Features - QOTW: Do you use an SSD in your main PC?

[Ciber]

I haven't used a floppy disc in years, and I have plenty of space still on my HDD, so from my point of view, there is zero point getting another drive until I really need the space, and when I do I'd like it to be a large enough drive that I won't have to keep uninstalling things. 120Gb is 'tiny' by todays standards, unless you only play stuff like CoD, and £120 is alot for something when I'll probably need to get another drive once it quickly fills up. My steam folder alone is 107Gb.

Get a £55 SSD. Put your steam folder on a mechanical drive. Everything will be better. Unless you like waiting to do things! Save up for a 120gb SSD to move your steam folder to later. Then again why do I care?

[BEANFro Elite]

Have a Revodrive 3 in the desktop for Windows, games, and looking at putting SSDs in my netbook and other future PC builds including an upcoming homeserver / media PC project (for the OS not the storage), I'm THAT impressed with them

I understand the cost to value ratio is still very bad copared with ordinary platter-drives but if you can afford an SSD then you should definitely get one

[Andrew McP]

The diference is about the price of 1 new xbox game. Put it into perspective.

I appear to have started a row. :-) In isolation any one saving is trivial, but £50 here and £50 there soon adds up. I appreciate that's a fairly old fashioned attitude, but it suits me... especially as I already blew £160 on my under-appreciated M4. I have to save money on the next SSD in order to make up for that premature adoption.

As for X-Box games, I'm a PC gamer and feel ripped off if I have to pay more than a fiver for a title these days. :-)

As I said before I can see why many people are very happy with their SSDs, but we all have a different idea of a good bang per buck. There is no wrong or right here, just choice. You choose to buy SSDs, I choose to measure them against the pair of fast 2TB HDs I paid £112 for (in total) about 12 months ago. I know it's not a totally fair comparison, but I'm happy to trade speed for convenience.

One thing I must say on the subject is that I've been a bit disappointed by the Z68 chipset and smart SSD caching. I had expected that to offer a much better compromise than it seems to have done. That "transparent" way to make optimal use of a small, cheap SSD seemed pretty promising for those -- like me -- who spent too many years (decades!) fretting about partition space to voluntarily go back to those days.

[Saracen]

... but if you can afford an SSD then you should definitely get one

No, oh no. It depends on your perception of value for money, and the importance of the benefits.

I can afford one. Comfortably. I just don't regard them as value for money, and won't buy one until I do.

Put it this way. I spent over £200 on a camera a few weeks back. That's on top of the two DSLRs I have already, and about half a dozen other digital cameras, and a small collection of film cameras too. And that's without the £700 macro flash, several other flash systems, a collection of lenses, and a £300 hardware monitor and printer calibration system. Or printers and scanners. I've got more of them than I know what to do with. £70 on an SSD is not a problem. What I regard as the value for money is.

But the benefits? Well, it's not the only thing, but people often mention boot times. My PC boots in not much over a minute anyway. And my routine is to power up, go make a coffee and by the time I get back, it's ready. So, if it boots in 10 seconds or 90 seconds makes NO difference to me, because the coffee takes about 3 minutes to make.

Application load times? Well, a few seconds here and there? Do I care? Nope. If you do, then maybe an SSD is worth the cost to you, but given current cost/capacity, it isn't to me. "Snappier" performance? Again, not really bothered.

And before anyone says "try one, you'll change your mind" .... I have, and didn't.

It's all about the benefit to be gained, and how each of us values it.

....

As I said before I can see why many people are very happy with their SSDs, but we all have a different idea of a good bang per buck. There is no wrong or right here, just choice. You choose to buy SSDs, I choose to measure them against the pair of fast 2TB HDs I paid £112 for (in total) about 12 months ago. I know it's not a totally fair comparison, but I'm happy to trade speed for convenience.

....

Absolutely. It's an individual judgement.

[brasco]

Application load times? Well, a few seconds here and there? Do I care? Nope. If you do, then maybe an SSD is worth the cost to you, but given current cost/capacity, it isn't to me. "Snappier" performance? Again, not really bothered.

That's the sentiment that's been rolling around for the past few years since SSDs became affordable. You're right, perceptions of value vary wildly, as a lot of my hobby ties to my work I can justify it a little more But I have to say for me it's so so much more than just a few seconds here and there

It's like buying a car, sporty and expensive to get you there quicker or a van that'll get more stuff where you want it to go!

cheers
brasc

[Noxvayl]

As much as I try, I battle to understand other people's priorities. As Saracen pointed out, he'll spend thousands of pounds on photo equipment while I'll do the same for my PC; the way I feel about his priorities is probably the same way he feels about mine.

Now I know how generations before us felt about clouds, the ocean and nature.

[andyb123]

It's like buying a car, sporty and expensive to get you there quicker or a van that'll get more stuff where you want it to go!

exactly this - if you do a lot of rebooting or loading (e.g. online gaming level load times on BF3 were painful before I got an SSD)... I wanted the Reventon performance when it comes to loading up game levels

I also have 2 transit vans installed for movies / photos etc.

when looking at SSD's you can't really think in terms of value per GB... you are paying for the speed and then you choose an SSD that will be big enough for your purpose... if hard disk speed isn't important to you then you have no reason to buy an SSD

having said that, they are always improving the process to reduce cost / increase size, so there will reach a point where normal hard drives stop getting bigger and SSD's take over

[crossy]

As I said before I can see why many people are very happy with their SSDs, but we all have a different idea of a good bang per buck. There is no wrong or right here, just choice. You choose to buy SSDs, I choose to measure them against the pair of fast 2TB HDs I paid £112 for (in total) about 12 months ago. I know it's not a totally fair comparison, but I'm happy to trade speed for convenience. One thing I must say on the subject is that I've been a bit disappointed by the Z68 chipset and smart SSD caching. I had expected that to offer a much better compromise than it seems to have done. That "transparent" way to make optimal use of a small, cheap SSD seemed pretty promising for those -- like me -- who spent too many years (decades!) fretting about partition space to voluntarily go back to those days.

Actually, what you say above strikes a chord with me. I always thought that the "hybrid" idea that Seagate (and presumably others) pushed (Seagate with the MomentusXT) was a darned fine "halfway house" until SSD prices fall. Although, I would have preferred if Seagate had made the MXT's larger and used the extra space to house more SSD capacity.

The "smart SSD caching" idea also should have got more exposure. What I would have liked to see was some low-cost device into which you'd plug (so not limited to a single chipset) an SSD and an HDD, but the SSD would remain invisible to the host OS. This (mythical?) controller would then sit quietly duplicating oft-used data from the HDD to the SSD. Data reads could then be fulfilled either by the SSD or the HDD - depending on whether you were asking for "popular" data or not, write would go to the HDD as normal. The thing I like about this arrangement most of all is the potential that since the SSD is merely a cache, not only would this be OS-independent (any admin needed being carried out at BIOS level) but also if you could get a faster/larger SSD at a later date then you could swap it in and then just wait for the controller to rebuild it's cache over time. I kind of like the idea of fronting a 1TB "Programs" HDD with a relatively cheap 120GB SSD - best of both worlds, lots of storage, but speed for those programmes (games?) where shaving off 10 seconds off of a load time will be appreciated.

[kingpotnoodle]

I love SSDs... got one in every machine for at least the OS... I like the quiet and the speed and I only have one 3.5" drive left at home and that's a 5900RPM which is for system backups and a rip destination area whilst I process a film.

I've noticed more benefit where the rest of the machine is also fast, my small/cheap AMD 1.3GHz laptop and the similar Directory Server (HP Microserver) are still slow at times because of the CPU.

The Intel 320 drives I've used were selected as much for reliability and migration tools as they were for speed, the Intel provided software migrated my laptop from a standard 7200RPM 320GB drive very quickly and easily. The rest were freshly installed.

I tend to use RAIDs of 2.5" drives for mass-data volumes.

Home:
Gaming PC - Crucial m4 256GB + 1.5TB Seagate 3.5"
Laptop - 120GB Intel 320
Directory Server - 40GB Intel 320 + 2x 160GB WD 2.5" RAID 1
Media PC/Server - 40GB Intel 320 + 3x 1TB Samsung 2.5" RAID 5
VMWare Test Server - 80GB Intel 320
Bedroom Media PC - 32GB OCZ Onyx

And in the office:
Work PC - 64GB Crucial C300 + 2x 500GB Seagate 3.5" RAID 1

[alpha channel]

Yep, use a 64GB Falcon II in my HTPC and a 120GB Muskin Callisto Heck my main rig, both great purchases and with the current price of the Corsair Force 3 I'm giving some consideration of getting one for my laptop.

[squirrelz]

Put a 60Gb Vertex 2 in my desktop last year, just upgraded to 120Gb Agility 3, makes a massive difference, wouldn't want to go back.

[Lord Midas]

I bought a Kingston SSD Now V 40GB about 2 years ago. It's my Windows 7 systme drive. After the OS is installed there ain't much room for anything else. But the system flies. SSD are the way forward.

I wish I could afford one to install games and apps on, they are currently residing on my 2TB WD Green drive. Or at least another SSD to install Steam and Skyrim on.

[roamer1711]

At this moment in Time no, as I have a duff OCZ vertex2 in my main rig which was my boot device and a perfect working 500gb spinpoint sitting looking for the OS to boot doh, next time I will have to have a spare boot sector on it. Of course I also have no windows 7 disk to reinstall as a temp on the HD( I know I have learnt my lesson as least all my data is backed up on the externals next time I will buy a disk and not rely on OEM installs )

[shaithis]

Couldn't be without them, but then I am impatient!

[kingpotnoodle]

I bought a Kingston SSD Now V 40GB about 2 years ago. It's my Windows 7 systme drive. After the OS is installed there ain't much room for anything else. But the system flies. SSD are the way forward.

I wish I could afford one to install games and apps on, they are currently residing on my 2TB WD Green drive. Or at least another SSD to install Steam and Skyrim on.

Skyrim off my m4 is so quick I can barely read the writing and look at the picture on the loading screens... it's SMOOth (with a capital SMOO)...

[bobharvey]

I have a netbook with an SSD and it has been really great. I will probably put one in the next desktop I build, if the prices come down a bit. But my current system has a 300GB boot disk and two 1TB disks for content. It will be a while before I can replace that lot with flash.