New to SSD Question

[aviconus]

I had initial plans to build a new IVY bridge rig, but changed my mind. Bought a 120gb SSD and a z68 board together. After I changed my mind on the build I took the board back, but decided to hold on to the SSD and throw it into my current rig. Here is where my question comes in. My current board Asus P6T's Sata Slots are only 3gb/s. The SSD is obv. 6gb/s. My question is, is it still worth it to keep the SSD with its nuts chopped off, or should I return it and get a new surround sound that I have been eyeing. My current rig has 2 x 1.5 TB Seagate HDDs in it, that I hardely utilize. SSD would be used as a boot/internet/gaming drive. Music/Media would still be stored on the HDDs. Thanks.

 

[foscooter]

SSD are backwards compatible! It will "scale down" just fine.

Keep it. You are thinking correctly!

Once you see your rig boot in less than 15 seconds, and program launch (almost) instantly, you'll be glad.

My other rig is an Asus P6T, with 2 SATA II SSDs in RAID 0, 1 HDD for data & media, 1 HDD for backups.

 

[aviconus]

I understand that they are backwards compatable, my question is, will I notice a considerable difference in performance as 3gb/s, is it still day/night difference from an HDD? A better question to ask would be, is 3gb/s fast enough to warrant using it over my current HDD's or would performance read/write be in the same ball park as the good HDD's? Or does that even matter? Sorry for so many questions.

 

[photonboy]

It's difficult to see the difference between SATA2 and SATA3. Your SSD does not always write and read files at 550MBytes/second (or whatever). Smaller files take longer.

Your system will be noticeably slower for general opening and closing, booting, with any hard drive rather than an SSD.

I was very surprised at the difference between my Velociraptor 300GB hard drive and my SSD drive.

Other:
I have a 120GB SSD, and a second drive for Games and other stuff.

STEAM:
Steam is installed on the hard drive:
1. Create the folder "STEAM" or "STEAM GAMES" before installing steam (or during)
2. Point Steam to this folder (i.e. "E:/STEAM")
3. All Steam downloads will then automatically go into this folder

I also have an "E:/GAMES" folder for my non-Steam games. You have to point to this folder properly during a game installation.

Other folders on the hard drive:
1) Downloads
2) Backups
3) Media (subfolders are: Video, Audio, Pictures)

 

[photonboy]

To be clear, your SSD may only have 111GB of usable space. You'll find that Windows can easily balloon up to 60GB over time (System Restore, updates etc). You should always leave at least 20% of the space for sudden updates, and the SSD losing space over time (slowly).

So I can't really recommend many games on the SSD.

Most people think games load much faster on an SSD. There's not a big difference in most games surprisingly because much of the load time is dedicated to CPU/GPU optimizations or videos. I believe the average increase between a normal hard drive and fast SSD is only 25%.

 

[aviconus]

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