SSD's on a desktop - worth it or not?

[meggiedude]

Hiya,

Just got a SCAN desktop bundle - which came with 1TB drive.

Toying with shelling out for an SSD for the OS and Apps. File storage on the HDD obviously.

SSD's are obviously getting cheaper, and I can understand why that are of use on a laptop, but in reality what difference do they make for a goodish spec desktop? Are they really VFM??

MD

[mikeo01]

They do make an overall difference as SSDs are now very cheap I would say why not.

The speed for general operations are great due to the <1ms access time; however I also like the separation of the OS and main apps. Makes troubleshooting and later recovery much easier, as all your important stuff is on a separate drive

You always have to wait on the hard drive and heavy reads and writes always brings a hard drive down to its knees. I'd say SSDs are worth it because now they are really quite cheap

Most state 120/128GB is a good size, I agree with this.

[Ttaskmaster]

I'm simple in my approach to PC stuff - If I can see the difference, then I'm interested. If I need to run benchmarking software to compare, it's not worth it.

I merely counted how many seconds things like boot up, restart, file transfers and stuff took on both my home rig and the 'modern' PC they gave me for work.
My home rig is always at least 4 times faster at everything and in some cases up to 11 times quicker.

I've no idea how many giga-mega-kilo-hertz of work per hour that equates to, or anything - It just made me go, "Blimey, that's insanely fast!!"... which is good enough for me. Installing Win7 was very much a 'blink and miss it' affair!

TLR - They're great. Get one, if you can!!

[Saracen]

In reality? Fast boots. But do you care? I don't.

A snappier overall feel, but how much difference that makes to day-to-day life depends on the rest of your spec, and critically, what you do with the machine.

Would I fork out £50-£80 for one? Maybe, but I'm far from convinced they're "value for money". But that absolutely depends on what £50-£80 means to you. The week's food budget, or a decent bottle of wine? Not upgrading something else, or a good contribution to the cost of a meal for one at your favourite restaurant? Your clothes budget for 3 months, or a decent shirt? Or just a good tie?

It's HUGELY subjective.

[StaticFX]

havent tried one yet.. but ive heard that its good for the OS. So get a small one and put the OS on it.. and everything else (except maybe your fav game) on another drive.

[herulach]

In reality? Fast boots. But do you care? I don't.

A snappier overall feel, but how much difference that makes to day-to-day life depends on the rest of your spec, and critically, what you do with the machine.

Would I fork out £50-£80 for one? Maybe, but I'm far from convinced they're "value for money". But that absolutely depends on what £50-£80 means to you. The week's food budget, or a decent bottle of wine? Not upgrading something else, or a good contribution to the cost of a meal for one at your favourite restaurant? Your clothes budget for 3 months, or a decent shirt? Or just a good tie?

It's HUGELY subjective.

This, personally I like it, but I'm fortunate enough to be in a position where the cost is readily affordable, for general office tasks I really wouldn't bother. Even my 4 year old work laptop boots win 7 from a 5400 rpm drive in under a minute. Office apps load faster than the network can pull the files down etc.

For my gaming computer it was absolutely worth it, I hate loading screens, which aren't eliminated, but are substantially shortened. If its going to be a gaming computer I'd say definately get one, but don't sacrifice anything else for it. You can always pick one up down the line and it in relatively easily if you want. The same can't be said for putting the extra £60/£80 toward a GPU or similar. You can't just go out and grab a £60 one in 3 months and bolt it on to your existing one.

[meggiedude]

I guess - like some above I am still sitting on the fence a little here.

Really I don't care about boot times - after all this only happens generally once a day.
Winblows 8.1 boot times are lightening speed for my current Acer Desktop compared with its orig Win7 install anyway - so I can't imagine they will be that slow for my new purchase.
Am more concerned about app speeds and general OS perf once booted., and have the SSD's reached a price point that they represent such a change in performance that they warrant the extra cash.

Still not completely convinced.

[mikeo01]

If you are happy with your current setup you'll find they may not make a difference.

Remember once your program is in RAM it's only when I/O comes into play you'll notice the difference. I.E. read and writes from your hard disk a lot.

It speeds up general performance due to the smaller files on your hard drive; those peasky small files that make your hard drive go "Hang on a minute". Example, picking up £1 coin instead of 100 x 1P coins the latter is slower.

SSDs excel because they're quick on their toes. But then does that justify it's cost? If your task is going to the shops everyday you'd probably go a bog standard car. Thinking in terms of computing if you do lots of rendering, video encoding, virtual machines an SSD will benefit you in some cases.


Personally, they are not worth the current cost. Although cost is down by quite a bit. I have contradicted myself they are worth it but they aren't worth it.


One up for an SSD cache however

[kalniel]

SSDs excel because they're quick on their toes. But then does that justify it's cost? If your task is going to the shops everyday you'd probably go a bog standard car. Thinking in terms of computing if you do lots of rendering, video encoding, virtual machines an SSD will benefit you in some cases.

Well not rendering or video encoding - they're limited by CPU and only read/write nice sequential chunks at a time to disk. It's general OS and app performance that they really increase - snappiness you might call it. When you open a program or firefox checks for cached content etc.

Having tried an SSD I would never not have one now - it's at least as great an update as going for a much faster CPU and RAM for general computing.

One up for an SSD cache however

Now that's where RAM is better - and thanks to windows automatic caching, it is

[mikeo01]

RAM yes but I find using an SSD cache simply caches most used files, I.E. some general OS files and apps. If you don't use too many application's I've found SSD caching to be a great budget alternative to SSDs themselves

[kalniel]

RAM yes but I find using an SSD cache simply caches most used files, I.E. some general OS files and apps.

That's what Windows does with RAM too SSD cache is good if you need more than you could put in RAM, but if you've got spare RAM then they're a very limited gain because frequently used stuff will be loaded with Superfetch.

[mikeo01]

My point is an SSD cache is a cheaper solution. If you've got spare RAM it's great but RAM prices are very high today so it's probably easier and cheaper to chuck an SSD cache drive in

But my opinion is an SSD is "OK". Windows 8/8.1 is already pretty quick.

[kalniel]

Yeah - buying RAM just for cache would be a very expensive way of doing things! Most rigs are over-specified for RAM though so do have quite a bit being used for cache.

[Ttaskmaster]

A friend is visiting, so I currently have 2 PCs in my house.
His rig has an FX-8350 running a Seagate Barracuda and an R9 270X, with 8GB Kingston HyperX Genesis RAM.
My specs are on the left.
My rig does just about everything 2-3 times faster than his.

While you do not desperately *need* an SSD, as matey's gaming rig proves, the difference is easily noticeable and I'd not want to go back!

[liammcd]

If you have just bought a bundle to upgrade your system from an old and "slow" system, then I would hold off for a year or so.

The speed of cheap systems now is frankly astonishing compared to what was available 10 years ago.

Each time you upgrade wholesale, the new system appears to be brilliant for a while but then it becomes the norm. If you then insert a cheap upgrade such as an SSD, you get the feel-good-factor all over again.

[pastymuncher]

I have had SSD's for around 3 years now and would never go back to just a normal HDD. Everything is so much quicker to load with a SSD and bootup to a useable desktop is less than 15 seconds. I still have a 1tb HDD for data but my OS and Steam is on the SSD. They have come down so much in price now as well. Just last week the Crucial M500 480GB was available for just £179.99 and a Seagate 600 series 480gb was only £159.99. I paid that for a 120GB Vertex 2E 3 years ago!!