So who's made the leap to SSD?

[sdedalus83]

Proin, you know better than that. Manufacturers use 1 billion bytes for their GB and 1 trillion bytes for their TB. A 2 TB drive is really about 1.8 TB.

[bloody000]

Price: 80 dollars
Capacity: 1TB
So, we have 1024 gigabytes. Technically, that's going to be a bit less when formatted, but that's true with any drive, really, so I'm going to just scale it down to 1000 gigabytes as a small correction.

Actually, it has nothing to do with "formatting" the drive. It's the way that a computer measures a gigabyte (the right way) and the way the manufacturers measure a gigabyte (the wrong way).

A computer measures 1 gigabyte as 1024 megabytes and 1 terabyte as 1024 gigabytes. The manufacturers measure 1 gigabytes as only 1000 megabytes and 1 terabyte as only 1000 gigabytes. Thus the difference.


The speed increase of two striped SSDs over a single (or even striped) HDDs cannot be overemphasized, however.

Truth is the exact opposite. 1 gigabyte = 10^9 bytes.  giga = billion. 2^30 != one billion.

[Proin Drakenzol]

Proin, you know better than that. Manufacturers use 1 billion bytes for their GB and 1 trillion bytes for their TB. A 2 TB drive is really about 1.8 TB.

I didn't want to go back that far...

[AceHigh]

For my next computer I plan on 2 SSD disks in Raid 0 configuration and 5 2TB hard drives in Raid 5 configuration.

I really need to save money for that....

[xShadow]

I didn't say the formatting was the reason, I just said that it's going to end up being less after you format it. >_>;

I knew that SOMEONE was gonna go head and start pointing that out, though. Took longer than I thought, I'll give ya that...

[Asako]

I have the 80Gb Intel in my new box (was just resetting more bookmarks/passwords, thus current browsing of the forum here). I love it a lot.

How can you not like

A lot of people complain about low capacity, and poor write speeds, but to me SSDs are all about the massive read speeds, and incredibly low access times. It's still a young technology but it is evolving; with SATA3 (6.0) controllers slowly entering the market we're seeing even more ridiculous speeds and lower access times; the new Sandforce drives look great, but I wasn't prepared to pay quite that high a premium at this point in time, especially when Marvel's SATA3 controller (the only one out atm) is so poor. Another year or so should see a great deal of improvement.

[Spanks]

^ Thanks for a  bit of real world stats


SSD seemed very tempting until I realized I still couldn't see myself fitting win7 + programs + games(not forgetting page-file + system protection + overhead) on anything less a 300GB SSD.

[Proin Drakenzol]

^ Thanks for a  bit of real world stats


SSD seemed very tempting until I realized I still couldn't see myself fitting win7 + programs + games(not forgetting page-file + system protection + overhead) on anything less a 300GB SSD.

you don't put your games on the SSD. The primary system performance boost comes from having the OS + Page File on the SSD.

[iindigo]

There's really no speed benefit from putting games on the SSD? I find that hard to believe, because when I'm playing WoW and I move into a data-heavy area that I haven't visited yet that session, for 2-6 seconds there's a burst of severe visual (framerate) lag from the game waiting for the HD to seek all the necessary files. After that it's smooth as butter.

[Spanks]

^ Thanks for a  bit of real world stats


SSD seemed very tempting until I realized I still couldn't see myself fitting win7 + programs + games(not forgetting page-file + system protection + overhead) on anything less a 300GB SSD.

you don't put your games on the SSD. The primary system performance boost comes from having the OS + Page File on the SSD.

You make a good point a　lot of the games data is put in the page file on start-up but not all of it is for some games and it still has to get いnto the page file in the first place．The games I play (total War game) spends　Half its time reading and writing to the ram and HDD. Anyone have anymore information on having the games or just the OS on the SSD?

[vuzedome]

Game load times do reduce significantly, but depending on the game as well.

[matoakit]

I am running a server with a 60GB X25-E (Yes the very expensive SLC model)

It was not my money that bought it, and WOW is it fast. Multi user (50+) MS server 2008 SQL stuff blazes on that drive.

I also have two Ridata 32GB SSD's in RAID 1 for data backup on the same server.
In my personal Panasonic Toughbook I also installed a 16GB SLC SSD. (~$370 for the laptop and ~$200 for the ssd drive) It runs very fast, and I would hope very reliable, it is very short on space though.

Pros:
Very fast and should be very reliable. (SLC TYPE lasts 10x as long and is twice as a fast as the MLC type)
Very low power usage.

Cons:
So expensive it makes me sad!
Very low storage space unless you cheap out on the larger MLC drives, or have buckets of money to spend on the SLC drives.

Reviewed units:
2x 32GB Samsung SLC 1.8". Bought for a song on newegg, $100 two years ago. They stopped making them, even though they worked perfectly. 10/10 $100 + $20 ebay 1.8" to sata adapter. My main home PC is using one for the OS drive. (320GB mechanical drive for large file storage)

60GB Intel X-25E SLC AWESOME, but AWESOMELY expensive! I trust their reliability. 10/10 $700/ea

4x Ridata 32GB SLC SATA, no problems, not as fast as the Intel drive. 8/10 $130/ea

60GB OCZ MLC drive, had serious problems, crashed the server until it was removed. Had to flash the drive firmware to get it to work. I still don't trust it with any valuable data, very high price for poor reliability. 5/10 $350

16GB SLC PATA Transcend, so far very fast and reliable, however I have not figured out TRIM on XP, so performance may eventually suffer. 7/10 $200

16GB SLC SATA Ridata, gets very hot and first unit burned out after three months, replacement unit is overheating as well. It is a very poor design and probably not to SATA spec. I do not trust this drive with any valuable data, and I would avoid this size from this brand. 2/10 $70

I would avoid the MLC drives in the future, the point is to have longevity and speed, and MLC does not do well at either.

Just my $.02

 

[sdedalus83]

There's really no speed benefit from putting games on the SSD? I find that hard to believe, because when I'm playing WoW and I move into a data-heavy area that I haven't visited yet that session, for 2-6 seconds there's a burst of severe visual (framerate) lag from the game waiting for the HD to seek all the necessary files. After that it's smooth as butter.

Crysis is horrible with this.  Granted the game is horrible, period, but this just makes it all the more unplayable.

[Spanks]

There's really no speed benefit from putting games on the SSD? I find that hard to believe, because when I'm playing WoW and I move into a data-heavy area that I haven't visited yet that session, for 2-6 seconds there's a burst of severe visual (framerate) lag from the game waiting for the HD to seek all the necessary files. After that it's smooth as butter.

Crysis is horrible with this.  Granted the game is horrible, period, but this just makes it all the more unplayable.

Played Crysis the other day after not touching it for many months and I've realized it is technically a very inferior game to fps/sandbox that have been released lately and it doesn't even look that good comparatively. Though it was released 2 years ago.

[AceHigh]

There's really no speed benefit from putting games on the SSD? I find that hard to believe, because when I'm playing WoW and I move into a data-heavy area that I haven't visited yet that session, for 2-6 seconds there's a burst of severe visual (framerate) lag from the game waiting for the HD to seek all the necessary files. After that it's smooth as butter.

As you said yourself, the only benefit is during "loading" sessions. I games like Risen where the new areas load continuously and removes the need to load when you get from one are to another, a faster HD will not give a better performance.

[iindigo]

It appears I was misunderstood when I said "when entering a new area".

WoW is entirely seamless except for separate continents. However, each zone uses completely different textures, models, etc. The game does not load all of these at login, but instead only when approaching said areas. That's when the lag I mentioned comes in - while approaching, sometimes my FPS will tank for 2-6 seconds (depends on the complexity) as the HD churns away plowing through files. My theory was that this would be alleviated by an SSD.

Also, which do SSDs tend to be better at? Opening a single very large file or many small ones at the same time?

[temuchin]

still to expensive for me.   i want a 500+gb drive for my next laptop.  :'(
love the speed/durability of these drives.

[fohfoh]

iindigo: How do you partition your current HDD? I know it's that 7200rpm one, but how do you do it? How much files are on it and how large of an area do you use for your OS/Programs. That alone might be an issue.

[iindigo]

iindigo: How do you partition your current HDD? I know it's that 7200rpm one, but how do you do it? How much files are on it and how large of an area do you use for your OS/Programs. That alone might be an issue.

My HD is 1TB with two partitions - 966GB for OS X and 33GB for XP (yeah, don't do much with Windows). 766GB of the OS X partition is in use. Fragmentation isn't an issue, because as long as you have at least ~30GB free, HFS+ keeps it very low automatically.

I typically find partitions annoying simply because I usually end up running out room on at least one of them, and readjusting partition sizes is a pain in the rear. That, and it's not difficult to reinstall the OS without bothering my files and apps if need be, so keeping the OS and apps/docs separate isn't really all that necessary.

[fohfoh]

Even if fragmentation isn't an issue, don't you think that a 800GB partition would be somewhat slow? I've always found larger HDDs slower than smaller ones in comparison with same rpm rates. Or maybe I'm crazy.

(My media centre on a 1TB 5400rpm drive eats shit in speed in comparison to a 120GB 5400rpm drive)