What should my next upgrade be ???

[Mfusick]

I was thinking of an SSD

Here is my system now

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1532226

 

[tecmo34]

Your system looks pretty solid for an older LGA 775 build. A SSD would add a nice speed boost to your system. How does your dual cards hold up to current games, as upgrading to newer cards is another option.

 

[CsG_kieran_2]

^+1 An SSD will get you along with opening up programs real fast

 

[Mfusick]

Your system looks pretty solid for an older LGA 775 build. A SSD would add a nice speed boost to your system. How does your dual cards hold up to current games, as upgrading to newer cards is another option.

yeah my pc is a few years old now... I have 3800 series radeon with 1gig DDR... it was $500 when I got it

But years have gone by since.

Honestly.. the card performs great. I have not needed to upgrade just yet,.

I think overall speed increase in loading and booting is money better spent for now.

I usually get a card, mobo, processor and ram at the same time when I upgrade. And take this make it the second pc for downloading and home theater use on the projector

 

[Mfusick]

oh.. I just noticed. I don't have seperate cards... the dual cards are built into the single video card I have.

 

[Guest]

I was thinking of an SSD

Here is my system now

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1532226

An SSD is a joke. It's not only extremely expensive, the storage capacity of SSD at present is quite small compared to a conventional HDD. Though I have a feeling that SSD will eventually replaced the aging HDD, I don't see it happening anytime soon. Current SSD technology has a lot of things to improve for it to eventually replace HDD.

Current SSD sequential & random write speeds are a bit slow compared to HDD. This really stands out during benchmarks where the main focus is on raw performance. One major disadvantage also is the write/erase cycle which is very limited. It could only stand for 1,000 to 10,000 write cycle. A conventional HDD could stand 1,000,000 - 5,000,000 write cycles. This means that the performance of the SSD will decrease over time.

At present, I think the best drive technology is a hybrid SSD. Its sequential & random read speed is comparable to a SSD while its sequential & random write speed is comparable to a HDD. Like a HDD, its write/erase cycle is almost unlimited. It has a large storage capacity also & it's priced about the same &/or just a few buck higher than HDD.


http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6280178&csid=_21

Depending on the game you're playing, if you need to upgrade my advice for you is to upgrade your aging dual GPU Radeon HD 3870X2. It's getting old & underpowered especially if you play such game as Crysis. I'm currently using 2 dual GPU Sapphire Radeon HD 4870X2 on quad CrossfireX set up & to tell you, some new single GPU video cards now like the Nvidia GTX 580 runs a lot faster than my video card.

 

[Mfusick]

SSD is worth it for a speed increase...

 

[Guest]

You're right about that, I don't have SSD & not planning to buy one either. I'm also upgrading my computer like the other gentleman. That's why I registered here at tomshardware.com the other day to get some answers on some computer related questions (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/295530-28-question). Like him, I'm also considering before purchasing SSDs for my computer upgrade but eventually decided not to get one after the more I read about it. The primary reasons why I don't think SSD is a viable option at present is its price & limited storage option.

I could be wrong but the highest capacity SSD drive I saw is somewhere around 260 Gb & the cheapest of that highest capacity was priced at $550 range. Though I used my PC for gaming, I primarily used it also for some other stuff other than gaming (job related). I need to buy at least 4 SSDs (to run on RAID 10) plus it has to have a minimum storage capacity of 500 Gb. I'm not extremely smart (though I finished 4 years of college ), but I'm not crazy enough to jump into the SSD bandwagon at its current state.

Other reasons why I stayed away with SSD is its sequential & random write speeds are a bit slow compared to HDD. The write/erase cycle is very limited also as what I read in the internet. Unlike HDD which has almost unlimited write/erase cycle.

Looking on different option, I think a hybrid SSD is a good choice at present. Its sequential & random read speeds are almost the same as SSD (only few seconds of delay as test shown). It's priced like a HDD. It just doesn't make any sense at all to go with SSD at this time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UtqV5SN4BY&feature=player_embedded#!

 

[Guest]

By the way, don't get confused with SSD's read speed & its write speed. Sure, SSD's read speed is fast but its write speed is very slow.

 

[Guest]

^+1
that statement by - cheaptrick was a joke...
he probably doesn't even have one but wants one and can't get it, don't hate..
I'm speaking about the second and third generation of SSD, third coming out now...

By the way, my statement is not a joke. Your knowledge on SSD is a joke.

 

[tecmo34]

is that why your girlfriend just bought me a new SSD.?

You have been a valued member since joining... Don't get yourself banned by Mod's for getting involved in a "War of Words"... Be the better man

 

[Guest]

You have been a valued member since joining... Don't get yourself banned by Mod's for getting involved in a "War of Words"... Be the better man

You're right about that. You don't have to belittle somebody if that somebody contradicts with what you said. Malmental failed in that aspect. I registered here to get some answers & try to answer someone's thread for the purpose of extending some help. This kid for some reason thinks he is the only one who knows the right answer. Learn some values by respecting other people's opinion. You only making yourself looks bad being this way.

You don't know who I am & what I do. Have some decency so you'll get some respect. You can always express your views without hitting on someone. Be true to yourself.
People don't care about what you said if you don't act like yourself. Paragraphs after paragraphs doesn't mean anything. For sure it wont make you something knowledgeable. What matter is the content. Keep it simple & be humble.

 

[Guest]

is that why your girlfriend just bought me a new SSD.?
P.S.
the group 'cheaptrick' were a bunch of druggies that had one hit song in the 80's; sounds like your the trick....

I don't hang out with people using drugs nor a one hit wonder. I do have some respect for myself & others especially for my wife & 4 kids. Don't you ever go that low with me.

Mr. Moderator, Sir, I beg your pardon but I think you need to do something about this man (Malmental). This is really so low for such a website like tomshardware.com.

His words are tantamount to libel.

 

[Guest]

I rest my case here. My apology to the readers on behalf of Malmental. Have a Happy Holiday to all.

 

[randomizer]

This topic has been closed by Randomizer

 

[aford10]

a little of malmental's info and finds on SSD:

Performance Degradation Over Time, Wear, and Trim

As mentioned above, flash blocks and cells need to be erased before new bytes can be written to them. As a result, newly purchased devices (with all flash blocks pre-erased) can perform notably better at purchase time than after considerable use. While we’ve observed this performance degradation ourselves, we do not consider this to be a show stopper. In fact, except via benchmarking measurements, we don’t expect users to notice the drop during normal use.

Of course, device manufactures and Microsoft want to maintain superior performance characteristics as best we can. One can easily imagine the better SSD manufacturers attempting to overcome the aging issues by pre-erasing blocks so the performance penalty is largely unrealized during normal use, or by maintaining a large enough spare area to store short bursts of writes. SSD drives designed for the enterprise may have as high as 50% of their space reserved in order to provide lengthy periods of high sustained write performance.

In addition to the above, Microsoft and SSD manufacturers are adopting the Trim operation. In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse.

As an added benefit, the Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur. As an example, consider a single 128 KB SSD block that contained a 128 KB file. If the file is deleted and a Trim operation is requested, then the SSD can avoid having to mix bytes from the SSD block with any other bytes that are subsequently written to that block. This reduces wear.

Windows 7 requests the Trim operation for more than just file delete operations. The Trim operation is fully integrated with partition- and volume-level commands like Format and Delete, with file system commands relating to truncate and compression, and with the System Restore (aka Volume Snapshot) feature.
Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.
Frequently Asked Questions

Before addressing some frequently asked questions, we’d like to remind everyone that we believe the future of SSDs in mobile and desktop PCs (as well as enterprise servers) looks very bright to us. SSDs can deliver on the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices steadily dropping and quality on the rise, we expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating HDDs. With that in mind, we focused an appropriate amount of our engineering efforts towards insuring Windows 7 users have great experiences on SSDs.

Will Windows 7 support Trim?

Yes. See the above section for details.

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

Is NTFS Compression of Files and Directories recommended on SSDs?

Compressing files help save space, but the effort of compressing and decompressing requires extra CPU cycles and therefore power on mobile systems. That said, for infrequently modified directories and files, compression is a fine way to conserve valuable SSD space and can be a good tradeoff if space is truly a premium.

We do not, however, recommend compressing files or directories that will be written to with great frequency. Your Documents directory and files are likely to be fine, but temporary internet directories or mail folder directories aren’t such a good idea because they get large number of file writes in bursts.

Does the Windows Search Indexer operate differently on SSDs?

No.

Is Bitlocker’s encryption process optimized to work on SSDs?

Yes, on NTFS. When Bitlocker is first configured on a partition, the entire partition is read, encrypted and written back out. As this is done, the NTFS file system will issue Trim commands to help the SSD optimize its behavior.

We do encourage users concerned about their data privacy and protection to enable Bitlocker on their drives, including SSDs.

Does Media Center do anything special when configured on SSDs?

No. While SSDs do have advantages over traditional HDDs, SSDs are more costly per GB than their HDD counterparts. For most users, a HDD optimized for media recording is a better choice, as media recording and playback workloads are largely sequential in nature.

Does Write Caching make sense on SSDs and does Windows 7 do anything special if an SSD supports write caching?

Some SSD manufacturers including RAM in their devices for more than just their control logic; they are mimicking the behavior of traditional disks by caching writes, and possibly reads. For devices that do cache writes in volatile memory, Windows 7 expects flush commands and write-ordering to be preserved to at least the same degree as traditional rotating disks. Additionally, Windows 7 expects user settings that disable write caching to be honored by write caching SSDs just as they are on traditional disks.

Do RAID configurations make sense with SSDs?

Yes. The reliability and performance benefits one can obtain via HDD RAID configurations can be had with SSD RAID configurations.

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
* Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
* Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

Are there any concerns regarding the Hibernate file and SSDs?

No, hiberfile.sys is written to and read from sequentially and in large chunks, and thus can be placed on either HDDs or SSDs.

What Windows Experience Index changes were made to address SSD performance characteristics?

In Windows 7, there are new random read, random write and flush assessments. Better SSDs can score above 6.5 all the way to 7.9. To be included in that range, an SSD has to have outstanding random read rates and be resilient to flush and random write workloads.

In the Beta timeframe of Windows 7, there was a capping of scores at 1.9, 2.9 or the like if a disk (SSD or HDD) didn’t perform adequately when confronted with our random write and flush assessments. Feedback on this was pretty consistent, with most feeling the level of capping to be excessive. As a result, we now simply restrict SSDs with performance issues from joining the newly added 6.0+ and 7.0+ ranges. SSDs that are not solid performers across all assessments effectively get scored in a manner similar to what they would have been in Windows Vista, gaining no Win7 boost for great random read performance.

If you're just going to copy and paste someone else's article, you should at least have the decency to give them credit for it, and not try to pass it off as your own thoughts.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx