SSD missing point?

[Lean L]

I just got an ssd (Kingston V+ 64GB) to see what all the buzz was about. To be honest I'm not really seeing the benefits too much. It does seem to speed up boot by a little bit but it's negated by the fact that when I switch my sata channels to ahci, there'a an extra screen when booting up.

Sure every program on my primary drive loads faster but they didn't load slow to begin with? It's the difference between .5 and .2 secs. On top of that, most of the programs that take a while to load eg games I can't really fit on my ssd. I have used a good 80% of my ssd capacity with just my OS, basic programs and Office.

Now I have the ability to load ms word before I can blink an eye but so what? I have enough memory so that it doesn't matter much if I just keep the program always running...

Why all the love?

 

[Blain]

Why all the love?

Because they shave seconds off reboots and programs loading.
And they bust out some great benchmark scores.

A higher "Windows Experience Index"... That's what life's all about! :\

 

[Lean L]

Because they shave seconds off reboots and programs loading.
And they bust out some great benchmark scores.

A higher "Windows Experience Index"... That's what life's all about! :\

My wei score is still 5.9 for some reason. May have to do with the fact that I left the original boot drive intact, cloned the boot partitions and then changed the BCD.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Trolling this forum too?

If you had gotten yourself a large SSD or learned to cached your HDD with your SSD, you would be able to load games or whatever faster. The biggest bottleneck on your system is your HDD. Many people want a more responsive system.

 

[nanaki333]

do you have AHCI set in your bios, or are you using it in IDE mode?

 

[Lean L]

Trolling this forum too?

If you had gotten yourself a large SSD or learned to cached your HDD with your SSD, you would be able to load games or whatever faster. The biggest bottleneck on your system is your HDD. Many people want a more responsive system.

The game thing was only an example. Realistically fast game loads don't do much good 90% of the time. You are forced to wait for slower loaders in many games.

ssd caching seems like a gimmick. also mlc for cache just seems like a bad idea.

 

[Lean L]

do you have AHCI set in your bios, or are you using it in IDE mode?

It's in AHCI

 

[Coup27]

is your OS partition aligned?

 

[kmmatney]

Depends how you use your computer. On my work laptop, an SSD is great as I do a lot of multitasking and am constantly transferring large file around and have disk intensive work being done in the background. An SSD allow me to keep working, while the disk is busy. I don't even notice when my machine virus scanned the entire disk.

On my personal machine, I also have a Gen-1 Intel SSD. In that system, it doesn't make that much of a difference, as that machine is used more for gaming, video encoding and other light work. The SSD is nice for quick boot-ups, but I would be fine without it.

So, it really depends on how you use the machine. I will never to back to a normal hard drive for my work laptop, if I can avoid it.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

Faster boot time is nice.

For me though, the greatest benefit is that there is never any "chugging" even when I am doing drive intensive searches or waking a machine up from sleep.

It allows programs to crash or otherwise leak memory and makes it more "survivable" and responsive.

 

[exdeath]

Try installing some large apps with your hdd then try to open a browser or computer management or control panel while waiting for the app to install. Happy hour glass yay. Now try and zip 5 gigs worth of 100k or smaller files, or compare a few hundred thousands files for backup, or move or copy your music collection... Happy 151 hours remaining progress bar. Gotta run chkdsk? Come back tomorrow!

Waiting 3 seconds for a context menu to pop up is annoying. You're like click click click...cruuuuuuuunch ugh brick wall.

I hate that crunching sound hdds make. Means I'm waiting on the 1950s data storage device.

Everything today is data driven. Processor power allows us to process 100s of gigs of data in the blink of an eye, and storage capacity allows us to accumulate untold gigabytes of that data, yet a hdd can only store and retrieve that data in random fashion at less than 10s of MB per sec. Even web browsing is painfully slow on a mechanical hdd when there are 200 writes to temp internet files on every page. God help you if you have anti virus running at the same time.

 

[Elixer]

SSD's main advantage is to load something faster than you could on a normal spindle drive.
As was mentioned, if you shave off loading time for every program you run daily, that can up to lots of time saved.

If you are a laptop owner with a lower than 7200RPM drive, then you will see huge improvements in the stuff you do everyday.

There are rare examples where a SSD doesn't help that much after loading the OS, but that just means you don't do much with your machine.

 

[Diogenes2]

I just got an ssd (Kingston V+ 64GB) to see what all the buzz was about. ......

That's not a very good reason to spend a lot of money on anything...



You should never buy a tool and then try to find a job it will do well..

You should buy a tool when you know it is what you need for a job you already have...

 

[VirtualLarry]

You should never buy a tool and then try to find a job it will do well..

Isn't that why so many people on these forums build these fire-breathing rigs, and then search for a reason for doing so?

 

[blackened23]

My wei score is still 5.9 for some reason. May have to do with the fact that I left the original boot drive intact, cloned the boot partitions and then changed the BCD.

Yes, your windows is not basing the score off the SSD if you're getting 5.9. You have to delete the MBR off of one of your old drives, WEI bases the score off of whatever drive has your MBR.

Also, TRIM does not work unless you do a fresh install of windows 7, AFAIK.

I would highly disagree with you, SSD is the single best upgrade i've ever done....Especially if you couple it with SRT on the Z68 chipset, its pretty amazing.

 

[God Mode]

People that don't see the benefit of SSDs are usually single application users. If all you do is load up a game or app that loads most of the code into memory anyway, an SSD will probably not be fully utilized.

 

[ahenkel]

I always tell people to use an SSD for a month then switch back to a standard HDD you'll punch your own grandma to get your SSD back.

 

[Lean L]

People that don't see the benefit of SSDs are usually single application users. If all you do is load up a game or app that loads most of the code into memory anyway, an SSD will probably not be fully utilized.

It seems like at my home computer when I use one or two intensive apps at once such as when gaming or whatnow it doesn't matter. I can see how it may help out with my work laptop since I open about 30 random word and excel documents all the time and it crawls at times.

With my home computer, I have a much more powerful processor, more memory and a faster spindle drive to begin with. I just open up whatever I need and leave everything open.

As far as installing/moving files when trying to use the computer, I have 2 drives that I load balance when I do these things anyway. If I download a large compressed file it will be on drive 2. It will be extracted on drive 2 but installed on drive one so there isn't really much slowing me down there to begin with.

Try installing some large apps with your hdd then try to open a browser or computer management or control panel while waiting for the app to install. Happy hour glass yay. Now try and zip 5 gigs worth of 100k or smaller files, or compare a few hundred thousands files for backup, or move or copy your music collection... Happy 151 hours remaining progress bar. Gotta run chkdsk? Come back tomorrow!

This confuses me. What kind of slow ass hard drive are you comparing it to lol. I install large (6GB installer) programs all the time and I have no problem working on the computer while I'm at it. Sure it takes longer to open photoshop if I feel compelled but the start menu should not take longer to load. As far as moving files, desktop hard drives are not that slow to begin with. It took me 12 mins to clone my boot partition going platter > SSD, that's about 50GBs in 12 mins averaging 71MB/s. I could get it done in probably 4-5 mins going ssd > ssd but I digress.

There's been talk of moving files around but afaic that is not the reason for ssds. I thought it was for the ultra low seek times that made loading the OS files so much faster. The problem with that is.. how often do you have to reboot your computer where that actually makes a difference?

There are rare examples where a SSD doesn't help that much after loading the OS, but that just means you don't do much with your machine.

I'm having a difficult time coming up with a usage where you are constantly pulling the same files over and over. I guess if you load photoshop with a thousand addins all day long... but then just leave it open?? SSDs are not large enough that you can pull that much data off of it. Chances are you would be using a network drive for a lot of files for work anyways. The only things that matter are core windows components and few applications. Everything else is moot as they are not on the ssd.

 

[Old Hippie]

I'm probably missing the point here but.....so what if you don't think it's worth the money?

There's many others that aren't impressed and these SSDs aren't for everyone.

I suggest you and your WEI score look for improvement elseware.

 

[Lean L]

I'm probably missing the point here but.....so what if you don't think it's worth the money?

There's many others that aren't impressed and these SSDs aren't for everyone.

I suggest you and your WEI score look for improvement elseware.

I never said I cared about the wei score?

There seems to be a point in hard drive speed probably around a 80MB/s in hd tach and <14ms seek time in which you will not be pained by load times.

 

[KingFatty]

So is the issue that there is something wrong with your particular SSD implementation, and you aren't benefitting as you should and therefore you have a bad opinion of SSDs based on an improperly configured SSD?

Or, are you arguing against SSDs in general, because their cost doesn't justify their benefit (even though you may not have experienced the best setup SSD to appreciate their true potential benefit)?

 

[Lean L]

So is the issue that there is something wrong with your particular SSD implementation, and you aren't benefitting as you should and therefore you have a bad opinion of SSDs based on an improperly configured SSD?

Or, are you arguing against SSDs in general, because their cost doesn't justify their benefit (even though you may not have experienced the best setup SSD to appreciate their true potential benefit)?

It's not ill configured. It's booting off the ssd for both the bcd and the OS. I have trim enabled, superfetch disabled all that good stuff. I'm not seeing why this is so much better than a standard fast drive unless all you do is constantly restart your computer or load the same few programs over and over. And again, once you enable AHCI, you get an extra screen when posting that lasts probably 5 seconds so that extra boot speed is probably gone.

And even though I don't have the fastest SDD, I see load speed as a unit affected by the rate of diminished returns. Who cares about the difference between very fast and really really fast?

 

[dbcooper1]

I appreciate my SSD every time I launch Photoshop or any other resource demanding program; I rarely restart except when required to do so after updates.

 

[Old Hippie]

I never said I cared about the wei score?

My wei score is still 5.9 for some reason.

You mentioned it, not me.

 

[Lean L]

You mentioned it, not me.

In response to Brain's post.