SSD newb question

[hubbs_67]

Hello,

I was reading on a couple of forums (on another site) and people were saying that once a certain amount of data is put on a SSD, the performance begins to drop off quickly, and that if you fill it, it's basically only as fast as a mechanical drive? (ie, some people were saying this starting happening when the drive was filled to about 75% of capacity, others said 90%, etc) Is this true?

Also, what I would like to do is have my OS and system files (ie, office, a few things like that), WoW and D3 on a SSD (I know SSD doesn't increase frame rates, it just makes load times better). Am I better off getting a high quality 60 Gig drive for my OS and program files, and then getting a second drive to put a few games on? Or is getting one drive for everything ok?

This weekend I can get an Intel 520 series 120 Gig drive for $158 Cdn, which is very tempting, but if I put about 100 to 110 gigs on there between my OS, program files, WoW and D3, and it's as slow as my HDD, I don't see the point...

Thanks in advance to anyone who responds!

 

[ubercake]

It is faster. I put my OS, drivers and device software on the SSD and my apps and everything else on my HDDs. Boot time is far faster than any mechanical drive boot even after running with the SSD for over a year.

It runs great, but I want to replace my app drive with a separate SSD just to make it that much faster to decrease game load times even more.

I would recommend at least an 80GB for the OS drive as with all the windows updates and device software, you'd be over 40GB in no time. Plus, depending on how much virtual memory you allocate (usually some multiple of the amount of RAM you have), you could be at close to 60GB in no time. That is why I'd recommend a minimum of 80GB.

I would say a good setup would be two SSDs; one for the OS and one for your apps.

Additionally, you could take it further with a RAID array setup as RAID 0 for each which would require 4 SSDs (2 for the OS and 2 for the apps). This would a crazy fast disk setup, if you wanted to go that far, but as I listed above 1 SSD for your OS and one for your apps and data would be a good affordable high-speed disk setup.

 

[game junky]

Depending on the manufacturer and the drive's onboard controller, some larger SSDs have faster read/write speeds so there are definitely pros and cons of using a dedicated drive for the OS and a drive specifically for program files. I personally am using the 120GB Intel 520 Series - it's smoking fast and it didn't require any extreme tweaking. I also have Samsung's 830 series drives in a couple of laptops - also very fast and pretty reliable.

 

[bucknutty]

Older drives with out trim and grabage collection running under XP vista would slow down alot. The problem with an ssd when compared to a standard HD is that when you write over an old block of data the ssd has to delete it first then clean it then write the new data.
When an operating system deletes data from a drive it does not really do a delete. It simply marks that section of the disk as free space so that next time you save something the drive can write over that area of space.
With a standard drive the act of overwriting old data is the same as writing new data. So the Operating system is not deleteing the data, or cleaning the block on the SSD when you delete. That step must be done when the computer writes new data which causes the slow down.

Newer drives on newer mother boards with Win7 should not slow down because of the trim command. Trim keeps track of any time a block of data is deleted and marks it for deleting and cleaning when the system is idle. This way deleting and cleaning of blocks never needs to be done during writing because every bit of free space was already deleted and cleaned.

 

[bucknutty]

I just got a 120gb sandisk drive for around $100. Boot time and shut down time was cut in half. Load times for games is much faster. I use steam and have like 100 steam games, so I have steam and all my games installed to my mechanical drives. To get the speed boost with my favorate game of the month I cut the game folder out of the steam folder on the mechanical disk and put it on the SSD. I then use the windows MKLINK command to allow steam installed on the D:\drive to run the game from the C:\drive. This allows me get the benifit of the SSD speed with out running out of the space on it.

 

[rozz]

I setup my PC with Corsair 120GB SSD and Toshiba 1TB HDD. With the new Z68 motherboards, you can incorporate Intel Smart Response Tech. and cache the SSD to the HDD. Pretty much making the SSD a giant cache for the HDD for speed, while retaining the 1TB capacity of the HDD. The performance is awesome. Windows boots in about 8 seconds, i don't even get a "welcome" screen.. goes straight to desktop and my c: is still 1TB.

Although, only 64GB of the SSD is cached, the other 60+GB of my SSD is used as another partition of my primary applications, (games, photoshop, misc programs) which make the load times of my games super quick still.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-z68-express-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching,2938-3.html

 

[hubbs_67]

Best answer selected by hubbs_67.