SSD's?

[Tyranastus]

I am going to display my ignorance here... (Please be kind).

I am currently looking at a couple of computer builds to buy by the end of this week... However, the only time I've really seen SSD's come up is in Chaud's builds.
Can someone please explain to me, as though they were talking to one of their parents (providing your parents aren't particularly computer savvy) exactly what an SSD is used for, how it differs in functionality from a HDD, and under what circumstances I would need an SSD?

Thanks in advance guys.

[Captain Midnight]

Basically, an SSD will be able to retrieve data that is stored on it a lot faster than a HDD. They're used basically for operating systems and programs that are used frequently (i.e. WoW or other games). You don't need an SSD in any case; it's more a quality of life thing.

[Deleted]

They are used for quick boot and to install few games, you'd want less loading time in. It is a kind of luxery, yet most people investing a lot in their rig, will fit a ssd. The amount data transfered is simply another league than hdd.

Though anyone with a ssd will also want a hdd for cheaper disk space, movies, other games.. Etc. So OS and few games on ssd = very little time staring out the window while waiting

[Tyranastus]

So essentially, if I had a SSD, and the main use for my computer was WoW for example. I would have all of my WoW files saved to the SSD, rather than the HDD, so that it would run faster and independently if I was to open other programs and whatnot while running WoW? (A bit of a lamen's phrase, but I think you'll know what I'm saying)

[DeltrusDisc]

Captain Midnight explained it very well.

SSDs, are nothing more than a luxury that make your life just a little bit less annoying, when on a computer, especially booting up. They considerably lower the time you have to spend in the "waiting" position. My computer boots up and I'm logged in I think about 15 seconds or so. It's very quick. Once you log in your computer is almost immediately ready to go, there's no serious wait for stuff to prepare, you're pretty much ready to go, especially if you optimize and turn off stuff you don't need to load. Loading programs/games is also pretty instantaneous, however only buy an SSD if you've already budgeted the best you can get for what you need in all the other compartments, as an SSD is NOT something you NEED, unlike a graphics card, which will give you an image and actually do something considerably better than integrated graphics.

[Tyranastus]

Fantastic! Thanks very much for that guys. I think, for the main part, since I am exceedingly patient at the worst of times, an SSD is probably not something that I should bother dropping $100-$150 on. Just doesn't seem like it's worth trying to explain to my GF that I'm an impatient bastard and that's why I've gone so over budget.

While we are here, not trying to take the post off topic, but I was wondering if you guys wouldn't mind just having a quick glance over the build I have picked out, and just give me any pointers if necessary.

Antec Nine Hundred - $119.00
ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 Motherboard - $135.00
G.Skill Ripjaws X F3-10666CL7D-8GBXH (2X4GB) DDR3 - $59.00
MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II OC 1GB - $255.00
Intel Core i5 2500K - $225.00
Antec High Current Gamer 620W Power Supply HCG-620 - $99.00
Seagate Barracuda 500GB ST500DM002 - $75.00 (I have a perfectly usable existing 500g HDD already, which is why I opted for a 500GB instead of the 1TB)
LG CH12LS28 12X BD-R Blu-ray DVD Combo Drive - $65
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64bit with SP1 OEM - $135.00

The Antec Nine Hundred is pretty much a preference thing, as is the Blu-Ray combo drive.

[Biged781]

Most here seem to be under the impression that the performance of WoW is affected by using an SSD. I would wager a guess that this is incorrect.

WoW is likely *not* IO limited. As with all other games, your bottlenecks are going to be CPU and bandwidth. I can't imagine that WoW hits the disk often while playing as that would be a terrible design decision. As such, an SSD will likely not show much if any improvement as far as gameplay is concerned.

[Tyranastus]

Most here seem to be under the impression that the performance of WoW is affected by using an SSD. I would wager a guess that this is incorrect.

WoW is likely *not* IO limited. As with all other games, your bottlenecks are going to be CPU and bandwidth. I can't imagine that WoW hits the disk often while playing as that would be a terrible design decision. As such, an SSD will likely not show much if any improvement as far as gameplay is concerned.

But they were right to say that an SSD can be used for storing your OS for faster booting? (assuming I have read correctly) I think generally speaking, I do understand now the point of an SSD, and have more or less come to the conclusion that it is not really a necessity for me. As more a quality of life/time saver.

[DeltrusDisc]

Most here seem to be under the impression that the performance of WoW is affected by using an SSD. I would wager a guess that this is incorrect.

WoW is likely *not* IO limited. As with all other games, your bottlenecks are going to be CPU and bandwidth. I can't imagine that WoW hits the disk often while playing as that would be a terrible design decision. As such, an SSD will likely not show much if any improvement as far as gameplay is concerned.

Actually it's part true and part false. WoW hits the disk several times if you're simply flying through SW, that's why on an HDD setup, you might have a little hiccup in fps when it's loading new textures and characters. With an SSD you do not get this hiccup and the characters are loaded almost instantly. Plus load screens are insanely quicker. So it kind of does and kind of doesn't affect gameplay, it does smooth things out, and coupled with a great gaming CPU like the 2500K and great GPU, like the 560 Ti he listed, it makes for a very pleasant gaming experience.

[Biged781]

But they were right to say that an SSD can be used for storing your OS for faster booting? (assuming I have read correctly) I think generally speaking, I do understand now the point of an SSD, and have more or less come to the conclusion that it is not really a necessity for me. As more a quality of life/time saver.

Oh yeah, anything that is disk intensive will be sped up dramatically by using an SSD. Just be sure to create backups because, currently, it *will* fail at some point in the relatively near future (think 1 year or more).

Actually it's part true and part false. WoW hits the disk several times if you're simply flying through SW, that's why on an HDD setup, you might have a little hiccup in fps when it's loading new textures and characters. With an SSD you do not get this hiccup and the characters are loaded almost instantly. Plus load screens are insanely quicker. So it kind of does and kind of doesn't affect gameplay, it does smooth things out, and coupled with a great gaming CPU like the 2500K and great GPU, like the 560 Ti he listed, it makes for a very pleasant gaming experience.

Yeah, that's why I said "I would guess". I don't know all of the ins and outs of WoW when it comes to stuff like this, so I imagine (as you point out) that there are some areas where an SSD would help, it just won't be some sort of panacea for performance woes.

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

An SSD drive load files orders of magnitude quicker than an HDD. If it takes 1 minute to load warcraft on an HDD it'll take somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 seconds to load it from an SSD. It won't help with frame rates - you'll still get the same speed you always have. It will help with loading time (blue bars), and having things "pop" into existance. Loading data from the drive can often reduce frame rates (loading takes up a lot of computing resources) so if zoning into org causes 10 seconds of drive access on an HDD where your frame rate is cut in half, an SSD can reduce that to half a second or less.

I'm using RAIDed SSD drives for Warcraft. Compared to normal HDD drives in a RAID set it's substantially faster.

Here's a playlist showing me logging into warcraft.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...ature=view_all

The first shows my SSD drives loading warcraft (just after I booted into windows I started warcraft, fraps, typed in my name/password/authenticator)
The second shows my old 7200 RPM hard drives (rebooted, started warcraft, fraps, typed in my name/password/authenticator)

The files are exactly the same: I just copied my warcraft folder from the HDDs to my SSDs. Everything else is identical. As you can see the difference is striking. Not only do I burn through the blue bar much quicker - once I'm in the game you can see that the SSD has all of the player models/textures/npcs/etc loaded instantly. The hard drives continue loading for quite some time. You'll also notice that the frame rate is identical in both cases: SSDs help smooth out frame rate dips caused by loading time - but they don't increase your frame rate generally.

Because an SSD can churn through it's "list of files to load" so quickly you'll find it responds to requests to load multiple applications very fast as well. Think of an SSD as a way to squash loading times for anything stored on them.

Oh yeah, anything that is disk intensive will be sped up dramatically by using an SSD. Just be sure to create backups because, currently, it *will* fail at some point in the relatively near future (think 1 year or more).

The mean time between failure for a modern SSD drive is actually longer than it is for a traditional consumer hard drive. Backing up is still good advice, but it's not something a person with an SSD need be more concerned about than they otherwise would be.

EDIT FOR SOURCE: For a source chosen at random: http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...ssd_201006.pdf

Samsung says their SSD drives have a mean time between failure 2-3x longer than their traditional hard drives (if on average a drive failed after 1-million hours. An SSD will fail, on average, after 3-million hours.)

I think generally speaking, I do understand now the point of an SSD, and have more or less come to the conclusion that it is not really a necessity for me. As more a quality of life/time saver.

You don't need an SSD in the same way you don't need a faster processor or more ram. The game will be playable on 1 GB of ram, but it'll be a better experience with more.

There's always a cost benefit analysis to work through. IMO an SSD is such a huge quality of life improvement that it's worth sacrificing nearly anything to get it. It'll make your computer feel much faster than any other upgrade you can do. The down side is that it's a fairly significant expense that is optional.

[DeltrusDisc]

Good comparisons evn, however I get the feeling that 7200RPM HDD you used in your second video is a bit.. old. =S My older HDD loaded WoW up a bit faster than that.

[Deleted]

While we are here, not trying to take the post off topic, but I was wondering if you guys wouldn't mind just having a quick glance over the build I have picked out, and just give me any pointers if necessary.

Antec Nine Hundred - $119.00
ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 Motherboard - $135.00
G.Skill Ripjaws X F3-10666CL7D-8GBXH (2X4GB) DDR3 - $59.00
MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II OC 1GB - $255.00
Intel Core i5 2500K - $225.00
Antec High Current Gamer 620W Power Supply HCG-620 - $99.00
Seagate Barracuda 500GB ST500DM002 - $75.00 (I have a perfectly usable existing 500g HDD already, which is why I opted for a 500GB instead of the 1TB)
LG CH12LS28 12X BD-R Blu-ray DVD Combo Drive - $65
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64bit with SP1 OEM - $135.00

The Antec Nine Hundred is pretty much a preference thing, as is the Blu-Ray combo drive.

Just nitpicking but I'd suggest a set of 1600MHz RAM like these, same price range G.Skill Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600

Don't forget if you plan on overclocking the 2500k you'll want an aftermarket heatsink.

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

It was this one. I bought it for cheap storage for my Drobo (network device) so performance wasn't my primary concern - but it's probably the sort of thing the typical nerd building their own computer is likely to pick up. big (for its day) and cheap.

That video was made a year ago - just after patch 4.0 but it's still a pretty good indication of the differences in performance. If you reboot Windows and launch warcraft it's going to be a slow load because nothing is cached. More expensive/faster hard drives (like the 10k scsi drives) will be much quicker - but still no where close to an SSD.

[DeltrusDisc]

oh I know man, I have a Crucial m4 128GB SSD myself, and while I quit WoW back in August, I still remember when I went from HDD to SSD, it's pretty amazing and glorious. I'm shocked that was a Cav Blue though! Cav Blues are pretty decent, being right under Cav Blacks and all.

[Tyranastus]

Thanks for all the help guys. Setup is finalized, I have permission from the missus to buy it, Notarget, I took your advice and upgraded to a 1600. Will probably post about the setup once it arrives and I've set it all up.

Thanks again for the advice.