My new SSD is unbelievably fast!

[FishAk]

Two questions about SSDs: 1. what kind of lifespan should I expect under heavy use and 2. are the speed benefits seen while gaming??

1. The life time of an SSD can be measured thus:
Compared to available new ones, at the time an SSD wears out, an unused SSDs of it's vintage will be worth one, maybe two beers. So just buy the one you want without worrying about the wear factor.

2. Games benefit relatively little from an SSD.

 

[Golgatha]

Give me a 500GB or better SSD drive at $0.80/GB or less, and I'll be taking my Velociraptor 600GB RAID 0 array out of service for all my game installs. Me loves my 256GB Crucial C300 SSD.

 

[FishAk]

UT2004 is 20GB in itself of levels and mods.

One size doesn't fit all. What will work for most, apparently won't work for you. Unreal Tournament isn't among the 100 most popular games on Amazon, so I wouldn't expect most people to use it. Same with the Master version of CS5. Your choice sounds a bit more like a corner case, and the price you pay is the inability to fit your program set on a budget SSD. People running a more common set of programs will easily get their OS partition below 30Gb.

 

[heymrdj]

One size doesn't fit all. What will work for most, apparently won't work for you. Unreal Tournament isn't among the 100 most popular games on Amazon, so I wouldn't expect most people to use it. Same with the Master version of CS5. Your choice sounds a bit more like a corner case, and the price you pay is the inability to fit your program set on a budget SSD. People running a more common set of programs will easily get their OS partition below 30Gb.

I agree with that, I was just stating my case. Also has to be remembered that most people who get SSD's, say from manufacturers, or event those that could install their own SSD and run the win 7 install (it's a few very well documented steps that most non techies can do) may not understand partitioning, or telling apps/data to install between seperate drives. Ultimately, the price of SSD's still have a way to go before they can become the every mans upgrade.

 

[dbk]

I'll get SSDs when i build my next rig (no plans yet)... I might pick one up for my mini 10..if it gets cheap enough

 

[ahenkel]

I put my old gen 1 OCZ Solid in aging Dell Latitude the thing feels like new even on a older poor performance SSD.

 

[Zap]

Still, can't wait to see the speed of my netbook and know that I won't destroy it with movement (nearly crashed the drive when it turned on in my bag the other day, after slinging around the drive has bad sectors).

DOH! Sucks about breaking the netbook HDD, but that's one of the many benefits of an SSD.

are the speed benefits seen while gaming??

Maybe and maybe not. Totally depends on your games. For instance, WoW completely benefits HUGELY from an SSD. I have L4D/L4D2 on my SSDs because I used to play it a lot, but while I was always the first one in a level, I always had to wait for my teammates anyways. ( EXPERT TIP: Being half way to the next safe room before teammates spawn in is a sure way to piss 'em off.) Some games like COD4 and BFBC2 have a timer at the start so unless your computer is gawdawfulslow, you all start at the same time.

 

[fffblackmage]

I still have not seen as big of a performance jump on a computer since I went from P4 --> Overclocked Conroe.

Ditto, and I went AMD BARTON 3000 to CONROE ... that was huge....not as huge as going mechanical to SSD though.

I went from the 2600+ Barton to E6320. I wouldn't say the difference was huge though. It was nice, but not huge when it came to basic use. The SSD upgrade was huge though. It was especially awesome when I was OCing. Jumping between the desktop and BIOS a couple dozen times has never been so painless.

 

[Cable God]

I am getting me 8 G3's in RAID 10 and will break the entire "thermometer". A score or 9.9!

Oh, wait a minute, I am awake. Nevermind

I've got 36 of the OWC Raid Edition Pro 200gb SF-based disks in RAID10 (3 12-disk groups). It is fast, but not as insane as you would imagine. Is it worth it? Yes, every penny. They easily pay for themselves with improved developer and qa team productivity.

 

[StinkyPinky]

The problem with SSD's is that using a pc without one just seems freaking slow. I agree, I find it weird that someone would drop a massive amount of money on a cpu but get a slow ass HDD.

My SSD is the most impressive upgrade since I first got a voodoo 1 way back in about 1997.

 

[jez006]

I have nearly all of my programs installed and have 27.5Gb free on the SSD. I don't really use my PC for gaming so 60Gb is plenty. I game on my xbox, got a lot of mates that play and xbox live just works so well.

On the subject of xbox, when I build a new computer in a year or so would I be able to replace the xbox hdd with this ssd?

Maybe just plug both into my computer and mirror the hdd onto the ssd? I'm pretty sure it's a 2.5" in the xbox.

 

[heymrdj]

I have nearly all of my programs installed and have 27.5Gb free on the SSD. I don't really use my PC for gaming so 60Gb is plenty. I game on my xbox, got a lot of mates that play and xbox live just works so well.

On the subject of xbox, when I build a new computer in a year or so would I be able to replace the xbox hdd with this ssd?

Maybe just plug both into my computer and mirror the hdd onto the ssd? I'm pretty sure it's a 2.5" in the xbox.

No you can't, the hard drive of the xbox contains specific firmware. That's why you'll read about people making their own 250GB drives by buying a 320GB WD BEVT drive for 55$ from newegg and a 4$ enclosure from China. They'll flash the downloaded 250GB firmware onto that drive and it'll appear just like an MS 250GB drive and have no issue. And SSD however can not operate on the mechanical drives firmware. So there's not anyway to make the SSD work for that.

 

[tweakboy]

Good info heymrdj. Very smart guy.

Ya theres no way you can use a SSD on xbox or else it would be the buzz of the whole net LOL... Its diff infrastructure like heymrdj said. Now you see why hes platinum. Thank you.

 

[heymrdj]

Good info heymrdj. Very smart guy.

Ya theres no way you can use a SSD on xbox or else it would be the buzz of the whole net LOL... Its diff infrastructure like heymrdj said. Now you see why hes platinum. Thank you.

Not me, my bro is the modder/jtagger. He taught me everything I know about the subject. :twisted:

 

[jez006]

dam..thanks for the informative answer.

 

[htwingnut]

Use an SSD for the OS and an HDD for utlities, apps, games, and storage. I have a Vertex 2 60GB and a Seagate Momentus XT in my laptop and the thing flies.

 

[Makaveli]

I went from the 2600+ Barton to E6320. I wouldn't say the difference was huge though. It was nice, but not huge when it came to basic use. The SSD upgrade was huge though. It was especially awesome when I was OCing. Jumping between the desktop and BIOS a couple dozen times has never been so painless.

I went from a socket 939 Opteron to an i7 and that was a huge leap.

But going from HD to SSD made that leap seem small in comparison.

 

[Makaveli]

Download GetFolderSize, and point it to your OS partition.

I think you will find that you have scratch and cache folders that have large files in them. The CS5 Professional install only required 1Gb hard drive space. Also, most, if not all, games load sequentially, so they don't benefit that much from an SSD.

The magic of an SSD is it's low access time for random files. This means that for small files, like those heavly used by your OS and your programs, the SSD is more than 100 times faster than an SSD. For files larger than about 32K, however, the SSD is at best, only twice as fast as a modern HDD.

I think that if you used GetFolderSize to identify where your large files are taking up all your room, and you moved those files to another partition, you would find that your OS/programs partition wouldn't be much more than 20Gb.

Thanks for this little app I was looking for something like this.

My current Windows 7 install is 16GB's right about where I expected it.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Use an SSD for the OS and an HDD for utlities, apps, games, and storage. I have a Vertex 2 60GB and a Seagate Momentus XT in my laptop and the thing flies.

But SSD's also benefit apps, games and utilities so there's definitely a value to installing most of your programs on the SSD. Photoshop, Office, Skype, MSN, antivirus, etc fly when run on an SSD. If you've got 100-500GB of games, then you may not be able to install them all on your SSD, but you should at least put most of your most commonly used programs on there!

 

[coloumb]

Awesome! When the SSD's start coming down in price - I plan to buy a few for around the house [main PC, laptop, netbook]. I'm hoping I can convince the company I work for to replace our laptop's hard drive with SSD's upon hard drive failure [rather than sticking in another slow 5400 speed 120gb drive - pop in an 80gb or 120gb SSD - it would make my job SOOO MUCH more enjoyable].

 

[jimhsu]

In a semi-dilemma right now. Have the Intel 80GB SSD on my desktop, but my laptop really REALLY needs a SSD (particularly considering it needs to boot/resume from hibernate several times a day, and I need it to be responsive for classes/work). 5400 rpm just makes it that much more painful. I've narrowed it down to getting a >80GB SSD for the desktop, and switching the existing one to a laptop, since I only have one drive bay for the laptop. Problem is, the imminent release of SF-2000/G3 makes me not want to buy anything now.

Suggestions?

 

[Makaveli]

Hold out in Jan then buy.

 

[jimhsu]

Hold out in Jan then buy.

That's what I thought. Could the releases push GB pricing towards $1/GB? That would be exciting.

 

[xboxist]

I haven't done the SSD transition yet. I'm competent enough to have built my past 3 rigs, but I'm also unbelievably dumb when it comes to certain functions. Like I wouldn't even know how to add the drive and transition Windows 7 over to it, etc.

I'm also waiting for the costs to drop a bit. I think I'd want at least a 128 GB model and I'm not content with their price quite yet.

 

[Makaveli]

That's what I thought. Could the releases push GB pricing towards $1/GB? That would be exciting.

That is still a dream and not happening.

I will say this as fact even tho its my opinion you will not see $ 1/GB ratio for SSD in 2011 probably not even in 2012 also.