SSD: A quest for knowledge

[TrickieTK]

So I've been considering getting a Velociraptor WD Hard Drive or an SSD and while the appeal of getting a crazy fast Hard Drive is an obvious choice from simple cool factor and my basic comprehension that "Faster is better" and "faster read speed means faster load times" but I'm curious to know more rather than the sound bytes I've heard from my other friends who build computers.

I understand that SSD > Fast Mechanical HD because there are no moving parts and so there is "theoretically" no scan time.

How much improvement could I expect going from a standard 7200RMP HD to say a 10,000RMP HD or an SSD

Would I see just faster load bars, or things like faster and farther away loading of textures and NPCs?

Would games would launch faster if they were installed on this faster drive?

Are there any benefits that I'm overlooking in my inexperience with these "performance hard drives"?

[None]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136555

That is about equal to some of the mid range SSDs in almost every area, but random access times may be a bit slower. You'll see a very quick load screen, and generally quicker load time of textures. The only way textures would load slower would be if your GPU can't render it, but you'd need a very low end video card for that.

[vesseblah]

I understand that SSD > Fast Mechanical HD because there are no moving parts and so there is "theoretically" no scan time.

How much improvement could I expect going from a standard 7200RMP HD to say a 10,000RMP HD or an SSD

Would games would launch faster if they were installed on this faster drive?

Both Velociraptor as well as cheap standard SSD discs will drop the boot time of Vista to about half, same goes for the load times of most programs and games. Level loading while inside game probably wont be much faster, or the loading of models in Dalaran since that's mostly up to CPU/RAM.

SSD has a problem with file writing (faster wear than high quality HDD) and Velociraptor can beat cheap SSD in write speeds.

[kabbeh]

i have been using 2 60gb ssds in raid 0 for a while now. i thoroughly enjoy them and i think it was well worth my money. i did a lot of research beforehand, but i still know very little .

i believe the 1st gen ssd's had more issues than second gen (obviously), requiring a bunch of tweaking and tricks to get them to run perfectly without performance degradation. the newer ones seem to handle a lot of those issues on their own through better firmware, and updating that seems easy enough. you still have to watch out as they are more fragile than hdd's, ie. no formatting(full), no defragmenting, etc.

as for the performance increase from a 7200 to an SSD, it will be massive. i havent used raptors before so i cant tell you about those. loading levels is significantly faster, even in dalaran. there will still be issues with lag and stuff but not that big a deal.

youtube should have a number of "SSD vs Raptor" videos showing mostly startup, but it will give you a general idea.

as for brands, i went with OCZ. they seem to have really taken the bull by the horns, and the forums are teeming with information. whatever company you go with, i would recommend finding whatever the latest gen model is and getting that, as i had to do virtually nothing to get mine working optimally. well not optimally, but damn well .

edit: FYI i am more or less a moderate user in terms of hardware knowledge and get lost with most of the terms thrown around. by no means an expert .

[chaud]

Velociraptors are a joke.

[TrickieTK]

I'm assuming things like starting 7 or loading into WoW would only be effected if these were installed on the SSD yes?

How big of an SSD should I look into? I was thinking a 128GB for Vista+WoW+MW2+space for a few future games

Is that overkill on space or should I be looking for more?

[kabbeh]

as i said before i have 2x60GB, which i think will not be enough for me. i am planning to add 1 or 2 more to get that little extra buffer.

theres also a cost comparison you can do buying 1 ssd vs 2 in raid0.

looking at the OCZ vertex turbo, the 60gb are $219 a piece, and a 120gb is $389, and the 30gb are like $139 each. it gives you a little more flexibility i reckon, but its really up to you. technically RAID0 will also further improve access times, but they're already fast as fudge, so what do you get...more faster as fudge? also with RAID0 if one drive fails, you're hosed till you can replace it. just a few things to consider.

i have all my other stuff like wow backups, music, pictures etc. on an old 500gb 7200 in an external enclosure. i think if you want the speed of the SSD for programs, they will need to be installed on the SSD. but smarter people than me have strange configurations where they have like 1 30gb OS drive, and partitions and strange words that seem really cool but i dont need .

edit: removed rebates from prices

[None]

Velociraptors are a joke.

SATA3 controller changed that, and until we start seeing more SSDs using 6Gbps SATA the new Raptors are the better purchase if you want a large hard drive. Your 300gb reference is using SATA2, the newer Velociraptors should be around 150 - 160mb/s Read/write. Your benchmark is also incredibly bad to compare an SSD to a HDD, with a 4kb file the HDD is obviously going to be significantly slower, but are you really going to even notice write speeds on a 4kb file?

Honestly I can't justify paying such a high premium for a few less seconds of access time, once SSD's start dropping to about half the price they are now I'll definitely get one.

[chaud]

The new raptors score slightly higher, ~150 on the gaming bench. That is a fairly good representation of normal usage. They are just not as good in any way beyond cost savings.

[Nemrod]

It's just a matter of money.
Everything you install on a SSD will load faster, be it an operating system or a game. But it's bloody expensive if you see the dollar/GB ratio.

Also gamers tend to have more than just one game installed, if you get a 128GB drive it will be full pretty fast.
Windows 7, some essential programs and WoW will take up about 50GB alone.

In games you can expect a faster loading time of around 20% according to my own tests.
Windows 7 starts in 15 seconds for me, from pressing the power button until I can work (well, would start if I hadn't had SEP installed)

You have to decide for yourself if that is worth it.
I decided against it on my gaming PC, but love it on my work laptop.

[TSchiewe]

I too went the SSD route this fall. I'm on a mac but I think most of my experience would apply to you too. I have the luxury of having four HD bays in the mac so I ended up going with the Intel X25-M G2 80gb and using the other three HD's as storage. If I was limited to just one or two bays, I would've went to the 160gb or even 2x80gb's in a RAID 0 and backing that up regularly.

Those graphes chaud posted give you a pretty good idea just how fast an SSD is. I believe those are from AnandTech.com, there's another graph that shows the 4kb random read speed and at the time the Intel dominated that spot.

AnandTech has written some awesome articles on SSD's if you want more information. Link to all: http://www.anandtech.com/tag/storage

That's why I chose the Intel because random read speed is essentially opening applications and booting up. My mac pro boots up in about 15 seconds or less now and whatever application I load will take less that a second. If your familiar with a mac, the app icon in the dock will typically bounce a four to times times when loading - in the SSD, most of the applications won't even bounce once. Photoshop, for example, will open in less than two seconds.

I migrated most of my stuff (music, pictures, etc and I moved my browser's download location to the other HD) to another 1tb internal HD and by doing that, I got my boot drve down to ~50gb with all of my programs installed including wow. But no others games, it is a mac after all haha and I have bootcamp with w/ 7 on another HD with all my other games installed for that. So that left me with about 30gb's to play with.

I guess if your worried about space, the key thing is to be on top of stuff and know where how much space you have left so your not unexpectedly running out of space. Although your also on a PC, you have a ton more options for games so you'll probably need a lot more space for that. If you want the SSD for general use outside of gaming, maybe thing about installing a second cheap 7200rpm 500gb HD to put all your games on and leave the SSD for the bare essentials.

Other than that, I highly recommend an SSD. Its a solid investment and I think it's the most noticeable upgrade you can do. I wouldn't worry about reliability, I've had no issues at all in the last six months that I've had it. I 'think' 7 has TRIM support too so that a big plus for you as well. I have to go through a massive process to get the SSD back to its factory state but thats a different issue. Just go for it, I guarantee you won't regret it.