Guys at other forums compared the fastest SSDs to the slowest HDDs before to support their argument. So now just returning the favor.
cheez
I didn't understand that one either.What do other guys at another forum have to do with anything. It's called logic.
An SSD does nothing for gaming, and with SuperFetch and System cache in Windows 8, doesn't really add much to program start times..
The only real advantage of an SSD is much faster boot, restart and shut down times (and we're just talking 10 or 15 seconds or so here)... Also, installing large programs like Windows, but how often do you do that?
It has a lot to do with it. People there have same belief as people like yourself in anandtech forum. The logic I discovered is that a SATA 2 SSD is much slower than a 3x raptor raid0. The video playback with heavy load of process in the background caused roughness, like frames skipping. You see, THIS is logic, basing off real world apps, not synthetic benches you like relying on.What do other guys at another forum have to do with anything. It's called logic.
Yes. Lol. It's actually a great analogy in my case.Torque? Lol
About the same as what you get with Sata II SSD.how much horsepower your mechanical drives got?
Are you having reading comprehension problems? This has been said many times already. The Raptors are much faster, not just faster, but much, in real life. I'm no longer a kid who relies on synthetic benches...Your Raptors aren't faster
That's actually exactly the opposite in many ways. Some SSD drives, like OCZ are flakey. Have you heard of failed drives after less than a week of use? Some are DOA.and its less reliable.
Raid0 10 of Cheetah's (15k rpm) with some dedicated high-end raid controller (not your average onboard mommyboard controller ) and watch that thing tear the 2x SSD raid0 in to pieces in heavy work load. Not talking about random seek time for opening tinnie winnie apps that sissies like doing.My family (ordinary users) would never go back to mechanical again.
That's because I am the entertainer. I have reputation for this since I joined the forum. I am famous.It's always suspicious when someone invents new terminology to support their argument. But I have to admit it's entertaining reading.
Those drives got a lotta torque, yeah baby, tool time gruntin' good.
SATA 2 SSD
When SSDs first became available on the market years ago, I promised myself I would eventually get one or two once the prices started to drop and the capacity got larger. Both of those conditions have been fulfilled to a large degree, yet I'm still running my trusty 600GB x2 Raptors in RAID 0, with no apparent desire to upgrade to SSDs at all.
I guess I've fallen into the "good enough" category, despite being a high end gamer for years. Or have I? :sneaky:
Since Windows Vista, Microsoft has made a concerted effort to improve the memory efficiency and performance of their operating systems. Vista had very aggressive prefetching, too aggressive in fact. Practically everything you clicked on would get loaded into memory.. SuperFetch's aggressiveness was consequently dialed back with Windows 7 but made smarter, and now with Windows 8, it has improved even more.
For the most part, apps and software that I use routinely open very fast due to SuperFetch because crucial parts of them are already in the memory. What's more important though, is that once the program has fully loaded, it remains in memory so even if I close it and reopen it, it opens practically instantaneously.
So my point is, with the easy availability of large amounts of RAM (which is far faster than any SSD) and the increased efficiency of SuperFetch in Windows 7 and 8, why go to SSD at all? Especially when hard drive capacity is so cheap, that you never have to worry about running out of space..
I suppose I need convincing
Raid0 10 of Cheetah's (15k rpm) with some dedicated high-end raid controller (not your average onboard mommyboard controller ) and watch that thing tear the 2x SSD raid0 in to pieces in heavy work load. Not talking about random seek time for opening tinnie winnie apps that sissies like doing.
cheez
You said "a large amount of memory" and 8GB is definitely not considered to be much nowadays - it's pretty much the minimum for a decent gaming rig. Either way, even if we take RAM out of the consideration, the price difference between the storage systems alone is $180.
8GB of memory is optimal for a gaming rig, and is hardly the minimum. The minimum is around 4GB for today's standards.
What's the point in going over 8GB for a gaming machine? The only reason I have 12, is because I'm still on a Nehalem based machine with tri-channel memory.
8GB is sufficient. That doesn't mean optimal in any way. More RAM, if used, is better. If you don't need more, than it's unnecessary. There's little/no proof that a game will perform better with only 8GB of RAM. You might manage to overclock a little easier with only two DIMMs populated, but that's a completely different argument.
An SSD will also help with gaming since you'll have faster load times (less important for multiplayer games), and in some cases better overall performance.
Ever had WoW running on spinning disks? Your FPS would have gone up with an SSD
Also, prefetching and superfetching only helps if you can actually pre-fetch the entire program beforehand. That's still a lot of reads that have to be done, and won't help you with simultaneous tasks.
That is the kind of expectation I had.
I've never played WoW, but I don't see how having an SSD would increase your FPS providing you have decent specs.. If WoW accesses the disk that much, even if the machine has a lot of memory and VRAM, then it must be a poorly coded POS program.
Intel X25-M 160gb SSD vs Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 SCSI x2
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/intel-x25-m-160gb-ssd-vs-seagate-cheetah-15k-6-scsi-benchmarks/
"This was exactly the situation Grant Gochnauer found himself in after finally giving into the hype and throwing an SSD into his laptop recently. When asked to subjectively describe the performance difference from a user perspective (ignoring numbers and science for now) Grant sent us back a lengthy reply that made us drool. You have to keep in mind that Grant is not comparing an SSD to a standard SATA drive hes comparing an SSD to his 15k SCSI desktop drive (which would probably dazzle most of us):
The best way I can describe how working on an SSD feels compared to a traditional (fast/15,000RPM X15) hard disk are that programs open almost instantly. I think between Windows 7 64-bit, 8 GB of ram, and insane access times/read speeds everything just operates as youd want and expect from a PC.
As a developer who works with pretty large code bases, the high IOPS really helps when Im compiling and doing other things at the same time. As an example, updating my SVN repo on my desktop which is about 600MB and contains about 48,000 files is about 5-6x faster on my SSD than my 15,000RPM drives. Furthermore, I can update 2 SVN repos of the same size on the SSD without any slowdown whereas on my desktop the whole system crawls and the update process takes at least 2x longer. If I were just surfing the web I wouldnt notice much benefit from an SSD. However when I start Windows from a cold boot, I click on outlook 2010, IntelliJ IDE, and Firefox and to see them open all virtually instantly on the SSD is just breathtaking. Not only that, I have Dropbox and Digsby concurrently starting while Im opening these 3 programs. Its just crazy that I can start working right away."
Edit: I know it's not a huge name site (not one that I recognize, anyway) but hey, it's a good read
It has a lot to do with it. People there have same belief as people like yourself in anandtech forum. The logic I discovered is that a SATA 2 SSD is much slower than a 3x raptor raid0. The video playback with heavy load of process in the background caused roughness, like frames skipping. You see, THIS is logic, basing off real world apps, not synthetic benches you like relying on.
Are you having reading comprehension problems? This has been said many times already. The Raptors are much faster, not just faster, but much, in real life. I'm no longer a kid who relies on synthetic benches...
Raid0 10 of Cheetah's (15k rpm) with some dedicated high-end raid controller (not your average onboard mommyboard controller ) and watch that thing tear the 2x SSD raid0 in to pieces in heavy work load. Not talking about random seek time for opening tinnie winnie apps that sissies like doing.
Torque analogy is great. Who's interested in a Civic SI with torque-less engine?
On my machine, which is no longer even cutting edge, a level in a modern game like Crysis 3 which uses very large textures loads in only 10 seconds or so.. I have 12GB of DDR3 1600, a Nehalem based Core i7 @ 4.2ghz and the VRAM (1.5GB) on my GTX 580 SLI cards is overclocked to 4400mhz.
If anyone forgets how nice their SSDs are, I suggest you simply revert back to using a computer with a HDD.
My current computer is set up where I boot from whatever drive I designate in BIOS to be drive 1. Sometimes I go back and boot into my old Windows installation on the HDD. When I do, it's like hey is my computer frozen? Then I realize I'm just waiting on the HDD. That little exercise really lets me appreciate how much I like the speed of SSD.
Plus, I admit my favorite part is that SSD's are silent.
I you mentioned 8GB as an optimal number, as though more RAM was detrimental to performance. The only benefit of having 8GB is that it's cheaper. If you ever want to start toying with VMs while doing large photoshop work, and then be able to fire up a game without closing them, then you'll run into issues.OK, what game uses more than 3GB of memory? Even heavy multiplayer games like BF3 don't even come close to using 4GB of system memory, so what's the point of going over 8GB?
I hate waiting. If I click on a button, I should get a response. 10 seconds to load a level is an eternity for me. I would switch from one system to another in the ME series in at most 2 seconds.Yes, with SSD you'll have faster load times, but how much faster? Like I said in my original post, we're no longer in the days where loading games could take up to a minute or even more.
On my machine, which is no longer even cutting edge, a level in a modern game like Crysis 3 which uses very large textures loads in only 10 seconds or so.. I have 12GB of DDR3 1600, a Nehalem based Core i7 @ 4.2ghz and the VRAM (1.5GB) on my GTX 580 SLI cards is overclocked to 4400mhz.
I understand very well how memory management can minimize disk access. Windows generally has very good memory and cache management (thread balancing is another matter). However, everything still has to be read from disk at some point. If you load up Crysis3, then load up BF3, then FarCry3 (three's seem to be my thing today), the initial loads are going to take larger. Your 12GB of RAM is insufficient to prefetch even all three of those games, their textures and models, and any other associated data. Prefetching will also only load executable data into memory - not static textures and models. Most of the I/O you experience while playing a game isn't loading the code - it's loading models and textures. That will stay in cache afterwards, but it won't be loaded when you start up your computer.People just don't understand how memory (system and VRAM) can mitigate I/O access..
Between the OS, the games and the hardware, everything is designed to lessen disk access as much as possible.
It also happened to be released in 2003. The present expansion has improved graphics a fair amount from the original, but the underlying game engine is the same as it was at release. Blizzard isn't in a position to re-write the program to take advantage of modern operating system functionality. Like Zap said - it's a gigantic world, and then you're dealing with other users entering and leaving your rendered region, each of them with their own character customizations and equipment.I've never played WoW, but I don't see how having an SSD would increase your FPS providing you have decent specs.. If WoW accesses the disk that much, even if the machine has a lot of memory and VRAM, then it must be a poorly coded POS program.
Again, cache only helps if the memory isn't needed for anything else. The moment the RAM is needed for active pages, cached data gets destroyed. If you had more than 8GB of RAM, you could load up several games in sequence, and chances are they'd still have some data left in your cache.SuperFetch doesn't preload the entire program, just parts of it. At any rate, it's enough to be noticeable. But once you load the program, it stays in the system cache so if I close it and click on it again, it loads practically instantaneously.
Call me crazy but I can actually hear my SSD (Samsung 830) when it is getting accessed. I can only describe it as a high pitch electronic whine. Its not constant but comes in bursts that is consistent with the flashing of the HDD light. I also have a 1TB Caviar Black in there but I know when that thing spins up and its definitely not that.