SSD's significant performance boost?
With SSD's dropping in price, £115 for the 64GB Samsung as featured here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...e,2000-19.html
Do they give a significant performance boost for a boot drive in your PC?
I used to have a raptor that I loved for performance but hated for noise. I eventually had to ditch it due to the fact that 32GB wasnt enough for my primary drive.
Anyone got a SSD for their PC?
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
You've got to ask yourself whether you'd prefer to spend £115 on a 64Gb SSD which may perform marginally better but nothing you'd really notice outside of artificial benchmarks, or £70-80 on a 1Tb Spinpoint F1 or similar...
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Remeber that raptor's wernt that good either.
They had random access, but the density was awful, so throughput was often less than you would get on a very large drive.
I've been using SSD's such as the X25-E and the performance difference is amazing, whilst i don't give a flying fornication about boot time, the responsiveness of the system is much better. Very complex apps open pratically instantly and have no latency when they touch the drive.
In my media PC, as part of my advertion to noise i've got a cheapo 30GB OCZ SSD. It runs faster than a traditional drive, but isn't even in the same league as the real performance boosting SSDs.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Wait until they take off. No point spending £100 now when you could spend £100 in a year and get double the performance and 3 times the capacity (total guess - I've no idea what will happen by then, but I suspect things are going to move fast in 2009).
We say it all the time in the PC industry where there's no point in holding off updating, but I think SSDs are one of the few exceptions. Unless your wallet is struggling to hold all the notes of course, or you've got a very specific need.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
People spend an extra £200 on a cpu or gfx card for a small (percentage) benefit.
SSDs run at similar speeds to HDDs at worst, at best they demolish them.
In some real world usage they can be 5x faster!
Instantly noticeable better responsiveness when sat at the PC, something that can't be said about a cpu upgrade.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
TheAnimus
Remeber that raptor's wernt that good either.
They had random access, but the density was awful, so throughput was often less than you would get on a very large drive.
good post (again) by the Animus
I have a 64 gig Raptor and it's quieter,(and latest 150 raptors are quieter again) and when it was close to empty, it was lightning fast. Bear in mind I only use it as a boot drive, for the OS and relevent installs. As soon as they get to 25% full or more, they start to slow in real life use.
But it's not ACTUALLY faster in real life, than the first partition on a larger drive. My next full install will be on the first partition of a WD Blue/AAKS or similar, with a good platter density. Or maybe a Samsung F1.
I AM, however, very interested in a SSD for a game drive. I already keep all my game installs on a seperate, first partition to speedup level loads, reloads after deaths etc... SSD could be awesome for that.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
The SLC samsungs seem to be on offer at novatech:
64gb @ £114
32gb @ £69
http://forums.hexus.net/current-barg...gb-69-inc.html
Though I did splash out on an intel X25-E , which is in a totally different universe to any other drive.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/7...pertalent.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/7...pertalent.html
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
TheAnimus
In my media PC, as part of my advertion to noise i've got a cheapo 30GB OCZ SSD. It runs faster than a traditional drive, but isn't even in the same league as the real performance boosting SSDs.
Do you have that machine functioning as a PVR? I would imagine that buffering live tv would probably kill an SSD pretty fast if it was being used on a daily basis?
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
With each memory cell being good for 100,000 writes, and wear leveling built into the memory controller, even using it as a time shift buffer isn't really an issue.
Say you have a buffer of 1 hour, and that 1 hour of space is kept in the same place on the drive (which it wouldn't be), that means you can write 100,000 hours of buffer in that same space. That's more than 11 years of continuous buffering!
As 1 hour of footage is about 2GB, on a 30GB SSD you have, for aguments sake, 15 unique locations for that buffer, giving you at least 150 years of continuous buffering.
A mechanical drive is going to die will before the SSD in this case.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Nice, contrary to what some people have been saying then? I have an Eee and people are always prattling on about the SSD wearing out from this, that or the other.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
SSDs wear out
Vista was made by the devil himself
Plasma TVs need "re-charged" after a couple of years
Hybrid cars save the planet
All of which are spouted about by people on thar interwebs. None of which are strictly true.
Old flash memory cards didn't have such good write cycle numbers and lacked wear leveling so were a lot more prone to bits or cells failing. Flash memory has been around for a long time though. NOR and NAND flash technologies were both invented by Toshiba around 1980 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#History). The industry has had 29 years to get it working well.
I still wouldn't use a memory card (like an SD or CF) for applications that require a lot of re-writes though as they probably don't come with wear leveling as their intended usage doesn't require it. Pro or industrial cards may be different, but certainly not mainstream or budget cards.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
I don't use it for buffering TV thou, too damn small!
Its more of a rich renderer, anything that stores data, is networked away in seperate room.
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Buffering TV doesn't need to be big, a couple of GB is all you should need. Recording TV is another matter :)
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
this_is_gav
We say it all the time in the PC industry where there's no point in holding off updating, but I think SSDs are one of the few exceptions.
It's an exception because HDD's have been the main bottleneck of the system for ages now :)
Once everyone's kitted up with an SSD and it's all the standard then you can have moan at those upgrading SSD's for faster speeds like GPU's and CPU's :P
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
After we'd run one desktop on an X25-E
Had virtually no issue getting sign off for more for my team!
Re: SSD's significant performance boost?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Funkstar
I still wouldn't use a memory card (like an SD or CF) for applications that require a lot of re-writes though as they probably don't come with wear leveling as their intended usage doesn't require it. Pro or industrial cards may be different, but certainly not mainstream or budget cards.
Agreed, this is why I have a 16Gb SDHC card for anything that isn't day to day. Pretty impressed with the perfomance actually, it seems to be faster than the seconday (8Gb) SSD in my Eee. That is particularly noticable when I install something via an external DVD drive.
What you mean that vista wasn't made by the devil? ...Simon Cowl perhaps then? (next best thing).