but in the end I always put it off because I honestly have no complaints when it comes to my system's responsiveness; especially with Windows 8.1 Pro..

My machine boots up in roughly 25 seconds or so, but RAID 0 slows down boot times by a few seconds.. Shut down and restart time are very fast, and so is overall application loading time.

Yes I would get better performance from an SSD, but I don't think it would be as, "OMG!" as some of you are suggesting.. :whiste:

 

[ronbo613]

Yes I would get better performance from an SSD, but I don't think it would be as, "OMG!" as some of you are suggesting..

That's true until you go from your computer with the SSD to a computer with a mechanical HD and you say "OMG! What's taking so long? Is this thing on?"

 

[Morbus]

i installed my first SSD about ten days ago. ten days, and i still haven't stopped laughing.

This sums it pretty much.

I tested my current setup with a Seagate Barracuda SATA3 32MB of cache and it was fast. I installed my SSD and it's like ANOTHER upgrade on top of my upgrade (came from a C2D with P35 Mobo). Disc access times are reduced to near zero, from what I can tell. Everything loads in an instant, it's like magic or something.

Seriously, I never knew computing could be THIS fast.

But that's with a fast machine, I have never tested an SSD on an old machine, but I can only imagine the results will be even more dramatic.

That's true until you go from your computer with the SSD to a computer with a mechanical HD and you say "OMG! What's taking so long? Is this thing on?"

Yeah, pretty much.

Yes I would get better performance from an SSD, but I don't think it would be as, "OMG!" as some of you are suggesting.. :whiste:

Oh yes it would. You just haven't seen it yet.

 

[homebrew2ny]

My experience goes against the grain here, but none the less.....

I have now had 2 laptops with an SSD, but the first one was upgraded to a SSD after using the mechanical drive for about 6 months. And to be honest, it was not that breath taking as some here seem to think/feel. Perhaps it's because I never and/or rarely shut it down but instead just keep it in a sleep state when idle so I never counted the seconds being shaved off of a cold boot. From what I understand that is the biggest inherent difference. Also I rarely install and/or move around large files so there too I am perhaps missing the benefit.

What I do is mainly web surfing, a bit of photo editing, and some light gaming here and there. Did I notice it become a bit snappier? sure, but did it go from unbearable to OMGBBQ!!1? No. For what I use my pc for, it just does not see the full potential. Having said that, I would never buy a PC without one from here on in as the benefit is real, however I am not so sure I would recommend the upgrade to someone who uses a PC/laptop like I do, that is until buying new.

 

[Cerb]

While and SSD is a worthy upgrade, I think that fast hard drives like Raptors are still viable, provided you have a lot of memory; especially fast memory.

All memory is fast memory, now. Raptors have been mostly superceded by cheap high-density HDDs, today, plus SSDs.

With the page file turned off, SuperFetch caches plenty of data so that much of your programs and files can be accessed very quickly.

It does the same w/ the PF on, if you have a usage pattern suitable for Superfetch (love it for work, hate it for home).

I've considered moving to SSD many times, but in the end I always put it off because I honestly have no complaints when it comes to my system's responsiveness; especially with Windows 8.1 Pro..

SSDs are a good upgrade, but they don't change everything, unless you constantly close applications, or unless your PC has too little RAM (often unfixable in notebooks), or unless your PC is running some disk hog of a program all the time, or unless you do tons of random access daily, or unless you reboot all the time.

I go to a much slower everything during my weekdays (2006-7 vintage Optiplex, with integrated Geforce 6100 video, whatever HDD came with it, and 4GB RAM), and don't get any more frustrated with it than before I was using SSDs. But, I also am not going without one, if I can afford it, because it is really nice to have.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, I'll "throw in" on this one -- briefly (I hope . . ).

The darn things were expensive when I first started looking at them. At that time also, the HDDs were exceeding 1TB. I had to make some choices, and there weren't many 500GB SSDs out there for a reasonable price.

Now the price is below $1/GB. What I had done then -- when I built my current SB rig -- was to buy the 64GB SATA-III SSD and pair it with an HDD for Z68 ISRT configuration.

At first, I had them both on SATA-III ports. The HDD was a Veloci-Raptor -- very likely overkill with the price. The VR maximum throughput was rated at below 150 MB/s. SATA-II maximum throughput is something like 300. So it dawned on me, but for some minor extra features, it wouldn't matter if the Raptor was on an SATA-III or SATA-II plug.

And it doesn't make any difference for ISRT -- provided the SSD is on an SATA-III port. Instead, the speed with the SSD caching is like day versus night compared to native HDD speed. When I turn off SSD caching, the system is a slug.

Since response times have been reduced or speed increased to something like 80% of the SSD's native speed, I've had little interest in springing for a Samsung 840 EVO to replace both drives. It's on my shoppin' list, either for this system or some new build.

My Mom has an old mATX Gigabyte LGA775 mobo with an E6700 Wolfdale C2D processor. I put a 128GB Intel SATA-III Elm Crest SSD in her system -- hooked up to the SATA-II controller and port. This literally tripled the speed against her HDD setup. I have to service and maintain her system. For 5-year-old CPU technology, there's nothing annoying to me about her system, and she's happier than a pig in --- well -- poop.

I wind up paying for many of the upgrades in this house. Despite the price of that Elm Crest, it has been a real breather for me to avoid paying more so the fam-damn-ily can have "fast" computers.

I still see the gadget showing CPU usage zip up to near 80% sometimes on her system, and I have an E8400 for business purposes where the processor gets a real workout. But opening up one of the longstanding bottlenecks in the von Neumann "architecture" like what we lived with using electro-mechanical hard drives -- definitely a winner.

 

[VirtualLarry]

My Mom has an old mATX Gigabyte LGA775 mobo with an E6700 Wolfdale C2D processor. I put a 128GB Intel SATA-III Elm Crest SSD in her system -- hooked up to the SATA-II controller and port. This literally tripled the speed against her HDD setup. I have to service and maintain her system. For 5-year-old CPU technology, there's nothing annoying to me about her system, and she's happier than a pig in --- well -- poop.

I wind up paying for many of the upgrades in this house. Despite the price of that Elm Crest, it has been a real breather for me to avoid paying more so the fam-damn-ily can have "fast" computers.

I still see the gadget showing CPU usage zip up to near 80% sometimes on her system, and I have an E8400 for business purposes where the processor gets a real workout. But opening up one of the longstanding bottlenecks in the von Neumann "architecture" like what we lived with using electro-mechanical hard drives -- definitely a winner.

Yes, SSDs really speed things up. You would think that OEMs might consider setting them up in a ISRT config, for their higher-end desktop rigs. OEMs could stick to the Hx7 chipsets, and the locked Intel i5 quads, to avoid the support hassle of Zx7 and K CPUs and over-clocking.

Maybe if more consumers knew how an SSD can speed things up, then they wouldn't be "afraid" of buying desktop PCs.

 

[Cerb]

^ Dell, at least, does exactly that. It's usually easy to find a per-configured XPS model with SRT and a 1-4TB HDD. But, since such a box is not nearly an impulse/price-point purchase, you will rarely see them at B&M stores.

 

[MoInSTL]

My experience goes against the grain here, but none the less.....

I have now had 2 laptops with an SSD, but the first one was upgraded to a SSD after using the mechanical drive for about 6 months. And to be honest, it was not that breath taking as some here seem to think/feel. Perhaps it's because I never and/or rarely shut it down but instead just keep it in a sleep state when idle so I never counted the seconds being shaved off of a cold boot. From what I understand that is the biggest inherent difference. Also I rarely install and/or move around large files so there too I am perhaps missing the benefit.

What I do is mainly web surfing, a bit of photo editing, and some light gaming here and there. Did I notice it become a bit snappier? sure, but did it go from unbearable to OMGBBQ!!1? No. For what I use my pc for, it just does not see the full potential. Having said that, I would never buy a PC without one from here on in as the benefit is real, however I am not so sure I would recommend the upgrade to someone who uses a PC/laptop like I do, that is until buying new.

I think it depends on what mechanical drive was in the laptop. I had a 7,200 RPM drive with SATA 2 support and one with a pokey 5,400 RPM drive with SATA 3 support. It sped up both considerably and more of an OMG on the slower 5,400 replaced with an 840 Pro and Windows 8.1.

I also upgraded from 4 to 8GB of RAM and noticed a big jump in the tasks you described (especially when coupled with an SSD).

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Yes, SSDs really speed things up. You would think that OEMs might consider setting them up in a ISRT config, for their higher-end desktop rigs. OEMs could stick to the Hx7 chipsets, and the locked Intel i5 quads, to avoid the support hassle of Zx7 and K CPUs and over-clocking.

Maybe if more consumers knew how an SSD can speed things up, then they wouldn't be "afraid" of buying desktop PCs.

It's really been a long while since I regularly checked the Frye's Electronic ads in the LA Times. That and some other sources give a hint about what sort of budget desktop systems are being offered -- for what prices.

I think it was only about ten years ago that computer "literacy" and usage were being touted for the lower half of the 98% and their school-kids. Some communities were offering free Wi-Fi internet access. But now, there is a stampede to mobile devices. I watch people fiddling with those things on TV commercials, and honestly feel as though I'm the one who failed to "catch up" to the tech-renaissance.

So I'm at a crossroads. I want to maintain a fixed computer-device budget. I see laptops, hybrids -- tablets . . . don't see the advantage of doing everything on a pocket-sized "phone" device when even the E-Trade baby couldn't touch-type on those things -- and obviously -- from my posts -- Mavis Beacon is software I'd never need.

You could really beef up a last-gen laptop with an SSD replacement. I think it was back in the late-90s the industry mags and journals were "predicting" non-volatile memory-equivalents to mass-storage. It took them at least another decade to get there.

So now, we have to wonder when the price will drop below what is now quite reasonable for a system disk (or approximately 5 times the cost of equivalent HDD technology).

Shucks! The HDD -- or even "floppy" storage bottleneck -- has been with us since the early '80s. SSDs are a quantum leap forward.