SSD(now) or later?

[kasuku]

Has anyone used the Kingston SSDnow hard drives. Am thinking of getting one as a primary os drive, but before I do, was looking for real user experiences. Is it worth the difference from say a WD raptor for example?

Can't seem to decide whether i should take the ssd plunge or hold off for a bit.

[cptwhite_uk]

Quality varies dramatically from model to model. The only ones worth considering are the high end models, the V+ range, and the V 40Gb model.

[kasuku]

Thank you. I guess I will lump SSD, USB 3 and SATA 3 for my next build then. Hopefully by then the price to performance ratio will improve for mainstream users. I guess thats the only way it will become cheap enough, if it is priced low enough to allow mainstream users to transition without too much of a pinch.

[Saracen]

Each to his own. In my opinion, the utility and performance gained don't justify the high price, either in absolute extremes or cost/capacity .... yet.

But that's my assessment, based on my values and criteria, and there are plenty of people that will disagree, and regard them as great additions. Maybe they're wrong, or maybe they just have different values from me. Or more money to spend on PC bits.

It strikes me that it's the type of question where you'll get a lot of personal opinions, often based on criteria which may or may not be important to you. For instance, if it drops my boot time from 90 seconds to 30 seconds, I really don't give a left-handed flying fig, because I turn the PC on, and do other things (kettle on, check my (snail)-mail, make phone calls, etc) while it's booting. But that may matter to you. Some people reckon they make game levels load really quickly, but I don't car about that either, as I don't play that many games on PC these days, and am not bothered enough about loading to fork out a large chunk of change to prevent it anyway. And so on.

For every opinion that reckons they are, or aren't worth the money, you'll need to try to assess why people think that. Good luck with that.

[kasuku]

Saracen, my thoughts exactly. You see, i ask this because I guess there is a approximate dichotomy between users, the first group being the "its new so i gotta get it" and the second being "hmmm is it worth it". I guess most mainstream users are part of the latter. Nonetheless, an initiative such as the ssdnow does to some extent help to convince those whoa re sitting on the fence. That said, I personally will wait. Right now WD drives are good enough for me.

[mikerr]

Going SSD for the OS drive is the best money you can spend IMO.

Not just boot times (who does that more than once a day?) but general usage is just snappier - your PC waits for the hard drive more than you realise.

Its never going to measure up against spinning HDD on price per gb basis, but its certainly a noticeable upgrade.
Think the difference between a raptor and slower rpm drive, but magnified.

[Saracen]

I must say, kasuku, I think we're getting quite a bit closer to the point where I'll jump. Having said that, I indulged in a couple of WD 640 Blues a couple of months ago, and haven't regretted it.

I'm sure you're right about there being those that will jump on stuff because it's new, and a few years ago, that'd have included me. Mind you, a fair bit of the time I had it before it was available, because I was testing it for one mag or an other (though not Hexus, as it happens). But even given that, I shudder at the amount of money I spent jumping on the latest passing bandwagon.

These days, I have a very different approach. In large part, it's because a few years ago, each new iteration of technology made a significant difference to performance, often meaning something that wasn't feasible or practical before became so ... such as effective, viable voice dictation. I even remember the days when burning a CD meant £4000 worth of hardware and software to burn the CD, and if you didn't want expensive (£15 a time at one point) CD coasters resulting from buffer underr-runs, you needed a SCSI hard drive system, and even then, AV-rated SCSI drives that didn't do thermal calibration in the middle of a burn, ruining the disc. I still have some Micropolis AV SCSI drives.

That was when I jumped on bandwagons, because there was often a significant gain from it. These days, most PCs are fast enough for me, so the value gained from the latest hardware is, to me, much less than it used to be and so I don't upgrade as often.

I guess it all comes down to what existing system performance is like, what level of gain you expect, and emphatically what you do with your PC.

It's certainly not as easy to decide if something is worth having (at the price it'll cost you) as it used to be.

[Zhaoman]

I'll agree most PCs these days are fast enough for the majority of tasks, my mum's 7 year old Toshiba laptop is still going strong and she doesn't have any plans to change it since she can check emails and use office apps no problem still.

But as someone who has experienced the advantage of SSDs first hand I have to say it probably makes the biggest difference to system performance if you already have a decent processor and gpu. Remember SSDs aren't just about loading times, a lot of people on both sides of the fence seem to think that this is the only benefit they give, but it's the huge boost to random access times too that just makes general everyday computing feel so much slicker. I would say that an SSD is the single biggest difference you could make to your everyday computing experience (opening apps, instant loading of documents etc). I say this because my dad's new Dell XPS 13 laptop feels much quicker to use than my current system despite it having a slower dual-core processor (compared to my faster quad) and ram.

Remember processor, memory and gpu speeds have increased (roughly as far as I remember) by 5 factors of 10 (10,000 ) since the early 90s yet the speed of hard drives has only increased by about 100. This means our daily computing experience when it comes to loading and waiting for the computer to access things is 100 times slower than the early nineties. An SSD helps to relieve that huge disparity in performance. So that's part of the reason why I think if you already have a half-decent computer (core2 duo etc) then the next step is to make the jump to SSD.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

SSDs are far too expensive at the moment for the capacities they offer and the cheap ones under £100 also have a small capacity and other limitations too.

[mikerr]

See, on a price basis they look silly,
but use a decent one once and you'll be converted

Use SSD as an OS drive, and use a spinny HDD for storage.
£100 buys you a corsair X32 or V+ 40GB (both decent drives),
then £50 on a 1TB drive for storage...

[Clunk]

I agree, it's one of the best upgrades that you can make at the moment. Even on a top spec system, you will see the benefits. I too don't care about boot times, but photoshop work is greatly improved, large RAW files open almost instantly.

For general consumer usage, I'd recommend any of the Indilinx based drives, whichever is affordable at the time, and if you can stretch to it, the Intel X25-M series is great too.

One thing is clear to me though, if you were to sit someone down at a PC with their o/s installed on about 10 different drives ranging from the cheapest of the current crop to the most expensive, they'd be hard pushed to tell the difference between any of them. They are all lightning fast, they pretty much all work great (depending on the firmware) and all have their weaknesses. Most drives can become much slower after a lot of benching or testing, but almost all the brands, including Samsung, Indilix and Intel now have their own garbage collection, and/or trim support, so they will "fix" themselves while idle. Also, if you do manage to slow down an Indilinx based drive, you can always use the supplied wiper.exe program to revitalise the drive, it takes a few seconds to do.

I use my laptop for the majority of my work which involves a lot of photo editing and the like and I bought a cheap Samsung 64GB SSD and it has absolutely transformed the laptop from being just OK to being nice to use.

From a value for money point of view, I think that yes, they are still overpriced, and yes they are going to drop in price, but you can say that about any computer part really. I say that if you want a good, tangible bump in speed for your O/S (not storage), then it's definitely worth a look.

[Zhaoman]

SSDs are far too expensive at the moment for the capacities they offer and the cheap ones under £100 also have a small capacity and other limitations too.

You can say that about any high-end part really, but given a choice between an i7 processor or a good SSD I would take the SSD anyday. Unless encoding is part of your day to day usage I think that an SSD is the better option for most people too.

[kmac]

Actually this subject might be worth a poll:

1) Already have one and its the dogs B*ll*cks
2) Planning on gettingone soon
3) Waiting for the price per GB to fall
4) I't be a a cold day in hell before I use one of those new fangled things...

etc.
I'd be interested in knowing how many hexus memebrs actually have them

[kmac]

See, on a price basis they look silly,
but use a decent one once and you'll be converted

Use SSD as an OS drive, and use a spinny HDD for storage.
£100 buys you a corsair X32 or V+ 40GB (both decent drives),
then £50 on a 1TB drive for storage...

The Intel X-18 80-Gb is available for £135 on Amazon.
Still high per GB but getting lower....

[kasuku]

Ok for me, I think the price point that I will snap up an SSD hardddisk would be when a 160GB disk goes for under 70 quid. Are we at that point no.

Do I think we will get there? yes.

When? I think SATA3 will be the tipping point. Asus and Gigabyte have sata 3 motherboards but I think the tipping point will be when sata 3 is integrated into the intel chipset.

Why the link to sata3? For current SSD's with 2 of them in raid 0, we are still not maxing out sata2. So with sata 3, and more mature SSDs in future, consumers will be able to set up more intricate raid systems which will probably have a much larger performance increase over what we have now. Further, by that time, prices would probably have come down.

So this combination of factors will most likely drive the mass transition to SSD.

My two cents worth.

[Champman99]

I think it's well worth the money - And there are more hidden benefits too for example the super fast boot times mean I'm much more likely to turn off my PC when not using it, saving power. OK its an exaggeration to say an SSD pays for itself but for a boot drive, I really think it is worth the money. Of course they will come down in price, but you can wait forever. I paid £3000 for an early LCD TV, sure in two years time i couldve got a set of similar quality for £1000, but I enjoyed the TV for those two years.

I dont regret my purchase at all, and I know that buyers are usually defensive about things they have already bought, but I dont mind holding my hands up when I've made a mistaken buy. In the case of my Intel G2 though, that is not the case - and I am very happy with it.