Is an SSD worth the upgrade?

Yes, a SSD will still be pretty quick (even on SATAII ports). Top end performers will top out at around 270-280MB for read speeds and 255-270MB for write speeds.

Access times will increase substantially and your boot time will be impressive compared with a good old 7200rpm drive.

If all you're looking to do is improve your gaming performance then you will not be depressed by switching to a SSD but you'll get more benefits from upgrading your GPU (depending on what you have).

If you're looking for a good entry level drive, I would recommend the Samsung 830/840 - incredibly reliable, very quick and usually fairly close to $/GB.

The Samsung 830 and 840 series aren't really entry level, they're the best SATA interface SSD's on the market.
- The 840 kicks everything, even I run two Samsung 830's, one in each rig, and I'm the author of PreCacher.

A Solid State Drive is more about the <= 0.2ms to 0.125ms response time than the sheer throughput in MB/sec.

You can still get an SSD down to about 5,800 KB/sec if you read lots of tiny files (under 64KB) from one within a 2 minute period.

Doing the same on a HDD would take much longer.

~150MB/sec with 8K I/O per second is heaps more responsive than <= 150MB/sec at just 120 to 500 I/O per second.


Using an application that I just wrote you can cache all files on your C: drive under 64KB and parts of the MFT when Windows loads (if in StartUp group) and enjoy SSD like performance from 50% to 80% of your file access. [:-)].

Spread the word:
- http://scottdbowen.id.au/PreCacher/