Waiting for faster SSDs or something even quicker

[pcslookout]

Is anyone else waiting after their first SSD purchase didn't seem worth it ? I originally used my WD Raptor 150 GB and sure it was faster but not earth shattering. Have the Intel 80 GB G2. Glad I didn't get the 160 GB.

To bad nothing is out there that is affordable and as fast as ram drives! I will give SSD this though it is awesome if you are opening more than one thing at once.

 

[Ben90]

SSDs are only insanely faster in certain situations. Well written applications are optimized for mechanical drives as they try to keep reads as sequential as possible. Not everything can be 100% sequential reads however, and certain databases can be up to 10x faster on SSDs.

For things like games which mainly only need to load huge sequential textures, there really isn't that big of a difference between your Raptor and a SSD. You can confirm this yourself by putting whatever application you think needs better I/O performance on a RAMdisk. If it really doesn't speed up that fast, you can start pointing fingers at things other than your SSD

 

[Emulex]

ram is faster than ssd by a long shot.

 

[Beautiful_Life]

SSDs are only insanely faster in certain situations. Well written applications are optimized for mechanical drives as they try to keep reads as sequential as possible. Not everything can be 100% sequential reads however, and certain databases can be up to 10x faster on SSDs.

For things like games which mainly only need to load huge sequential textures, there really isn't that big of a difference between your Raptor and a SSD. You can confirm this yourself by putting whatever application you think needs better I/O performance on a RAMdisk. If it really doesn't speed up that fast, you can start pointing fingers at things other than your SSD

Actually SSDs are faster in all cases. SSDs sequential read is faster about twice as Raptors.

Programs cannot be well written to read in sequentially from the disk. The program can't control where exactly the files are written on the disk. The disk controller will just fill up whatever unused space it finds first. Some performance programs can trick the controller by collecting many small writes into a large sequence so the disk controller will write a longer sequence of data from a program. So data ends up less fragmented. Then comes the problem of mechanical drive seek times. The more fragmented, the worse the speed it because of the long seek time.

Loading large textures, models, map, core engine of whatever game is much, not just noticeably faster from an SSD compared to a velociraptor.

RAM disk are buggy, and RAM cost much more than an SSD. Plus, at every startup, you've to waste time loading the files from the HDD into the RAM disk and you've too waste even more time writing back the file on the SSD at shutdown.