First SSD... I'm amazed

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MorgothPl

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So, finally got a SSD, at first I doubted that single piece of hardware, other then GFX or CPU could speed up my machine in a noticeable way. Then I got me the Samsung 830 256 GB.

And I'm amazed. Really realised that this thing was propably best thing I could add to my machine, much better upgrade then the other I was considering - from 570 to 670.

Boot time went down from 44 to 31 secs. Starting SW:Tor (from hitting play button to character chosing screen) went down from 32s to 20s. And biggest increase in loading speed was in LA Noire - from 1:22 to 58 secs. Also no more milling of the HDD's header which was irritating during night sessions :)

That thing is silent, fast and nice. Now I don't doubt when people state on forums, taht first thing you need to upgrade is HDD to SSD.
 
I've felt that way since I got my first one at the beginning of 2009... a 64GB for a whopping $499. It really brings a machine to life, the random reads are excellent. I'll never go back to booting from a HDD, having an SSD has spoiled me. Some people still don't believe they make a difference though.
 
The last box I built for a gamer friend of mine was a i7-2600, 8GB 1600Mhz DDR3 and a SanDisk Extreme 120GB SSD. From dead cold boot to Settled down in Windows 7 in 14 seconds flat. Absolutely insane.
 
I ran a pair of Plextor M3s in RAID 0 for a few months, got over 1000MB/s reads and something like 600 MB/s writes in benches from what I recall, and.. sold them.

It's just loading times. Nothing else changes; nothing's smoother, nothing actually /works/ better, and most things I run load quickly off a HDD anyway.

The only appreciable change to me was startup times, and given I almost never reset my desktop, that's certainly not worth the price premium. For a laptop it makes sense, but for a tower? Who gives a damn. I just don't understand when people are so thrilled over SSDs anymore.
 
I am really liking the 10 or so second boot and 3 second shutdown I have on my i7 970 with 256GB M4 as the OS drive and second 256 GB M4 for programming.
 
silent-circuit said:
I ran a pair of Plextor M3s in RAID 0 for a few months, got over 1000MB/s reads and something like 600 MB/s writes in benches from what I recall, and.. sold them.

It's just loading times. Nothing else changes; nothing's smoother, nothing actually /works/ better, and most things I run load quickly off a HDD anyway.

The only appreciable change to me was startup times, and given I almost never reset my desktop, that's certainly not worth the price premium. For a laptop it makes sense, but for a tower? Who gives a damn. I just don't understand when people are so thrilled over SSDs anymore.
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lol... okay.
 
drescherjm said:
I am really liking the 10 or so second boot and 3 second shutdown I have on my i7 970 with 256GB M4 as the OS drive and second 256 GB M4 for programming.
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I guess that's my point -- why are you booting it up or shutting it down? Sleep. Any modern os (Linux, Win 7) will do so quickly, smoothly, and with newish hardware the draw at the wall is stupid low. Why spend $200+ on a 256GB SSD when you could get almost the exact same experience for like, $20 a year in "vampire" power draw?
 
In 2010/2011 I was on a contract with a number of other developers, almost all were using dell quad core laptops and I was running a slightly dated 2.00 dual core laptop. When I nabbed a 2nd gen Intel x-25m ssd and put it in my laptop, it could outperform all the quad core laptops with 7200rpm laptop drives in most development tasks, especially compiling our large solutions in VS2010.

Over this last winter I was working at a client where I had to use the desktop they provided, a Xeon 3.0-ish quad core with a single platter 500GB 7200rpm drive. Instead of doing my development on that, I used a virtual machine running off an Intel 320 120GB SSD. I only assigned 2GB RAM and 2 cores to the virtual machine, but it could compile faster than the host machine could simply because it was running off the SSD.

Other than pure email/web surfer users, anyone who does anything real with their PC ought to have an SSD.
 
silent-circuit said:
I ran a pair of Plextor M3s in RAID 0 for a few months, got over 1000MB/s reads and something like 600 MB/s writes in benches from what I recall, and.. sold them.

It's just loading times. Nothing else changes; nothing's smoother, nothing actually /works/ better, and most things I run load quickly off a HDD anyway.

The only appreciable change to me was startup times, and given I almost never reset my desktop, that's certainly not worth the price premium. For a laptop it makes sense, but for a tower? Who gives a damn. I just don't understand when people are so thrilled over SSDs anymore.
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A lot of people give a damn because it performs better. Seems like you're going out of your way to justify HDDs, which is fine. But with HDD prices being ridiculous - SSDs are very appealing.
 
silent-circuit said:
It's just loading times. Nothing else changes; nothing's smoother, nothing actually /works/ better, and most things I run load quickly off a HDD anyway..
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I disagree, even basic tasks like web browsing are faster. I have a windows 7 install on my HDD as a backup and comparing chrome speeds on the same machine, the SSD allows nearly instantaneous page loading while the HDD will load a few images at a time slowly trickling down the page.

My machine does boot faster, although I almost never shut it down, so I don't mind that. My games load faster, and I don't have any hiccups when loading large textures while in actual gameplay. I don't have to wait for the disk to spin up to open a program or file when it went to sleep to save power. There are numerous advantages to having at least a small SSD for windows.

It sounds like you went crazy with your setup and it wasn't worth the price, which I can understand. I had Corsair Force GT's in RAID 0 and I wasn't impressed with it other than in benchmarks, now I just us a single 120GB for OS and a few games and I feel that its a good investment at ~$110 these days.
 
silent-circuit said:
I guess that's my point -- why are you booting it up or shutting it down? Sleep. Any modern os (Linux, Win 7) will do so quickly, smoothly, and with newish hardware the draw at the wall is stupid low. Why spend $200+ on a 256GB SSD when you could get almost the exact same experience for like, $20 a year in "vampire" power draw?
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Compile times are also much faster and I get better core utilization saving me several minutes for every single build.

Edit: Also Visual Studio is significantly faster with an SSD. Loading a 300K+ line project (typical project size) is now a few seconds instead of almost a minute. There is no long delay before a search ...
 
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I switched to raptors the first day they came out for the reduced access time. Switched to SSD's as soon as they became semi-reliable for the reduced access time. Well worth the investment. I recently swapped a 5200rpm 2.5" drive in my x220 for an old vertex 1 120g I had laying around... whole new laptop. It's now CPU limited in pretty much every scenario lol.
 
I haven't built a machine in 2 years that doesn't use an SSD for the OS and programs. Once people see a demonstration and use a machine with a SSD they don't wanna go back to a spinner. Single biggest bang for the buck upgrade on any modern system.
 
Congrats OP! welcome to the club.

Now you need a dedicated SSD for OS and one for games :D (depends on how many things your PC is doing in the background, but you will see even faster loading times)
 
silent-circuit said:
I ran a pair of Plextor M3s in RAID 0 for a few months, got over 1000MB/s reads and something like 600 MB/s writes in benches from what I recall, and.. sold them.

It's just loading times. Nothing else changes; nothing's smoother, nothing actually /works/ better, and most things I run load quickly off a HDD anyway.

The only appreciable change to me was startup times, and given I almost never reset my desktop, that's certainly not worth the price premium. For a laptop it makes sense, but for a tower? Who gives a damn. I just don't understand when people are so thrilled over SSDs anymore.
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i agree with you for the most part, but recently switched 2 of my computers to SSDs. theyre just too cheap now not to. my htpc and gaming rig now sport M4s and when i use my laptop with an HDD, its just annoying how long it takes to boot and to load programs. sure its not a big deal, just a few seconds. to me ive always wanted good framerates, ability to run lots of programs at once, etc much more than ive wanted to boot 10 seconds faster. i can always find something to do for a few seconds while i wait. but now that fast SSDs are like 50 cent/gb theyre more than worth it. my old intel G2 for $2.50/gb wasnt worth it, but a faster M4 for a fifth the price is. IMO.
 
Megalomaniac said:
Congrats OP! welcome to the club.

Now you need a dedicated SSD for OS and one for games :D (depends on how many things your PC is doing in the background, but you will see even faster loading times)
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That's my plan.... I want to get 2nd 256 to install programs and games, Right now I just keep few favourite games on SSD, but the purchase is in two months, got a car checkup and insurance to pay next month. Then I'll keep my hDD only for music, movies and pictures
 
Megalomaniac said:
Congrats OP! welcome to the club.

Now you need a dedicated SSD for OS and one for games :D (depends on how many things your PC is doing in the background, but you will see even faster loading times)
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I now have a spare 60GB Agility drive I'm debating between ebaying or popping into my desktop as a Guild Wars 2 / gaming storage drive.

:)

Druneau said:
I switched to raptors the first day they came out for the reduced access time. Switched to SSD's as soon as they became semi-reliable for the reduced access time. Well worth the investment. I recently swapped a 5200rpm 2.5" drive in my x220 for an old vertex 1 120g I had laying around... whole new laptop. It's now CPU limited in pretty much every scenario lol.
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The addition of an Intel X25-M made my old Turion X2 laptop feel about 100% faster. Made a huge difference.
 
For the games SSD, you can get a "cheap" one. You won't write to it often (saves, new installs), it will mostly be read speeds (loading times) that you have to worry about so you can save some cash on that. Dont worry about IOPS.
I definitely recommend 256+ GB drive for gaming.. that steam folder can get big fast! I've had mine for almost 2 years now, and there's maybe 30GB free on it, on and off.
 
Megalomaniac said:
For the games SSD, you can get a "cheap" one. You won't write to often to it (saves, new installs), it will mostly be read speeds (loading times) that you have to worry about so you can save some cash on that.
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Small reads are still shit on async NAND normally used in cheap SSDs. I don't agree with this advice.
 
Initial loads will be continuous, but during game play it's typically small random reads/writes.
 
silent-circuit said:
I guess that's my point -- why are you booting it up or shutting it down? Sleep. Any modern os (Linux, Win 7) will do so quickly, smoothly, and with newish hardware the draw at the wall is stupid low. Why spend $200+ on a 256GB SSD when you could get almost the exact same experience for like, $20 a year in "vampire" power draw?
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I'm with you! I wasn't impressed 2.5 years ago when I moved from a WD Black to a 60gb Agility 2. But it wasn't exactly a top of the line ssd either. After using it for a year, I decided to switch to a Raid 0 setup with two spinpoint F3s. It's been that way for about a year and half now.

Hopefully this buzz is true and I'll actually notice a difference when I install my new 240GB sandisk extreme drive this weekend. I don't have my hopes up though. :(
 
silent-circuit said:
Why spend $200+ on a 256GB SSD when you could get almost the exact same experience for like, $20 a year in "vampire" power draw?
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If you've got several programs all hitting the drives at the same time, thats where SSD's will shine. I've never seen any HD setup I've had that could handle all the stuff I've got going some nights.

With my SSD's I can be encoding HD video, playing a game, have a full virus scan running and be archving stuff all at the same time on the same drive and not even notice a skip anywhere. Plus they dont make a peep of sound or generate the amount of heat a HD can.

They have their place, and I've got 2 old laptops that feel like brand new now compared to before, but laptop HD's are almost always the system bottleneck imho.

At this point it's pretty much a given, either you're gonna love it or you're gonna be like "WTF why bother?", there's almost zero middle ground. It's another rivalry like Intel vs AMD or NV vs ATI/AMD. Now we have HD vs SSD. ;)

Me? You can have my SSD's when you pry them from my cold, dead hands. :p
 
Changing some settings in your registry can make your startup even faster, I'm pretty sure my computer boots cold in about 5 seconds from button to login with the intel 320s. But yes, it is AMAZING, not to mention how fast windows installs on an SSD vs HDD.
 
Limahl said:
If you've got several programs all hitting the drives at the same time, thats where SSD's will shine. I've never seen any HD setup I've had that could handle all the stuff I've got going some nights.

With my SSD's I can be encoding HD video, playing a game, have a full virus scan running and be archving stuff all at the same time on the same drive and not even notice a skip anywhere. Plus they dont make a peep of sound or generate the amount of heat a HD can.
:p
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Yeah, that's the big thing. I can crack open 5 Firefox sessions in 2 seconds, or Word, or whatever. While encoding a video in handbrake in the background. Etc.

I like the startup times - I like to shut down my PC and have a nice clean boot (not leave it sleeping sucking power).

Zipping/unizipping is nice and fast too.

Windows updates - those install a lot faster too.
 
J Macker said:
I'm with you! I wasn't impressed 2.5 years ago when I moved from a WD Black to a 60gb Agility 2. But it wasn't exactly a top of the line ssd either. After using it for a year, I decided to switch to a Raid 0 setup with two spinpoint F3s. It's been that way for about a year and half now.

Hopefully this buzz is true and I'll actually notice a difference when I install my new 240GB sandisk extreme drive this weekend. I don't have my hopes up though. :(
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You probably won't notice a difference between a SanDisk Extreme and Agility 2.

If the move from an HDD to an SSD didn't impress you, then the much smaller difference between the Agility 2 and SanDisk won't do it either.
 
I got an Agility 3 and although it's not a high-end drive I wasn't impressed with the install speed of Windows 7. I was really thinking it would be incredibly fast but it was just like a standard hard drive. Startup and shutdown were fast and opening applications was fast. Things like installing Windows updates flew by. Not sure what caused the issue with the Windows install. I'll need to try installing from USB thumb drive to see if the DVD drive was the bottleneck.
 
Welcome, I recently joined the club myself!
I felt like this after I got everything installed...

jeremyclarksonscummyman.jpg
 
Sp33dFr33k said:
I got an Agility 3 and although it's not a high-end drive I wasn't impressed with the install speed of Windows 7. I was really thinking it would be incredibly fast but it was just like a standard hard drive. Startup and shutdown were fast and opening applications was fast. Things like installing Windows updates flew by. Not sure what caused the issue with the Windows install. I'll need to try installing from USB thumb drive to see if the DVD drive was the bottleneck.
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Aren't DVDs and USBs slower than dirt?

I doubt you could install faster than you read it off the disc. :)
 
jwcalla said:
Aren't DVDs and USBs slower than dirt?

I doubt you could install faster than you read it off the disc. :)
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The big difference installing to SSD instead of HDD is the small writes are much faster.

A modern, single platter 7200RPM HDD can get well over 100MB/s reads and writes, but only with large files. The smaller the chunks, the slower the reads and writes. While this is still true with SSDs, the difference is much more substantial when dealing with many many small files. There are a /lot/ of very small files in an OS install.

Assuming you're pulling from a DVD at a solid 30--50MB/s you can read the whole disc in about 2 minutes. Less, really. Since it should be read more or less linearly, the drive should be able to keep handing you data at or near its theoretical max speed. A HDD can't write all those little files that fast, so you end up with a 20-30 minute install despite our crazy fast modern CPUs. With a SSD you can get that down in the the 5-7 minute range, sometimes less.

To maybe clarify on some of my earlier posts: I'm not anti-SSD, I'm just lucky enough to have a pair of 640GB HDDs from before prices went crazy and my usage scenario (mostly gaming, and light anymore at that) doesn't really benefit from them enough to justify the considerable cost. In truth, I don't even know what I'd do with $200ish to my current tower, as it's already far more than I need. For those using VMs or programming, editing uncompressed HD video, etc... yes, you may see a substantial difference, and I'm not telling you that you're wrong. I'm just saying I don't care about startup times because my machine almost never fully shuts down, and I can stand to sit a few more seconds at the loading screen for League of Legends; chances are there's some Russian trying to play it on a Nokia N-Gage that'll take 3 hours to load anyway. Gives me time to get a beer.

If someone in GenHard sets a low budget and says they want to have a high performance gaming machine, the first thing I'll tell them to do is reuse a fairly modern 7200RPM HDD if they have one and leave the SSD for later. Better GPU / CPU is almost always more important than better read/write speeds in this case, and that $100-200 is much better used elsewhere. SSDs are great, but they're still total luxuries that give almost zero real world performance increase outside of loading and startup times in a gaming rig. I'd rather wait a bit longer and have a better experience once the game loads, and I suspect most others would agree.
 
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silent-circuit said:
If someone in GenHard sets a low budget and says they want to have a high performance gaming machine, the first thing I'll tell them to do is reuse a fairly modern 7200RPM HDD if they have one and leave the SSD for later. Better GPU / CPU is almost always more important than better read/write speeds in this case, and that $100-200 is much better used elsewhere. SSDs are great, but they're still total luxuries that give almost zero real world performance increase outside of loading and startup times in a gaming rig. I'd rather wait a bit longer and have a better experience once the game loads, and I suspect most others would agree.
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Only for playing games. Maybe CPU for a video encoding rig. Otherwise, I'd recommend an SSD - they're good in a lot of scenarios and do more to make a PC feel fast than anything else.
 
An SSD is definitely the best bang for your buck. I was amazing when I finally got one.
 
I realized a few weeks ago that I don't have any systems any more that DON'T have at least one SSD in them any more. Even my servers all have them for VM boot drives, boy is that a night and day difference. Heck my parents have SSDs in all their systems now too, 80GB intel G2 hand-me-downs in the laptops and a 60GB 330 in the desktop.
 
JRS said:
In 2010/2011 I was on a contract with a number of other developers, almost all were using dell quad core laptops and I was running a slightly dated 2.00 dual core laptop. When I nabbed a 2nd gen Intel x-25m ssd and put it in my laptop, it could outperform all the quad core laptops with 7200rpm laptop drives in most development tasks, especially compiling our large solutions in VS2010.

Over this last winter I was working at a client where I had to use the desktop they provided, a Xeon 3.0-ish quad core with a single platter 500GB 7200rpm drive. Instead of doing my development on that, I used a virtual machine running off an Intel 320 120GB SSD. I only assigned 2GB RAM and 2 cores to the virtual machine, but it could compile faster than the host machine could simply because it was running off the SSD.

Other than pure email/web surfer users, anyone who does anything real with their PC ought to have an SSD.
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I cant overstate this....
MrWizard6600 said:
I work on a 12 year old .net codebase ("wait a minute, .nets only been around 10 years." yes, we ported from vb6), on a laptop with this same CPU and a disk it took 5 minutes to build core and 2 to build our plugin. On the W520, with a kingston 128GB SSD, it takes a little over half that.
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Its just, so much stuff is IO bound.

Most of the performance gains are fairly subtle, but they're subtleties that, when not present, piss you off. The comparison of an SSD to a spinning disk is a lot like the comparison of a 1080p screen to a 720p one of the same size. It's not a world of difference, but its really nice to have.

To put it into perspective, if a single CPU cycle happened in one second, then it would take a few seconds to get something from L1 or L2 cache (in your pockets), a few minutes to get something from main memory (in your car or your locker or your-boss-on-another-floors desk), then, by this time scale, it would take 8 months to get stuff from a spinning disk (on another continent, and you're in the 17th century).

@JRS- Software Developer e-peen comparison time: how big were your solutions? Our "uber" solution (boot server on localhost + boot client pointed at it) was 96 projects.
 
Guys I wish I could wax poetical too about SSDs like you all are but there's a dirty little secret about them: you need a good chipset. I installed an Intel SSD 320 80GB into my E-350 netbook and while it certainly is faster than the 5400 RPM drive it replaced, its 4K numbers and access times are literally 1/3 or 1/4 of the benchmark numbers that I've seen for the same SSD on a good chipset like SB850. This means that on my lightly used netbook it takes about 30 seconds to hit the desktop with GUI boot off.

So yeah, make sure you are on a good chipset if you really want to harness the potential of an SSD.
 
I keep telling everyone SSDs are the rocketships to the Hard Drive hang gliders, something I read on Anandtech one time, but those people are still like "too much money". Well you drive and don't bike to work, don't ya?
 
XacTactX said:
Guys I wish I could wax poetical too about SSDs like you all are but there's a dirty little secret about them: you need a good chipset. I installed an Intel SSD 320 80GB into my E-350 netbook and while it certainly is faster than the 5400 RPM drive it replaced, its 4K numbers and access times are literally 1/3 or 1/4 of the benchmark numbers that I've seen for the same SSD on a good chipset like SB850. This means that on my lightly used netbook it takes about 30 seconds to hit the desktop with GUI boot off.

So yeah, make sure you are on a good chipset if you really want to harness the potential of an SSD.
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This so absolutely true!
I have a 780G and run two Intel 330 120G in Raid0. The performance difference between that and a normal harddrive is minimal. Except from benchmarks

However, my new i7 laptop feels somewhat more snappy with SSD.
Boot times I really don't care about, I always get go get a new mug with coffee anyway :)
 
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