SSD and HDD relations

[TechRoy]

Hey guys,
I honestly pissed off. I got my new build a few days ago, I ran some tests finally. They put in the wrong HDD! I was supposed to get a WD Caviar Blue 1TB 64MB buffer Sata3 and they stuck a Seagate BarracudaLP 5900Rpm 1.5TB 64MB Sata3 instead.
Now the funny thing is that the price difference just hit my country and prices spiked (again) by about 100%. The WD drive is now around 220$. Corsair 60GB Sata3 Force3 550/490 is much cheaper, around 130$.

So thats the situation and I have a few question regarding:

1. If I install all my application (OS, games, office, photoshop, etc) on the SSD and stick with the barracudaLP with 1.5TB of storage, will I feel the performance drop because of the fact that its a slower HDD? Would I be better off with the WD Caviar Blue as a storage drive?

2. Is the Corsair a good SSD? I don't have a lot of choices, I saw that the new batch of SandForce drives get BSODS and such. If I don't get a bad chip, is performance comparable?

3. How important is it to keep the SSD / HDD on Sata6Gbs and not Sata3Gbs?

4. Do you have a better suggestion for me in my current situation?

Thanks a lot guys,
Roy.

 

[legendkiller]

What are you planing to do and how much storage you need? For a 120GB SSD, get OCZ Vertex 3 120GB MAX IOPS Sata3
For 60GB SSD, get OCZ Agility 3 60GB

 

[TechRoy]

What are you planing to do and how much storage you need? For a 120GB SSD, get OCZ Vertex 3 120GB MAX IOPS Sata3
For 60GB SSD, get OCZ Agility 3 60GB

My main concern is to have a high performance build that will handle gaming, video and photo editing (not professional grade) and sound production (Cuebase mainly and some Ableton suite). Also, ofcourse, I watch a lot of movies and listen to a ton of music but that has nothing to do with performance.

Sadly, I can't get an OCZ drive. I can get a 120GB Corsair Force3 GT that I read good things about, would you recommend it?

My main question is less regarding what kind of ssd and more at what kind of HDD. I mean, I am afraid that because of the fact that the seagate drive is a slower, "greener" drive it will hurt my overall performance.

My gut tells me that since I'm using it as a storage drive for media mostly (movies, music, photos, etc.) it won't matter at all. I could just as well use an old IDE drive and not really feel any difference since all my apps are on an SSD. Is this true?

Thanks a lot for the help,
Roy.

 

[clonazepam]

There may be increased load times in games, if installed to the larger storage drive, but actual game-play wouldn't be effected.

As far as video and photo editing, would the system render the work fast enough to match or exceed the drive's read/write capabilities to a very noticeable degree? Obviously a lot of variables come into play and when/where actual bottlenecks might occur could be hard to determine.

Lastly, you could transfer the current project to the SSD for working with, and when finished, offload back to the storage drive, if this proved to have any advantage, or any space was available on the SSD to begin with.

You've said this is not professional grade so I'm assuming time doesn't equate to dollars so you could be much more tolerant in how much time tasks really take.

For instance, rendering a typical dvd movie to mkv or mp4 or something... does it matter if the project takes 25 minutes or 35 minutes?

I think if the price makes sense to you, then you'll probably be pleased. I use OCZ SSDs and once I started using them on a modern motherboard with a modern up to date bios, I never had anymore problems. I'm going to assume that probably holds true for most SSD technologies.

 

[TechRoy]

There may be increased load times in games, if installed to the larger storage drive, but actual game-play wouldn't be effected.

As far as video and photo editing, would the system render the work fast enough to match or exceed the drive's read/write capabilities to a very noticeable degree? Obviously a lot of variables come into play and when/where actual bottlenecks might occur could be hard to determine.

Lastly, you could transfer the current project to the SSD for working with, and when finished, offload back to the storage drive, if this proved to have any advantage, or any space was available on the SSD to begin with.

You've said this is not professional grade so I'm assuming time doesn't equate to dollars so you could be much more tolerant in how much time tasks really take.

For instance, rendering a typical dvd movie to mkv or mp4 or something... does it matter if the project takes 25 minutes or 35 minutes?

I think if the price makes sense to you, then you'll probably be pleased. I use OCZ SSDs and once I started using them on a modern motherboard with a modern up to date bios, I never had anymore problems. I'm going to assume that probably holds true for most SSD technologies.

Thanks for the reply.
From what you wrote it feels like you do more editing than I do . No, it doesn't really matter if something takes a few minutes extra. My main concern is for games as far as load times and yea, I don't want stuff to take too much time if I can speed them up, why not? Also, I am excited about the reported speed increase in general computing once you move to an SSD.

I gather from your reply that it doesn't really matter what HDD I will use as a storage drive. Correct?

Thanks again,
Roy.

 

[clonazepam]

Pretty much. I do some basic photo editing at times, of pictures taken on my cell phone, and over usb 2.0 even, the thumbnail previews load quickly, the editing and saving directly to the phone's memory card (class 10 32GB microSD) is pretty zippy with a read speed of about 16MB/S. Your HDD would wipe the floor with that performance.

I use the SSD / HDD set up. It's a 7200rpm drive but I think the performance is still pretty comparable, especially if we're talking about relatively low file sizes, like 1-4 GB videos.

I stream audio and video from a network attached storage drive that runs at 5400rpm. On a good day, I can read/write to it at 10MB/S. More than enough speed to feed a digital copy of a movie, incl. 1080p.

 

[legendkiller]

My main concern is to have a high performance build that will handle gaming, video and photo editing (not professional grade) and sound production (Cuebase mainly and some Ableton suite). Also, ofcourse, I watch a lot of movies and listen to a ton of music but that has nothing to do with performance.

Sadly, I can't get an OCZ drive. I can get a 120GB Corsair Force3 GT that I read good things about, would you recommend it?

My main question is less regarding what kind of ssd and more at what kind of HDD. I mean, I am afraid that because of the fact that the seagate drive is a slower, "greener" drive it will hurt my overall performance.

My gut tells me that since I'm using it as a storage drive for media mostly (movies, music, photos, etc.) it won't matter at all. I could just as well use an old IDE drive and not really feel any difference since all my apps are on an SSD. Is this true?

Thanks a lot for the help,
Roy.

Get the Corsair 120GB SSD than...
The HDD will not effect it as long as you don't raid them... Make the SSD boot drive so you have all those files on your SSD boot faster and work faster awhile HDD not doing anything but store files... You'll transfer about 70Mb/s BUT it'll only be about a minute to transfer 1GB or more... HDD doesn't really matters as it's for storage these days and SSD for performance...