Is an SSD worth the money for a casual user?

[cocklehorseman]

Hi guys.
So I recently bought an ssd and for the life of me, I can barely see a difference between an ssd and a classic hdd.
Reading some 20-30 forums everyone kept saying it's going to change my life, it's like going from a piece of crap vw beetle to a pagani zonda F, or from a small chested woman to a 38 DD pornstar, but I just isn't.
Sure, windows boots faster, from 15 seconds win 8.1 uefi, to ~ 7 seconds on SSD, but does that really make a difference in anyone's life?
Browser boots in an instant on both of them (hdd/ssd), media player also (more like pr0n player, ), can barely see a difference in game loadings, 1-2 second gains here and there.

So, my question, is this the most overrated piece of hardware?

[csgohan4]

if it doesn't make a difference to you in real time, then you know yourself. however if you game alot, use intense programs, coding, e.t.c the difference is worlds apart. Imagine loading a map in Battlefield 4, takes you 1 min+ , but takes me 15 seconds. Big difference to me that is.

[cocklehorseman]

What ssd are you using?
I'm using a kingston, I haven't played bf4, only bf3, and I can't see such a difference, the ssd has an advantage of 5 seconds at most.
I'm also on sata 2, am I that limited by the older sata port?

[aidanjt]

SSDs are so stupidly cheap nowadays, it's kinda at the 'why not?' price point. It isn't that hard to scrape together £60 for a 128GB SSD, set it as your boot drive, and install windows on it. You can even carve out 20GB for Intel's SSD caching so your hard drive filesystem access can get a bit of a boost as well. And now that your system isn't having to wait for a read head to seek around for every file you read and write, all those little delays interacting with software just go away, and overall improve your system's responsiveness, usability, and well, life, really.

[Saracen]

....

It isn't that hard to scrape together £60 for a 128GB SSD, set it as your boot drive, and install windows on it. ....

That depends on the individual's circumstances. There are a lot of people for whom it'd be pretty much impossible, never mind hard.


As for whether it's worth it for the casual user, that entirely depends on the casual user, what that user feels about the benefits, and how much £60 (or whatever) means to him/her.

In my opinion, no, it's not worth it, not for my usage anyway. I don't care if my PC takes 5 nanoseconds or 5 minutes to boot, because I don't sit and wait/watch while it boots. I turn it on, go and make a cup of coffee, and come back to find it booted. And the performance difference it makes to me in real-world use makes little to no difference to me.

So much so, that the 128GB SSD I have sitting here has spend the vast bulk of it's life sitting on my desk, as I can't be bothered to put it back in. I suppose I'll get around to it sometime, but does it make any real difference to me? Nope.

[JackBeePee]

I turn my PC on and off quite a lot, and I have quite a few startup programs. I really appreciate the difference the SSD makes, speeding up most things I do. I agree that in some cases, you won't notice it's there though.
I also play a few games with quite large map files that used to have quite silly loading times, but now I hardly wait at all.
Again though, I guess it really depends on what you use your computer for!

[aidanjt]

That depends on the individual's circumstances. There are a lot of people for whom it'd be pretty much impossible, never mind hard.

Well yes, a student living on beans or a hobo might struggle to scrape together £60 for an SSD, but they're not exactly in the market for PC upgrades. But SSD prices are exceptionally reasonable right now.

I don't care if my PC takes 5 nanoseconds or 5 minutes to boot, because I don't sit and wait/watch while it boots.

I don't know why people think SSDs are all about OS boot times, that's way down on the bottom of the list of performance advantages. Application load times and responsiveness are hugely improved by SSDs, even on machines with boatloads of RAM, that's the big benefit from them.. And as I already pointed out, with a bit of added software they can cache hard drive sectors as well, chief among those are going to be the filesystem indices, improving performance of those, too. And then there's energy and thermal savings on top of that, since your machine doesn't need a beastly 7,200rpm disk spinning constantly anymore. If you come back from dinner and find your PC, or at least its drive in sleep mode, you don't have to wait for the same to spin back up, just hit a key and you're back in business before your key finishes travelling back up.

It's no one thing that's improved by SSDs, it's just everything altogether because you're no longer limited by the mechanical action choking the random I/O and IOPS performance of mechanical hard drives. And all those slices of 10ths of a second, all the way up to minutes shaved off application load time and UI response rates add up to an awful lot of time saved not twiddling your thumbs.

[kalniel]

Hi guys.
So I recently bought an ssd and for the life of me, I can barely see a difference between an ssd and a classic hdd.
Reading some 20-30 forums everyone kept saying it's going to change my life, it's like going from a piece of crap vw beetle to a pagani zonda F, or from a small chested woman to a 38 DD pornstar, but I just isn't.
Sure, windows boots faster, from 15 seconds win 8.1 uefi, to ~ 7 seconds on SSD, but does that really make a difference in anyone's life?
Browser boots in an instant on both of them (hdd/ssd), media player also (more like pr0n player, ), can barely see a difference in game loadings, 1-2 second gains here and there.

So, my question, is this the most overrated piece of hardware?

I couldn't care less about boot time once it's already in the reasonable range, and likewise I don't think SSDs are much use for gaming, but it's precisely the casual use that I think benefits most from SSDs. Things like opening applications, loading web content from cache, Lightroom operations and use of it's cache etc.

However as computers get more RAM and operating systems get better at predicting what you are going to use and preloading into RAM the effect of an SSD does reduce.

On Windows 7 my SSD was by far and a way the biggest improvement my user experience, easily beating out increases in RAM size and speed, and an extra Ghz or so on CPU. Windows 8 may not see the same increase, I don't know - however an obvious (though not trivial) test would be to try going back to a mechanical drive after a while, and see if you notice the difference - that's when most people who had SSDs suddenly realise how good they were.

[Saracen]

Well yes, a student living on beans or a hobo might struggle to scrape together £60 for an SSD, but they're not exactly in the market for PC upgrades. But SSD prices are exceptionally reasonable right now.

Not the only scenarios, though. For instance, either losing your job, or unable to work through ill health, which for the self-employed, can be a disaster. And in both those cases, I speak from personal experience.

There are also many that can scrape together £60, but not repeatedly, so the issue then becomes getting value for it, because it only spends once. Whatever, there are lots of people that can come up with £60, but for whom it's very far from easy. On the other hand, there are people for whom it's a whimsical decision. My point was for the former, they may have the money, but it's not going to be easy to replace if you don't use it wisely.

....

I don't know why people think SSDs are all about OS boot times, that's way down on the bottom of the list of performance advantages. Application load times and responsiveness are hugely improved by SSDs, even on machines with boatloads of RAM, that's the big benefit from them.. And as I already pointed out, with a bit of added software they can cache hard drive sectors as well, chief among those are going to be the filesystem indices, improving performance of those, too. And then there's energy and thermal savings on top of that, since your machine doesn't need a beastly 7,200rpm disk spinning constantly anymore. If you come back from dinner and find your PC, or at least its drive in sleep mode, you don't have to wait for the same to spin back up, just hit a key and you're back in business before your key finishes travelling back up.

It's no one thing that's improved by SSDs, it's just everything altogether because you're no longer limited by the mechanical action choking the random I/O and IOPS performance of mechanical hard drives. And all those slices of 10ths of a second, all the way up to minutes shaved off application load time and UI response rates add up to an awful lot of time saved not twiddling your thumbs.

As for boot times, I entirely agree, but I think every time SSD performance comes up for discussion, quite a few people mention boot times, including the OP in this thread. For some people, it matters, especially if they're forever starting and restarting. I don't. So how much it matters depends on how you use your PC.

As for saving all those 1/10ths of seconds, again, it all comes down to how you use your PC, and for what.

For instance, as a writer, I spend a LOT of my PC time writing. Surprise, that.

So, I boot (coffee-making time), load a word processor, and ..... create. Write. That process involves far more time thinking than typing. So, three hours later, how many tenths of a second have I saved, because my PC has been sitting there idling for about 99% of the time, between reading keystrokes, with the regular automatic background file-saving not impacting me at all? In fact, I rarely notice.

Then, after lunch, maybe I do my accounts. So I load Quickbooks, and have an hour or two catching up. Again, my PC spends most of it's time bored out of it's mind, while it waits for me to do something, because I used to do my accounts on Quickbooks under Windiws on a 386 without any noticeable real-world 'lag', so my current PC is akin to using a Ferrari to folliw a pensioner on a zimmer frame.

Clearly, some people will have uses that are far more performance-dependent, contantly switching from one heavyweight application to another. Some people will gain a lot from SSDs .... and some won't.

You summed it up in your last few words. It's not me "twiddling my thumbs" waiting for PC I/O, it's my PC already, without an SSD, "twiddling it's electronic thumbs" waiting for me to give it something to do.

Is an SSD good value for money? It depends entirely on the user and what they use the PC for, and how. As for all those 1/10ths of a second, do they make ANY real-world difference to my productivity? Do I get more words per hour? Absolutely not. Maybe, if I'm very lucky, I end my 3-hour writing session a few seconds early. Do I care? no, and certainly not £60 worth.

Your mileage may vary.

The OP is the only one that can make that judgement for him.

[Saracen]

.... - however an obvious (though not trivial) test would be to try going back to a mechanical drive after a while, and see if you notice the difference - that's when most people who had SSDs suddenly realise how good they were.

Which is pretty much what I did.

My main machine boots from a drive in a removeable 3.5" bay, so I can put one of several HDs (Win7, Win8 or Ubuntu, currently). Or, with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, from 2.5" HDs or SSD.

So, with Win7 on a 640GB Caviar Blue (not even the world's fastest HD) I compared to booting from Win7 on a 128GB Crucial M4. The HD system was fully loaded with all sorts of apps, hardware drivers, utils, etc, and the SSD was a brand new, clean Win7 install with the bare minimum (for me, firewall, AV, and my office suite). The SSD had every advantage, and did it make any real-world performance improvements? Nope. Oh, the machine felt a bit snappier loading apps, but did my word rate benefit, did I get my accounts, etc, done any faster? No. Because the limitation wasn't the PC. It was me.

[cocklehorseman]

Ok, I returned the kingston 120gb v300 and bought an intel 530, and I have to say, it makes a huge difference, it's so much faster.
That piece of **** kingston had decent results, especially in the response time area, intel are barely quicker, but in th 4k area, intel results are double.
I knew kingston changed to asynchron memory and that made it slower(I bought it on sale, really cheap, so I couldn't be bothered), but I thought response time is the most important score, because everyone kept comparing the response time to a hdd, boy, was I wrong.

I can see what some of the fuss is all about now.

@Saracen
I'm glad you can see my point of view, even with a faster ssd I have to admit and agree with @aidanjt, it's more of a "why not" purchase, i can't say it's definitely worth the money, but it's good to be there.
Tbh, going from 4 gb to 8 gb ram was the same thing, ofc it was a way cheaper upgrade, but still.

Bottom line, win 8.1 is so damn fast, for a casual user who rarely does gaming, mostly browsing and movies, there isn't much need for a ssd upgrade, imho

[Saracen]

....

@Saracen
I'm glad you can see my point of view, even with a faster ssd I have to admit and agree with @aidanjt, it's more of a "why not" purchase, i can't say it's definitely worth the money, but it's good to be there.
Tbh, going from 4 gb to 8 gb ram was the same thing, ofc it was a way cheaper upgrade, but still.

Bottom line, win 8.1 is so damn fast, for a casual user who rarely does gaming, mostly browsing and movies, there isn't much need for a ssd upgrade, imho

The only thing I have against "why not" is that it depends how easily the £60, or whatever, comes. And because it only spends once, the real cost is what else you'd have spent the cost of the drive on.

I'm not well enough off that I have an infinite supply of £60's to hand, so spending it on an SSD implies it's not there to spend on domething else, and I have a fairly lengthy list of things I'd get better value from than an SSD.

But it's very much a personal judgement on, first, just how much difference an SSD makes to the experience of using a PC, and second, how much the amount it costs means to the buyer. A little while ago, I spent roughly £500 on a food processor, and a similar amount on a blender. Those, to me, were both worth it, but I'd bet there's a lot of people on here eould rather spend that grand on a new PC, or upgrading their existing one.

It's priorities, preferences and personal circumstances, IMHO.

[Top_gun]

Personally, if money was a deciding factor between HDD & SSD then I'd choose SSDs. Why? Well, they're more energy efficient which means slightly lower energy bills. Also more reliable so you don't have to worry too much about cost of replacement when the HDD is out of their short two year warranty period.

[ik9000]

not to mention if it's for a lappy longer battery life and the speed of suspend/wake, plus the no fear of bumping a spinning hard drive while on the go.

[Zak33]

So, my question, is this the most overrated piece of hardware?

run a full anti virus scan on it.. then smile

or a large Windows update when you need to get work done and the PC won't boot up fully until it's all installed.

I love my SSD as boot drive and I have a quite old one now.

yes. it's essential

[Saracen]

....

yes. it's essential

Interesting use of "essential". My PC works fine without one, albeit a bit slower, but an SSD doesn't allow me to do anything that it won't do without one.