Zap said:
I never meant to talk down on Raptors, I still have a system running them and while they provide excellent performance, they aren't my main rig with an SSD. Basically put,
SSD>10k>7200>5400
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Zap said:Originally Posted by jimbob200521
We all know it basically comes down to personal choice; the OP isn't going to be convinced to go SSD no matter what...
Yet he made the choice for two VelociRaptors in RAID.
Check out any hot deals threads on VelociRaptors in the past couple years, and you will find lots of thread crapping on how worthless they are because if you really want performance you go with SSD. If you really want value, you go with 5400RPM/7200RPM
If I were building a new machine, I would choose SSD over RAIDed Velociraptors every time. Access times of the SSD are significant shorter, and power utilization and noise are way, way less. And cost is comparable too.I've been reading these comments, and it seems like most people still haven't gotten my argument completely.
My argument was never about SSD vs Hard drive.
It was about SSD vs RAID Hard drives PLUS a large amount of memory. With at least 8GB (but preferably more) and Windows x64, you get the benefits of a large system cache where data is partially (or even completely) stored in memory for lightning fast access.
And like I said, memory is orders of magnitude faster than any SSD..
I recently benchmarked my hard drive and this was the score I got:
Not bad eh? I know it doesn't compare to a high end SSD, but look at the buffered read access to get an indication of what I was talking about. And I never have to worry about space..
Eventually though I will definitely have to try SSD, if even just to satisfy my curiosity. But don't for a second think that my rig is crippled in performance by running mechanical drives.
Seconds yes, but minutes? Time for a defrag? Or are you running a virus scan after each bootup? I run my virus scans at 3 am while I'm asleep. Or maybe it's time to clean out your Startup folder or something.
And like I mentioned earlier, I only reboot a few times a month.
Don't get me wrong, I really like SSD. As alluded to earlier, I have 3 machines with SSD already. However, I also fully understand why someone might not feel the need to run out and upgrade his/her desktop machine with SSD now. There are things one can do to keep a desktop running smoothly, like maxing out the RAM, keeping the drive defragged, and deleting all unnecessary software. A lot of OEM machines come with loads of crapware that load up at boot, and I always make a point of deleting it all before I actually start using the machine.
I'm not sure the relationship between seconds and minutes but my home system is seconds while my netbook is defintely a minute or so as it loads skype and a few programs into the taskbar. If I was to guess I'd say it's more related to memory though than the hard drive. I have 8GB on my home system and 1GB in my netbook.
I'm not sure how the newer veloci-raptors compare to the older 3.5" raptors, but I was not a fan of those at all. Very loud, ran hot and quite frankly, not all that fast. Seek times were good but transfer rate was quite a bit less than many 7200 RPM drives that were quieter, cheaper and larger capacity.
I don't mind going back to raptor HDDs... only if it wasn't for excessive power draw and noise (both electrical and sound).I've never used raptors, but I will never go back to mechanical drives ever again.
False, unless you are talking fully tweaked up SATA 3 SDD with fast hardware. 3 x Raptors @ raid0 with 512MB system RAM ran faster and smoother than a single Sata 2 SSD in real world Windows environment. I don't buy this synthetic ghey benchmarks anymore...A single top end SSD is faster than your raptors in RAID 0. Also if you RAID 0 SSDs, you're looking at 1GB r/w.
I don't mind going back.Once you try a SSD you never go back.
False, unless you are talking fully tweaked up SATA 3 SDD with fast hardware. 3 x Raptors @ raid0 with 512MB system RAM ran faster and smoother than a single Sata 2 SSD in real world Windows environment. I don't buy this synthetic ghey benchmarks anymore...
cheez
I was speaking in general. After all, Sata II SSD is SSD. It still shares the same SSD technology.Cheez, stop comparing sata2 generation ssd's, which are limited to ~250mb/s reads and writes, to 3x raptors. It mucks up the comparison and makes no sense... We're in mid 2013 here, All new ssd's of the last year are sata3.
I don't care about 4k and "random" R/W non-sense. I need the momentum.... and torque. Not interested in high revving Civic with lack of torque.Even something like a Samsung 840non-pro will give 3x raptors a run for their money in read/write performance, and absolutely blow them out of the water in 4k and random r/w performance.
Guys at other forums compared the fastest SSDs to the slowest HDDs before to support their argument. So now just returning the favor.Why are you comparing maxed out raptors in raid 0 vs a gimped ssd on sata 2? What does fully tweaked Sata3 mean? Lol
Apology accepted. I haven't tried the SATA 3 SSD's, but I doubt the torque isn't all that stellar as what shines in synthetic benchmark. I'm sure it is largely faster than the Sata 2 SSD, but comparing against multiple raptors raid.... for large file transfer and multitasking... Ummm.. I don't know.Sorry, but its true. A single SSD on SATA 3 is faster than your Raptors in RAID 0. Cooler, silent, and less risk of data loss to boot. Not sure why anyone would use raptors at this point. If you need storage get a 1TB drive and a small SSD to cache it.
Well, my Windows desktop is 3 years old, so it's old enough to have been used for years, but new enough to have modern hardware in it including a reasonably fast CPU and lots of RAM. It's also new enough to have a 64-bit OS (Win 7) that can address all that RAM and caches well with it. It still boots Windows fast, and loads up apps fast (esp. after the first load).Well the seconds to minutes basically depends on the hdds itself on how old the pc is. In my experience defrag did not help much at all with such issue. I call it the "windows degrading issue". A clean-install always feels and is faster than after a pc/laptop that has been used for years. Note: maybe this is less of an issue with Win 7 but sure was with XP.
Wha?I don't care about 4k and "random" R/W non-sense. I need the momentum.... and torque. Not interested in high revving Civic with lack of torque.
All that RAM isn't used so adding all that isn't necessary. I see no benefit in performance (and actually slower) with SSD's.But that goes back to the original argument some were making... SSD has good benefit on higher end machines, but has much more of an impact on lower end hardware (and in this case, machines with older OSes that don't cache well and that can't address more RAM).
SSD is slower in heavy tasks, such as transferring large files over the network while downloading some large files from the internet while playing high def videos. It's much much slower than the Raptor drives @ raid0. Who cares about random seeks/writes. I can be patient waitin for that, but while running heavy programs I can't afford to have slowness / roughness issues that SSD's have.Wha?
All that RAM isn't used so adding all that isn't necessary. I see no benefit in performance (and actually slower) with SSD's.
SSD is slower in heavy tasks, such as transferring large files over the network while downloading some large files from the internet while playing high def videos. It's much much slower than the Raptor drives @ raid0. Who cares about random seeks/writes. I can be patient waitin for that, but while running heavy programs I can't afford to have slowness / roughness issues that SSD's have.
cheez
Money. It's a waste to spend a couple of hundred bux to update a machine that already runs just fine, esp. if that machine only cost $500 to begin with.there really is no justifiable reason to not be using SSD as a boot/OS drive these days
Remember that a high-end RAID setup, tons of memory and a fast CPU are not exactly cheap either. A good SSD is ~$100 nowadays as 128GB is completely fine as a boot drive. That doesn't even get you a single VelociRaptor. Here's some comparison:
2x WD VelociRaptor 600GB - $360
G.Skill RipJawsX 4x8GB DDR3-1333 - $230
Total: $590
Samsung SSD 840 120GB - $110
WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm - $70
Corsair 2x8GB DDR3-1333 - $105
Total: $285
For less than half the price, you can get an SSD+HD setup with roughly (1.12TB vs 1.2TB) the same amount of storage and still have a decent amount of RAM.
32GB of memory is for workstations and not for gaming machines. For gaming machines, 8GB is optimal, and 16GB is overkill. Personally, I have 12GB in my machine, so I'm in the middle.
With 12GB of memory, SuperFetch works very well, and I also have a large system cache which launches programs faster than any SSD.
SSD access time is so much faster than any mechanical drive it's just not worth putting the numbers down on paper. 1 or 2 ms vs 8 or 10ms. That is a lifetime when it comes to tranferring data from storage to main memory.
Raw data throughput on a single modern SSD is between 200 and 550MB/s which kills a single raptor.
Even if you have 3 raptors in RAID-0 a single SSD will make your PC exprience so much better than those raptors. No, you won't get the same data throughput, but add 3x SSD in RAID-0 and kiss goodbye to those Raptors.
Yes, a high end SSD drive is much faster than my raptors in RAID 0..
But is it faster than memory? Hell no..
That's the entire point of my argument guys. I have 12GB of memory in my machine, so once something loads, it STAYS in memory; and memory loads stuff pretty much instantly.
For programs that aren't in memory yet, there's SuperFetch, which preloads certain critical files. Once SuperFetch has preloaded these files, my favorite programs and games only take seconds to open. A large game like Bioshock Infinite opens in about 2 seconds on my Perfect Disk tuned RAID array...
Things today aren't like they were back in the days of Windows 98 and XP, where the operating systems weren't as efficient with memory usage and large amounts of memory were prohibitively expensive..
Back then, it was common to hear the hard drive grinding away almost constantly during gaming sessions due to the CPU having to access data on it. We called it hard drive thrashing.
But now, gaming machines have tons of not only system memory, but VRAM as well. So data not only loads very quickly, but it rarely needs to be swapped out because you have so much of it.
If memory was expensive rather than cheap, my argument wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But since memory is cheap, what I'm saying makes sense.
Having a hard drive does NOT cripple your system's performance, if you have a large amount of memory in your system (including VRAM) and a fast processor.
Guys at other forums compared the fastest SSDs to the slowest HDDs before to support their argument. So now just returning the favor.
Apology accepted. I haven't tried the SATA 3 SSD's, but I doubt the torque isn't all that stellar as what shines in synthetic benchmark. I'm sure it is largely faster than the Sata 2 SSD, but comparing against multiple raptors raid.... for large file transfer and multitasking... Ummm.. I don't know.
cheez
I love the speed difference of SSD, but I'm easily willing to admit just how ridiculously overblown the hype around SSD is. I just have a hard time believing there are that many ordinary people using the type of heavyweight applications that SSD reduces load times on.
I keep seeing enthusiasts here and on other related forums *promising* ordinary users that they will expect "night and day" differences by going with SSD.. it's absolute bullshit, and I don't understand this need to push SSD to the ordinary public.. the average user is NOT a video editor, professional photoshopper, or gaming with 20 GB sized mod folders.