SSD: What Are Its Advantages Aside From Start-Up Times?

[Morituri]

I have read that that SSDs greatly increase computer start-up and program load times. I am not that concerned about these issues. Are there any other advantages to SSDs? For instance, will game transitions load faster? Will games play any better? Will very large pdf or other file types be quicker to work with? Thanks for any guidance you can offer me.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001396.htm

Loads of similar authoritative pages can be found if you use a search engine.

 

[GorfTheFrog]

Hi -
Just my personal experience, but adding an SSD has made my entire machine generally feel more responsive for every-day tasks. I'm running an older i7-920, 6GB RAM, with two SSDs and the older SATA-3Gb/s channels.

My first SSD is the boot disk. My second I use for swap space and high-write utilities, log files, etc. At least at first this was my setup. Over time I have eliminated my swap space entirely, and with 6GB RAM I don't notice any problems.

There are some additional tuning steps that you'll need to implement in order to get the most of you SSD. Specifically, Windows has some utilities (prefetch, superfetch) that run to optimize HD access. I've disabled these, as recommended by most tuning articles.

I also use my secondary SSD as the temp drive when burning DVDs. This seems to make a bit of difference as well.

Game load times vary. When a game has to validate a license key from a DVD, STEAM, or other external source, it feels like the key verification is the long wait-time factor. If the game is self-contained then, yes, it loads a bit faster.

In another setup, for my parents, I used an SSD with Intel's SRT to speed up their system. Mom and Dad have been quite pleased with the overall outcome.

Lastly, my work laptop has an SSD, and it performs *much* better than the old ones without. (Note, I still had to manually optimize it.)

For my money and time, I'm always including an SSD in my builds, and would always recommend one.

Hope this helps,
GorfTheFrog