Confusion over SSD. If you have one please comment.

[J_Sparrow]

Hi,

I've looked at the benchmark comparisons of SSD'd on this site, but there is too much information. They list things like write speed, read speed, throughput read minimum and maximum, streaming read and write speed etc

I don't really know what a lot of this means, I read a review elsewhere that showed a normal 7200rpm hard drive booted windows in 58 seconds and that an SSD booted in 13 seconds.

Is this the main reason to get an SSD? so that I can boot windows faster?

I'f I'm currently using a Raptor 10,000rpm hard drive as my boot drive will i notice much difference. Also has anyone had experience with an SSD drive doing things like using PAR2 for paring files and also zip-7 for unzipping files? was it noticeably faster then a 7200 or 10000rpm hard drive.

I also get the impression that there are a few different types of SSD, i.e, you could look at say 5 100GB hard drives from different manufacturers and each one would perform at different speeds. At least with normal hard drives you can look at the RPM speed and the buffer size to get a good idea of performance, what do I look for with SSD drives?

Also, whats round the corner? I dont want to spend £150 on a drive today just to find they have some new memory type in a new drive next month that performes 25% better at the same price? Is there anything i should know about whats worth waiting for.

Finally, is the price gonna keep spiralling down, should i hang on another 2-3 months and save £50 or has the price drop slowed down alot?

If there's anything else you have experienced with them and think i should know, please tell me.

Thank you for reading.

 

[RickyT23]

SSD's I got an 80GB Intel one in the computer at work. I use it as the primary HDD, and store all of my files, music, documents etc on a seperate 1TB SATA2. The SSD contains the OS (Windows 7 64), and all of the main programs. From pressing the power-on button to seeing a usable desktop with no more loading happening takes apprx 30 seconds. Which to me is fast.

SSD's have limited lifespan if you are always writing and then overwriting data. But I gether it's something like 10'000 writes before it will start to corrupt, which is quite a lot!

The price seems to have been decreasing slowly for a while.

I think you will notice a difference. My SSD does about 220Mb/s read speed, and Inotice that the OS and programs all load a lot faster than I was used to.

I think mine only has about 80Mb/s write speed though, so there are drives out there which are a lot faster.

My SSD came with instructions to NOT defragment it, as this would not increase the speed of the drive at all, and only decrease the life-span.

 

[RJR]

I have some things on a 150GB VelociRaptor and had to use it for a couple of days and thought to myself this is still quick I don't think it's that much slower than my 128 GB SSD. I switched back to the SSD after a few days and OMG what a difference, EVERYTHING is much quicker. Get an SSD when you can you won't regret it.

 

[wolfram23]

SSDs have better read and writes in all areas, but they really shine at random reads and writes because they have no moving parts so they take 0.1 milisecons to access random data, when a HDD needs to position the head and get the disk to align at the right spot.

Things won't necessarily run faster. Encoding video or zipping/unzipping are CPU bound. It's just data access is greatly improved so essentially any and all loading times are cut down big time. I have an 80gb Intel X25M SSD with Windows 7, Photoshop, iTunes, Starcraft 2, F1 2010, and a few other smaller boot up apps, and all these things are much improved (well, actually, F1 2010 doesn't seem to load faster but SC2 definitely does).

I keep most games, along with movies, music, pics, documents, and some OC software on my RAID 0 HDDs.

 

[J_Sparrow]

thank you for your replies.

The life span thing make me a bit nervous, as i would not be just using it to boot, I'd want to use it as my download and par/zip drive too, so its gonna get around 500-600GB moved through it each month!. I guess this will shorten its lifespan very quickly. I'll instead consider getting a smaller 60-80 GB drive (originally i wanted to get 160GB), and using just as an operating system drive with my load up programs. This way i save some money and get a nice fast boot time and shut down i would hope.

I guess the industry is working hard to increase the life span of these drives as it would be a major turn off for people forking out good money just to have the system die on them randomly one day. I may hold out a bit longer and see how things play out. Your info has helped me reach this decision. Well that and the fact I went a bought a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini today on pay as you go, so i now have less money to waste

-edit-

i'd replied as wolfram must have been typing, i might consider a RAID 0 then, its only gonna cost about £90 for a 1TB RAID 0 setup. and all in all i need fast read and write speeds, as a lot of time i'm parring/unparring and zipping/unzipping aswell as moving stuff about.