Printable View
I'm doing a pretty large pc upgrade and i have been advised to get an ssd. i was just wondering if they are worth. If you have any advice on getting one it woudl be great thanks?
Sorry if this has been asked before I had a look but couldn't see anything. If it has could you link me there?
Tell us your specific usage. Then we can give the best advice. SSD's are doubtless a good upgrade but for it to be worth it for you we need to know more.
So tell us what your PC is used for and what sort of parts your looking to upgrade too.
If you want something small, fast, low powered, reliable, silent - Yes. If you want cheap or high capacity - No.
It depends on what you're looking for, in my opinion, and on your sense of value for money.
Will they make your PC boot faster and feel "snappier"? yes,
Will they give any overall gain in productivity for most generic, office-type tasks? No.
And there's a variety of scenarios in-between.
So a lot depends on exactly what you do, what you're after and your value for money system. They are certainly an expensive way of adding capacity, per GB, so the reason for adding them has to be other than that.
My experiences... currently with Intel 320 SSDs in both cases.
In my Core i3 HTPC I was impressed with the boot speed, and Media Centre is snappy, guide data and reading the indexes for media has made it nice and responsive in comparison to 5400rpm 2.5" drives, it's even better over the OCZ Onyx I tried first.
In my laptop I am honestly underwhelmed, the difference from the 7200rpm 2.5" and the SSD is minor, boot and sleep/resume is a bit better but everything else feels much the same really. Battery life slightly improved.
Reason I think is that in the laptop the 1.3GHz Athlon is the bottleneck. My Windows installations are very well maintained and crap free already, I'm totally anal about keeping my systems in order, so that helps reduce disk contention.
My desktop is currently a 2x 500GB 7200rpm arrangement, and is pretty snappy apart from loading games where I do notice some drag. I'll probably use an SSD in my next desktop build to help with that.
Is it noticeable better? Yes if the rest of your system is fast and you want to do heavy lifting jobs beyond web and office or things which benefit from fast small random reads.
Is it value for money? Depends on your priorities, it could be argued on a tight budget you'd get more benefit from a faster graphics card if you're a gamer, or by using the money to jump from dual to quad core. There are more important things than a few seconds of loading time here and there, I think an SSD is best seen as an upgrade for the PC that otherwise has everything that could make it faster at what it usually does.
Thanks for the help so far guys.
My PC is mostly used for gaming. my current plan though its not set in stone is.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-s...cache-85ms-ncq
http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ConfigureSystem.asp?SystemID=1202
taking the 2nd selection in all the options for above
I already have a nvidia gtx460 I upgrade to recently
This is the ssd my friend suggested
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/120gb...rce-controller
Personally I would go for a different SSD than the one your friend suggested which is a SATA 2 SSD.
One that can take advantage of the SATA 3. At lease something like OCZ Agility 3, Corsair Force 3 or Crucial m4.
I'm glad you said that, I was looking to get a ssd as a boot drive on my htpc as well and you just helped confirm my decision :DQuote:
Originally Posted by kingpotnoodle
thanks for the advice I'll look into that. if you have any links that would be great though i'm sure I can find them myself.Quote:
Originally Posted by eyezpy
I would look at this:
http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...34nm-test.html
Even though the latest OCZ SSDs are usually faster I would go with one of the Crucial or Intel ones.
You just need to weigh up the cost vs load times. It's a very personal choice.
The only time I ever feel cheated is when playing online and you have to wait for others to finish loading.....the 4 letter words can start flying!!
thanks a for all the advice some interesting stuff I'm going to be ordering the lot in a few days so just making my final decisions. thanks for the advice if anyone has any more I'd be really grateful
yesQuote:
Originally Posted by sadistic_stevie
just that... get one for the boot drive for your Operating system and key apps
life with an ssd is lightning fast
For what it is worth, I wished I had bought the Crucial C300 drive rather than the OCZ Vertex2. Sandforce looked good at face value but, now I think differently about it. I'm tempted to buy a Crucial M4. If only just to see the difference between the 2.
why exactly???Quote:
Originally Posted by Sputnik
i was thinking of getting a vertex 2......
SSD's are worth it, why, because your only going to live for so long, and I dont think its a good idea waiting for your pc to boot up, its a waste of life :p
Get the fastest drive you can :D
I keep looking at Getting an ssd but I looked at my Steam directory the other day and its over 200 gig atm so wouldnt be able to fit on an ssd :(
I love this... /\ it's exactly right.Quote:
Originally Posted by shakerist
Win7 updates are lightning fast too... any anti virus scans are super quick too.
nor would IQuote:
Originally Posted by kopite
that's what a large 1tb SATA drives are for :)
:D I`ve got the 1tb drive already but I wanted steam to load quick:DQuote:
Originally Posted by Zak33
My current main PC takes under a minute, and that's without an SSD. I can't even make a cup of coffee in that time, so the SSD is actually a complete waste by that score, since the existing spec is booted by the time I get back with my cuppa.Quote:
Originally Posted by shakerist
Because the Sandforce controller works in such a way that the drive starts to slow down with use and the only way to get it back seems to be to Erase the data off the drive and start again.Quote:
Originally Posted by yuan.li
The other reason is the throttling that they have built to make them last for the life of the warranty, Which is in another thread by 'Cat The Fifth'.
I'm not saying it is a bad drive but, I think my money would have been better spent on a Crucial C300 which was the other drive I was considering buying or even a Kingston as they were quite a bit cheaper at the time.
I have to agree with Saracen in that it only makes a maximum of 30 seconds difference compared to a HDD and I also usually hit the start button, Then wander off to do something else.
The real difference I noticed with it was installing windows or other programs.
You shouldn't buy an SSD just for faster boot times - they're far more useful once you're into windows than the bit before it - I barely notice the faster boot, but I hate going back to mechanical disks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
Absolutely. And I wouldn't, for that reason. That was just a reply to shakerist's (tongue-in-cheek) reason.Quote:
Originally Posted by kalniel
Updates & AV scans are only fast of the rest of the machine is too. My Q6600 with spinny disks completes scans (they are similarly clean installs, I refer to the MS SE 'Quick' scan) in a fraction of the time of my Athlon laptop with SSD...Quote:
Originally Posted by Zak33
And yeah gotta agree, don't buy one just for the boot times, general quickness should ensue if the rest of the system is good quality. An SSD is also not a sticking plaster for a bloated/broken Windows install, many people could achieve same benefit with an afternoon's work reinstalling.
Ssds = quick boot,quick virus scan, quick search, quick game loading, quick application loading but if you feel all of the above already happen quick enough it might not be worth the cost.
They also do not need to be defraged, nor indexed with MS Search and their smaller sizes make them much easier to make system backups of.
But it can be frustrating, especially with sub 120gb to pick what to store on them. You also need an empty bit of space at all times for the best performance.
If an ssd saves you 20 seconds a day a year you will save 2.02916667 hours lets say your ssd is gonna last year 10 years thats like 20 hours saved, and im sure an ssd will save you more than 20 seconds a day :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
But im 16 I only want a ssd for the speed not the reliability or any other reason, I havent had a hdd fail on me nor have I lost any critical data because I dont have any (apart from gcse coursework which was on a usb because im stupid) :)
Read what he said again. :p The limiting factor on time is his making a cuppa. Making the computer boot faster will not speed up his cuppa making, therefore he won't save any time at all by getting an SSD :pQuote:
Originally Posted by shakerist
It's always worth looking into limiting factors - will help advise your computer specing/upgrading to maximise results.
Kalniel is quite right.Quote:
Originally Posted by shakerist
My PC boots in about 50 seconds, but it takes me about 2 mins to make a cuppa. So I hit "on" and go make the cuppa. 2 mins later, I'm back.
Now suppose the SSD makes that boot 49.99 seconds faster, so it takes 0.01 seconds to boot. It still takes me a couple of mins to make a cuppa, so I'm still back after 2 mins.
Without an SSD, the machine boots and sits idle for 70 seconds. With that (especially fast) SSD, it sits idle for 119.99 seconds instead. So if it's about boot time, I've spent £100 (or whatever) to increase the amount of time my machine sits idle by 49.9 seconds. And that's assuming the phone doesn't rig while I'm making the cuppa, or it'll be idle for a lot more than even that.
For me, the time it takes to boot the machine is fast enough without an SSD that it makes absolutely no difference to me whether the boot time is faster. If that was all an SSD did, I wouldn't pay 50p for one, let alone £100, give or take. Of course, it isn't all an SSD does, so for me, any benefits lie elsewhere. And for others, maybe you, perhaps boot time is important. Fair enough. But I don't give a flying fig about any further improvement in boot times.
As I said in my first post, whether SSDs are worth it "depends on what you're looking for, in my opinion, and on your sense of value for money." And that's a decision for the individual. Nobody can make it for you, because it'll be different for each of us. There is no right or wrong answer.