I'm having a bit of trouble deciding whether to jump on the SSD bandwagon or not. I have an i5-760 on a ga-p55m-Ud2 with 12gb of ram, and I'm currently using a spin point f3 for storage. I don't tend to play very demanding games (alien swarm ), but I do work with raw files in Lightroom as well as using photoshop, fireworks, dreamweaver and virtualbox. My questions are as follows: 1. The ud2 mobo only has sata 3gbps, but the crucial m4 which I would buy is a sata 6gbps drive. Will this mismatch affect the drive's performance? 2. How would performance compare between 1x f3, 2x f3’s in raid 0 and the m4 128gb? Finally, do you think it would be a worthwhile upgrade? Any additional advice and suggestions would be appreciated Thanks -ed
It makes day to day use of a PC painless! The M4 should work fine on your motherbaord and it bests any traditional HDD with the one exception of storage capacity. An SSD is a great upgrade to make as you can dive in and out of applications and games in mere seconds! Although games like Alien Swarm are slowed down by the weakest link for load times and in a network game that would be your broadband connection speed!
I had a 128GB SSD briefly and tbh the time it takes my PC to load up photoshop from a HDD is not so slow that an SSD made a ground breaking difference. Granted, boot times and general operation of the PC are very fast with an SSD, but for me the trade-off (faffing around with separate boot/file drives, limited space, sata controllers, limiting writes to the drive etc) was too much. With a good HDD you simply install and go, write & erase as many times as you want, which for me is what's most important (eg, not random access speed). Horses for courses - a ton of people here use SSDs and are very happy with them.
That's what I'm worried about, really. Boot times mean very little to me, as I hardly ever shut down my computer, and i wonder how much difference I would see in Lightroom if my pictures are stored on a conventional drive anyway...
make sure you get at least a 128gb one. i got a 64gb a couple weeks ago, nowhere near big enough. my mistake
max speed of read and write speed is not the problem with HDD, it's access time. An HDD, can easily read 100 MB per second, if not more (depending on the model). The problem is reading lot's of a small files, or accessing data scattered everywhere on the disk. That is also why a SSD SATA 6Gbps provides the same performance (real world, and visually) on a 6GBps SATA controller than on a 3Gbps controller. For most people, people don't read/write large enough files on a daily basis to take advantage of the 6GBps SATA speed. If you check reviews 4K test don't pass 250-300 MB/s, as an example.
and also this. not gonna lie, for me the speed difference wasnt THAT great. y'no it shaves a few seconds of opening of big programs. a few seconds lol. i dont know what i was expecting really. if you cant wait a few more seconds for photoshop to open then.. in contrast to my other point, i am glad i didnt go with a bigger ssd in a sense because i would have had to spend more money to come to the same conclusion perhaps when they make ssd's which literally open programs instantly, and i mean instantly (even with a fast ssd there is obvs still some delay) without having to have like 5 in raid, then i will be more impressed
If you were using Lightroom to access files stored on an SSD, then yea that would be worthwhile... but everybody knows that's not gonna happen. I'm rapidly filling up 3TB worth of HDD space with memory card backups so really, if file storage and access is what you want, you need two or more fast HDDs in Raid.
TBH with the price of HDDs I think not going SSD is a bit silly. Of course it depends what you need it for, for me boot times are irrelevant, it's the advantages it gives for gaming (ie level load times, cutscenes yada yada) and the fact that it's silent.
Yeah with price of hdds I might just get ssd only with my new PC. I think I can get away with single 128GB crucial m4 as I don't actually store or install many items
It really depends on your usage pattern, but as was stated before - the main benefit of SSD is the pretty much non-existent access time. For example, this makes a difference between few seconds to start Eclipse IDE on SSD versus few tens of seconds to do the same on hard drive. Same is true for any application with many plugins/files to load at start.
I wish I had gone the other way with my SSD and HDD, I too don't restart my computer often enough to start sucking off SSD's over boot times However I do wish I have put Win 7 on my HDD and used the SSD for games and things I actually use when in windows. Or at least buy a 64GB SSD as windows only drive, then another SSD for things I use.
Thanks for the replies, guys.. I think I'm going to try raid 0, as I already have 2 spinpoint f3's and with my camera producing as much as 9GB from a single shoot, space is important . What do you guys think about partitioning a raid array to separate system files and data? Will that affect performance?
I'm in no great rush to go SSD. They're too small to load all your programs and games onto, so essentially they are a boot drive. I boot my PC maybe once a day, and takes around 45 seconds to boot from a F3. Photoshop loads on 4 seconds from it too. To me, they're not worth the money at the moment. Having said that, mechanical hard drives are stupid money at the moment too. I'd buy no storage devices right now.
Totally with you there. The biggest SSD I could afford would be 128GB, and with that I could fit Windows and a few games. Windows is irrelevant - it already boots fairly quick from an F3, and as you said, it happens once a day. Having that happen faster would be no benefit to me. I could put some games on it, but then I'd have to choose which games are SSD-worthy and which aren't, and frankly I'm not someone who gets into a game and then just plays that for ages - I play a variety of everything - whatever I'm feeling at the time. Besides, not once have I opened a game and thought "this could load faster" - everything is fine as it is. Until SSDs start coming down in price, I will be sticking with my HDDs.
You should stay with them then. The issue with SSD's is not that they feel so much quicker when you switch to them. The issue is that the hard drives feel a lot slower when you switch back .
11 seconds for itunes to be up and running... and I'm too impatient to want to wait almost a minute for a PC to boot... especially in the car ! dunx
