I don't have an SSD, but logic would dictate that actual in-game performance would be unchanged with the exception of stuff like fallout/oblivion where there's just no way of fitting the entire map into memory. Load times would probably be a lot faster though.

*very little
*yes
*probably, for most things
*I think they pretty much all do. Its where the drive reserves blocks of memory to use as backups for when other blocks eventually wear out and fail. Downside is that formatted capacity will be lower than the number on the box, but its pretty much necessary.
*Varies. Used to be pretty bad. Newer ones will probably last nearly as long as a traditional drive. Given how fast SSD technology is changing right now though I wouldn't worry about lifespan - it will be obsolete and replaced long before it ever dies most likely.

I have two SSDs, one in my desktop PC and one in my (5 years old) notebook.

* little power consumption. My notebook went from max. 3:30h of battery time to 4:10h.
* yes
* yes
* all new SSDs have TRIM or garbage collect (GC). When you delete a file on your SSD, the according blocks have to be marked as being "free" before the SSD can overwrite the block with another file. TRIM and GC do that automatically "in the background". When neither of those were active, the performance of the SSD decreased significantly.
* You don't need any drivers. When you're on Windows 7 you're all set for any SSD. When the SSD does not have GC but only TRIM, you must use no other Windows than Windows 7.
* SSDs last very long. I have mine since fall 2009 and SSDlife tells me it'll last until 2018. Note: When you buy a SSD which has e.g. 128gb instead of 64gb, it will last significantly longer since the single blocks will be overwritten less frequently.

this.

your OS needs to support TRIM. afaik that means either win7 or linux kernel 2.6.33 and upwards.

SSDs do not improve anything else than hdd loading times (and energy comsumption), i hope the op realizes that. it's much much more important to have your OS run on a ssd than any game.

You can get TRIM to work on XP too but you also need to align partitions and whatnot as opposed to 7 or Linux where's it's just lovely plug and play :p

But yeah SSDs do make great OS drives. Only put your games on it if you have room to spare (and don't forget to leave quite a bit of free space on it -25%-30% IIRC- to prevent the performance from dropping severely)

The performance difference between an SSD and a HDD is completely insane. Think maps in Starcraft 2 loading in a few seconds as opposed to a few minutes. Also, imagine your computer starting, from the moment you press the power button to you viewing your desktop, in about 15 seconds.

This is exactly the kind of skewed hype that ended in me wasting money on getting a SSD.

But he's right, the performance difference is huge, but for gamers it's limited to loading times, and in a lot of games it's not even noticeable compared to a decent HDD.

Notice exactly what he wrote.

"a few minutes" to load a StarCraft map.
A 'few' is at least 2.
Do StarCraft maps take 2 minutes to load?
And is that time reduced to a 'few' seconds by installing an SSD in the same computer?
A 'few' is usually no more than 2-10.

I don't own StarCraft, but you can't tell me that you go from loading a map in 2 minutes down to 5 seconds.

I do, however, own an SSD, and in daily operation it feels like its about twice as fast as my other drives.

I'm trying to save the OP from wasting his money on something he doesn't need. Preventing him from making the same mistake I made.

Unless the OP is rich, the money you have to pay for SSDs right now do not justify the price tag. Especially not if you're just using it for a gamer pc.

Yes he did exaggerate, I don't know how it could take minutes to load a SC2 map tbh, it took seconds on the HDDs I've had it on.

I don't disagree with you anyway.

The difference is huge for some things but for the average user/gamer it only makes the OS feel snappier and improves loading times slightly.

Keep in mind that most people have no clue how a HDD works and how to best use it which explains why so many find the difference to be so "OMFG MAN".

Still Win 7 feels a bit crap on a HDD (XP doesn't) because it is writing/reading so much stuff constantly. But buying 2 or more HDDs (one for the OS, one for the games etc) can often be a cheap and very good alternative, especially when you do smart partitioning.

It does take a couple minutes for me. Might be because they're campaign missions. Might also be because my stationary is starting to show its age.

mfw when my XP boots faster on my WD Black 640GB than 99% of all Win7 comps does on a SSD ^_-

XP is extremely light compared to 7 and can easily be tweaked to boot ridiculously fast on a HDD. But it still boots even faster on a SSD mind you. But here we're discussing about HDD vs SSD, not win 7 vs XP.

On my desktop it takes 30 secs after I've pressed the power button (and yes I can start launching applications right away without any slowdown). On a 7200rpm drive. And the bios takes about 25 seconds out of these 30.
On my laptop... 20 seconds with a 5400rpm (fastest bios I've ever seen :p).

An SSD is for the OS and commonly used apps, not for games (though if you have the room to install your games on it, sure why not? I for one would need a 500Gb SSD to do that).

A fast and optimized HDDs is fast enough for games, there is rarely a noticeable difference with SSDs even regarding loading times, probably because a lot of games use large files as opposed to the billions of small files an OS uses.

Set up a Ramdisk (that's even billion times faster than a SSD) and see the difference it makes: for pretty much all my games it's negligible and again we're talking about loading times, in game performance isn't affected at all in my case, even with games that are constantly streaming from the drive.

If you don't want to spend a lot of money you can always get some cheap 7200rpm HDD for the OS and short stroke it. But SSDs do make insane boot drives (W7 does a lot of reads/writes constantly and benefits a lot from it, moreso than XP for example) and they don't even require defragmenting or anything.

you dont event need a 500gb ssd for w7. how many programs do you have? i use 64gb as well and is fine. id go for 128 max if you have to much money.

I meant that I would need 500gb for the OS AND my games. For just the OS and small apps I can live with even 40gb tbh.

but also note that a full ssd is never a good ssd :) *i think crack told me never to fully load my ssd because it will decrease in performance but I am not entirely sure why.

He might have meant that since you'd have to overwrite data to get new data on the drive it will wear out the write sectors.

Absolutely true, but I really don't need much space even on my OS drive. My OS drive has only 5gb on it atm, with all my commonly used apps :)
That's XP mind you (OS folder = about 2gb), but even with win 7 on 40gb I'd still have enough room to keep the performance intact.

My 1tb drive (torrents, music, films, my documents folder etc) is on the other hand pretty much full and my 500gb drive for games has very little free space as well.

I regret having spent good money on my 128gb SSD. Just not worth it.
I was told tales about massive speed increases and game performance boosts.

It does not improve game performance for me. It loads the games faster, yes. And it will load the maps faster. But once you're in the map/level/whatever, there is zero difference compared to a standard HDD.

The only place where I really feel the SSD is when booting my pc. All the small apps like anti virus, MSN etc start a lot faster on reboot.

Overall, I absolutely regret buying this SSD. I could have gotten 6tb of space instead of the 128gb I got for the same price.

I think unless you are someone who does a lot of read/write intensive tasks, SSDs are not worth the money.


Yes, they use standard SATA[2] cables.

Of course it doesn't improve in game performance, who the fuck told you that anyway?
Even more so now that we're moving onto 64bit and having a silly amount of RAM. Gamers should just get a small one for the OS and a big 7200rpm HDD with a good platter density for the games.

It does not improve game performance for me. It loads the games faster, yes. And it will load the maps faster. But once you're in the map/level/whatever, there is zero difference compared to a standard HDD.

...but what did you expect? it's a hard disk for crying out loud, what did you think it was going to do? draw graphics for you, crunch numbers? please.

you're not the sharpest tool in the shed
you're not the brightest bulb in the box
you're not the quickest bunny in the forest
you're not the fastest drive in the rack

are you?

you're not the sharpest tool in the family, are you?

Not the greenest Keel in the Campgrounds.

Do you own a SSD?
If not, shut up.

And if you do, tell me exactly where I'm wrong?

Or do you simply get off by posting trite drivel?

You are not wrong.
But you regret buying an SSD because it didn't make your games faster.

No, that's not the reason why I bought it. I knew it wouldn't make them [much] faster.

But I still regret it. :p

you're not the fastest loading game on the drive, are you?

lol, are you serious?

What's the 'lol' for?
And why would I not be serious?

I'm going to get an SSD as OS/Game drive. For that purpose it's suppose to be insanely good from my sources :)

Not to increase FPS, but strictly for loading times and faster use of basically everything, but not in game, for me, that is enough..

SDDs are great for games that load lotsa smaller levels such as deus ex human revolution, elder scrolls, etc etc. Loading times suddenly don't ruin immersion.

EDIT: BTW 512 gb capacity sdds cost at LEAST 800+ (USD anyways). Even more so, I'm being very conservative.

the only use i can see is for streaming big sound libraries and for hd-videoinstallations or visual-jockeys. even if it makes the os and loading times 50% faster, i think it's always bad deal right now for "gamers".

Yeah and for someone like me who never boots his pc (on 24/7) it's a really poor deal tbh.

This.

Well not only the OS loads faster, but also any application you start within the OS, e.g. Photoshop, Word, Excel, whatever. The whole experience is just so much "snappier". I love it and would never go back.

i already included it with "os and loading times" and also said "a bad deal for gamers" :p which doesnt mean a frequent use of apps like photoshop or whatever. i still don't feel like hanging in the stoneage with a photoshop loadup time of 30sec instead of ~15.

anyways it's great if you can afford it, also like kalston said because of the almost nonexistant latency, that was what my examples were referring to

HDD right now is a really big bottleneck.. especially with video editing tools, Fraps etc. and especially when multiple apps using the disk

can't wait until the PCI-E SSDs become affordable.. or going further: when RAM and SDD will merge into a unified memory :D

Was just going to mention one could just have lots of ram, then I read the final line of your post :P

I find it surprising that no one ever mentions scsi/sas based disks akin to the seagate cheetah's; they should in theory have higher bandwidth/throughput with regards to writing and will have a much longer MTBF.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/enterpris...971-4.html

I had an old pentium II hewlett packard pc with a 4GB scsi disk in it, and it was easily as fast as any ssd-powered computer I have seen in operation today; the loading times were insanely short.

Admittedly they are noiser, and some of the more extreme 15,000rpm drives require active cooling (not difficult to arrange); I'm just surprised that they never get brought up in SSD discussions, especially when the programs being run write to the disk heavily they are probably faster.

Sequential write/read speeds (aka read/write speed on huge files like ISOs and shit) may be better on some Cheetah drives but the latency is still more than 10 times higher which is what matters the most to 99.9% of the computer users. (latency is also one the reasons why SSDs can do so many things at the same time (high IOPS) without feeling slow)

Mark my words, people feel that SSDs are faster purely because of the latency, it has absolutely nothing to do with read/write speeds which have been sufficiently fast on HDDs for several years already.

There are specific situations in which a raid-0 of Cheetah drives can do better, but certainly not when it comes to booting the OS, using a couple of average apps or gaming.

No HDD can compete with an halfway decent SSD for the average user. Don't forget that SCSI drives (or even Raptors for that matter) are ridiculously overpriced and a short-stroked 7200rpm drive with high platter density can easily compete with them while not being noisy/power hungry and costing a fraction of the price.

Also, it has been proven that MTBF hardly means anything and even the SSDs supposed to have a relatively short lifespan will last many years even if you do heavy writing on them.

SSDs are no more or less reliable than HDDs atm, but that's a matter of manufacturing defects and firmware issues, simply because it's a new tech. Things should keep getting better and better though.

The only really downside with SSDs (apart from the price per GB) atm is that when they fail it is very unlikely that you'll ever get any data back (even if you pay the price) while with HDDs it's almost always possible to get the data back (expensive, but when it's critical...)

Ramdisk ftw http://images.ncix.com/forumimages/FCE50FC3-7...25E0F9.jpg

(not mine, I only peak at 3000mb/s )

Doesn't even cost a thing if you got ram to spare.

How does it work with RAMdisks?
If you have 16gb of system RAM, can you have RAMdisk[s] utilise the 13-odd gigs Windows 32-bit cannot use?

Or are you stuck with making RAMdisks within the 3-4gigs that Windows can use?

If its the first, I might look into getting some more RAM. :)

Yes, you can make a 13gb Ramdisk (or even more) on a 32 bit OS but the program isn't free while if you remain within the 32 bit limitations you can find a free one.

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php this one does it for example (think it's the best one too) but maybe you can find it for free somewhere else if you see what I mean.

Edit : looks like there's a free trial too

Sweet... now I'm kinda regretting only getting 4gb RAM when I built this pc. :)

Can you give us an example of what you use your RAMdrive for?

I guess temporary internet files would be a good one?
Maybe make disc images and drop them into the RAMdisk every time you have booted?

Back in Amiga Workbench days, you could just drop a whole folder or disk into the RAMdisk icon, and it would all run flawlessly from there.
Of course that can't be done in Windows with all the DLLs from System32 and stuff that programmes need to run in Windows, I'm assuming.

I use it for the browser(s) and a bunch of small applications, sometimes for games too but rarely.
I actually don't use it much at home since I got great HDDs there but rather on my laptop or at work where the HDD is really slow and it makes a HUGE difference.

But yes you can put all you want on it, even the pagefile, temporary files etc.

Most RAMdisk software let you configure them so that they load an image automatically at startup and save what's on the RAMdisk every time you shutdown the PC. So unless you have a power failure or a crash you don't even lose what's on it and could put even put savegames or something on it.
Obviously it may take some time to write the image to the HDD if you have a large RAMdisk.

I forget, sdds are great for quickly getting into and out of a game right in the middle of studying.

.

Especially if you buy a small SSD for OS but every game insists on installing gigabytes of savegames and profile data on it. I'm definitely going to wait till the price (hopefully) drops.

Overhyped? Not for me. Since I use SSDs I would say that working with a computer is a whole new experience to me.

*edit* As for example: Extracting a 700mb movie from a rar archive sometimes doesn't even show the "extraction in progress" window because it has finished the extraction already :)

.

people will always find excuses to justify their purchase anyway

Well I put a lot of thought into it, and I think rationalizing everything is ok for the following reasons...

When you have an SSD, you no longer have to. While you are distracting yourself with other menial tasks to get the time passing quicker, I am happily fapping away. :p

Also, nothing stopping a person from having an SSD for program files and a HDD for data files. That's basically what everyone does anyway.

All my computer upgrades are to get stuff working faster. SSDs definitely do that.

They do that (I'd add that they ALWAYS do that with recent SSDs, older ones may have had issues such as slow random writes but that's long gone), but the difference will not be huge or significant for everyone, which is exactly why one shouldn't just jump on one considering how expensive they still are.

What about putting your OS on an SSD?

Putting your OS on the SSD is one of the main reasons to get one in the first place.

What are the benefits of putting your OS on an SSD?

Does your PC boot quicker? Does everything feel more responsive?

Your OS boots a lot quicker. As for the second part, not sure. I have two computers, an older stationary with vista and no SSD and a laptop with a hybrid HDD, so I can't compare performance on two modern computers.

How much faster (in seconds) does an OS boot on an SSD as opposed to a typical hard drive?

In windows desktop and other non-intensive applications, my Core i7 runs at 1.6GHz because of Nehalem turbo boost. I think it goes up to 3.0 GHz whenever I boot a game.

Your CPU at 1.6 GHz takes considerably longer for your OS to boot. The arrow keys in my BIOS don't work for some reason, so I can't overclock anything.

My laptop starts in 15 seconds. This is from the moment I press the power button to the moment I'm able to start up firefox.

And my laptop does 18secs with a 5400rpm HDD, god bless the super quick bios and my tweaked XP :p

Guess it would be like 10 secs with a SSD though.

That's really nice. What kind of tweaks are those? Is it possible to do similar stuff with win7?

1 : a small dedicated partition for the OS (15Gb out of 250 on my laptop) followed by a 4Gb partition for temp files (to avoid fragmentation) - I use the rest of the HDD for my games and files -
> that's called short-stroking

2 : turn off / remove all useless services/programs (to do that I use Ccleaner, the Windows service management and Autoram by Sysinternals, some manual /delete too)

3 : use MyDefrag with the monthly system script (takes only a couple of minutes on a modern HDD if your OS partition is reasonable in size)

Just as an example; Windows updates are turned off and I do them manually every now and then instead of letting Windows do it.

To go even further, you can turn off useless devices off in the Bios and Windows, and also delete/move the useless files/folders in the Windows folder.

All of this can be done on 7 but with limitations (many things that can't be deleted, many services that are necessary...). Several files can't be moved at all either and it results in poorer defragmentation than on XP.

But as I said, this crazy boot time is mostly due to the short bios, on my desktop I have done exactly the same tweaks and my boot time is still 30 seconds (maybe 28 with the quick boot thing in the bios).

Also note that since it's still a 5400rpm, that means application start up ain't too fast (FF and Opera take 5 secs to start, compared to about 1-2 on my desktop with the 7200rpm)

It depends what HDD you got, how fragmented your OS is, how optimized (or not) is is etc.

If you have a single partition system, the difference should be huge (maybe cut your boot time in half) but if you have a dedicated partition for your OS the difference won't be as big, but should still be noticeable.

Responsiveness? well that depends what you mean by responsiveness, but most of your applications should load a bit faster and sometimes much faster.

To access the Bios with your keyboard, trying using an old PS/2 one (and from there you can turn on the feature to enable USB keyboards in the Bios).

Modern SSDs probably last longer than HDD. Lifespan is no longer an issue. They're great for responsiveness, having your machine come on in seconds and programs open nearly instantly makes older machines feel unusable.

Can I use an HDD and an SSD simultaneously? Or can you only have one or the other?

Of course you can, that's actually what most people do unless they're really rich and can afford large SSDs.

Best way to go is to use a SSD as your primary OS / Gaming disk, then use normal harddrives for every other data.

it's needless to put games on the ssd

I'd probably still leave quake on it, but install any other game on the normal hdd

if it's needless, why leave quake?

to be able to load a map faster than than the rest and do a quick /callvote map campgrounds before anyone can vote "no" :D

/callvote map qzdm13 (aka lost world) ftw

haha :D
That's not going to work, tho. But I guess you already know that. ;)

that actually does work pretty well, i got it binded and just press that once the map loaded. there wasn't a single time yet this didn't work :p

Why would it not work?

I always thought, because the clients are already 'there', just not playable. Therefore Quake recognizes them as players with voting rights.

hdds r 4 poor people

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html

anyway watch out for those cheap SSDs, they run 10x slower than good SSDs (at least that was the case in 2009)

ed: when you search for performances look out especially for seeking time, not for read/write speed, as this is what makes the difference when it is abt SSDs (the speed the SSD do find data)

Yeah, it's all about the seek time (latency), and yes, cheap or old SSDs are terrible and tend to "freeze" every now and then because of horrible random write speeds (mostly) and/or a poor design.

And I really do mean "freeze", something than even the slowest HDDs won't do.

ocz 3 series looks pretty damn awesome :D and ssds are getting cheaper.

I really like ssds, I've used the crucial c300 in raid 0, and the corsair force drives, ocz vertex 2e, and they have all been amazing compared to a standard hdd. Not much call for raid 0 though, really. Some people will tell you it won't work, but it does, easily. When SSDs first came out they were obviously new tech and not perfect, there were certain rules you had to follow - some people think the rules still apply today, but they don't. CBA to go through them as others have already done that. But basically I would never ever buy a normal hdd for a boot drive again :D

~2€ per Gb is still not exactly cheap :c

And OCZ SSDs are the least reliable btw. Maybe now that they've left the RAM market they'll start improving on that though.

Its a lot cheapER than they used to be though ;)

I thought the OCZ vertex 2e was basically the same drive as the corsair force Oo I suppose they can use whatever brand memory they want though, so yeah I can see how they may be less reliable.

~2€ per Gb, yeah I suppose thats about right atm for the most part, although I think prices are about to go down quite a bit. I can get an ocz agility 3 128gb for 190€ which is about 1.6€ per Gb. And its new tech which is a fair whack faster than a vertex 2e.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/268244
If you look at some of the smaller drives like the corsair force, they are also around 1.5eur/gb. I know the larger drives bring the average price per gb up, but just focusing on the drives most people would use, its not too bad.

I think the reliability is purely a matter of firmware/controller, the parts themselves are very unlikely to have issues (it's all solid state after all).

But that's nothing that can't be fixed so SSDs should become more and more reliable anyway (and cheaper too I guess).

My PC specs:

intel core2duo e4400
asus p5b
gigabyte geforce 7600gt 256mb
2gb ocz ddr2

and I'm going to pick up a seagate 7200rpm drive just now.

Would it benefit me most to get an SSD or is there some other bottleneck where spending money would be more efficient?

Not looking forward to replacing my whole PC just yet.

Also, does anyone know if my graphics card supports DVI-D?

SSDs are a nice upgrade but I wouldn't recommend getting one right now as even Intel which is supposed to be the most reliable is having firmware issues.
If you want a HDD though go ahead, they're cheap, rather reliable, and their performance has improved greatly as well.

Regarding the rest of the rig... well I don't know what you want to do with it so I'm not sure what would be a good upgrade.

Your GPU certainly does support DVI-D but if you meant dual link then I can't be too sure.
Although for example http://www.inno3d.com/products/graphic_card/gf7_pcie/7600gt.htm this one does, so maybe yours does too?

if you're going to get a 7200rpm hdd, get a samsung f3 or wd black

i think 2nd most reliable ssd would be a crucial m4.

I got myself a OZC Vertex 3 120GB with 6GB SATA and I'm more than happy. I previously had a Raptor 10k RPM for my OS/Games and the difference in loading times /working in Windows 7 / loading games / starting your PC is huge. Not noticed or recorded any FPS difference as I don't currently need any more FPS for any games I play :)

I will never go back to RPM drives again!