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question about SSD

K

kingdomwinds

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 17, 2005
Messages
406
I use an old 7200rpm drive with 16mb of cache right now. My motherboard does not support sata III, so will i see improvement in game load times and booting times if i get a SSD that is sata III?

I dont feel like upgrading the motherboard until ivybridge is out.

currently on a system with a i7 920, 6gb ram, 570gtx, and 500gb 7200rpm drive
 
I find it hard to believe your system that supports a i7 920 doesn't support SATAIII 6.0Gbps, can you list your model?

To answer your question simply: Yes you will see a dramatic boost in load times for anything loaded on an SSD.
 
Cmustang87 said:
I find it hard to believe your system that supports a i7 920 doesn't support SATAIII 6.0Gbps, can you list your model?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately there were a lot of pre-SB mobos that didn't support SATA III. I have one of them myself from an early 2011 build (Core i7). :mad:

But it's all good... SATA II is fast enough... for now. :cool:
 
Cmustang87 said:
I find it hard to believe your system that supports a i7 920 doesn't support SATAIII 6.0Gbps, can you list your model?

To answer your question simply: Yes you will see a dramatic boost in load times for anything loaded on an SSD.
Click to expand...

its an asus motherboard that is discontinued now. I blame myself for not knowing about sata III. I guess ill get an SSD then. wish they were not so pricey. Im thinking of getting a Crucial 500gb SSD but that cost around $800
 
A new spinning hard drive would also be much faster than what you have now - hard drive speed has increased quite a bit in the past few years. Not compared to SSDs of course, but much cheaper.
 
Keep your HDD and buy a smaller SSD. JMO. Large SSDs are kinda pointless at this stage since most large files are typically streamed (video, audio, etc.) where performance beyond 1 MB/s is overkill.

Of course if you do a lot of copying of big files or photo editing then maybe you'll want the performance, but even then you might want to keep that activity on an HDD since you don't want to be writing large files consistently to an SSD.

Though with an i7 920 you definitely need an SSD.
 
PS: You can always get a SATA controller card if you really want SATA III and have an available PCIe slot.
 
Alot of pre sandy bridge, and 890 series AMD motherboards did not offer SATA III or 6GB/s, alot of them now do though.

Generally yes, it will help your boot, load, etc drastically, that is if the chipset supports it properly, there is alot of things one should do though to keep it running at its optimum, things like making sure windows defrag will not touch the SSD, making sure you put as little as possible on the drive.

Basically, I know everyone uses an SSD differently, but they are and remain thier fastest when the information on them does not change often, and as such, anything you can do to ensure that, by taking all the "junk" and placing it elsewhere, the better. A 60GB-90GB SSD is plenty even if you wanted to have 1 or 2 most played games on it, though I would advice against doing so, seeing as the faster the system is, the faster it does everything anyways.

Good choices for my $ is OCZ Agility 3, just make sure it has Firmware 1.13 or newer, another good choice is Crucial M4. The 120Gb models generally offer the best $/capacity value, and really are not that much more then thier 60GB little brothers, for example, I got an Agility 3 60GB for a 120GB model it would have costed $35 more, I decided to just use my caviar black more then I would have and save the few $$
 
Don't blame yourself, an i7 920 is a Nehalem CPU that uses the X58 chipset, and the X58 doesn't support SATA3, that's it. SATA3 is 2011 technology, really. The X58 mobos that offer SATA3 (I've got one, since my original mobo died on me) only do via an additional controller that kills the performance of SSDs (even SATA2 ones). Same for cheap PCIe SATA3 cards, the performance is terrible.

I advise against a 500GB drive too, it's just too expensive, especially considering you have no SSD experience. A 60GB on the other hand is too small, and has less performance than 120GB drives, usually. So, 120/240 is the sweet spot, and if you're converted to the SSD religion you can always add another drive later.
The only way to get performing SATA3 is to buy a 2011 chipset, mainly sandybridge. I, too, am waiting for Ivy bridge, but I've been using SSDs since before Nehalem.
 
I will get the 256gb SSD then. The one from crucial looks good.

This is a noob question, but i have never used multiple hard drives in my builds. Do I just format my old hard drive in windows 7 before hand or will I get an option to format both of them when I re-install win 7 on the SSD? I will use the SSD as the OS booting device and the old one as storage.
 
You don't have to reformat your old HDD but if you want to, just do it from within Win7 after you install it on your SSD. It should be somewhere in Admin Tools.
 
Unplug the hard drive when you install windows on the SSD, or else there is a risk the boot sector will be written on it instead of the SSD. Then plug the hard drive back. No need to format it, don't you have anything you want to keep on it ?
 
no right now, i just have the OS and some files on my old hard drive. I figure it has to be wiped since it already has a win7 install on it
 
I didn't think about license implications, maybe that's what you're referring to ? No right to use two installs at the same time. That's true. Anyway, don't do it before being sure you succeeded with the SSD, in case there is a problem you just have to plug the HDD back and use the computer.
 
As for speed, it does affect the drive depending on controller and flash used, however, 60GB models are not "that" small if you use them effectively, if you plan on putting games and such on it, then by all means a 120gb or better is prefered, but for the price of them the 120GB models are quite reasonably priced.

the speed difference between newer 60 and 120gb models are honestly not that different, say compared to jumping from a HDD to SSD directly, it is still a significant speed.

Also, if you are using an older sata II port, the SSD would be affected, yes, but it would still be very fast indeed, at least until you can get an Ivy Bridge or something along that line.

I personally would look at the one you plan on getting, be it an Agility 3, a Crucial M4 etc and read some reviews on it, to see the actual differences in outright speed, before you go shelling out huge $ for nothing, that an if you really wanted some significant speed, you could always grab 2x60 or 2x120gb drives and raid them(just makre sure to us the right ones)

As for liscencing issues, if I recall thier legal disclaimer, you can only have one install "active" at a time on one computer, so to have both drives active in windows like a virtualized dock, then you would need 2 liscences, however, you should be able to use current key/disc to install it on the SSD, once you are in windows, go to performance tools, the one with WEI page, on the bottom left here is a "activate windows now" button, this will make it a genuine copy as it revalidates it using same key but with a different MS ID, after all it is still just on the one computer and only 1 active copy being used :)
 
An SSD will not necessarily have a drastic impact on game load times... It depends largely on the game, some will see a big improvement (MMORPGs, some shooters, etc.) but others are bottlenecked by other components (texture/map unpacking from compressed state bottlenecked by GPU/CPU, etc.).

I'm a huge fan of SSDs but I wouldn't buy one specially just to cut down game load times and boot times, except maybe in the case of a laptop... Specially considering the cost per GB and game install sizes. It's not hard to move installed games around with symlinks/Steam Mover, but depending on how many games you play and how large your drive is it may not be trivial either.

Now if you're also after the general usability improvement that they provide while multi-tasking and/or opening other large productivity apps, then go for it.
 
I was reading something along that line as well.

In general, most games now are held in non compressible formats, so thier format and the fact they cannot shave down thier size makes them ill suited for SSD.

Things such as OS, word documents, databases, speadsheets and the like work very well, mostly cause thier info can be compressed, and if it cannot, at least it is in smaller more manageable sizes that do not need to be extacted/decompressed or can be streamed from the host source as needed.
So I suppose in a general sence, this is why google and many server companies use them for fast database storage, but for large storage, they still use mechanical or ribbon.

SSD drastically help load times for the OS and help open things such as defragger, Anti virus and such, but games, it really is not the best place for them to be, not to mention an SSD has a finite lifespan for its NAND cells, the more that is written to them, or read from used moved rewritten(fragmented/erased info) the more this degrades thier speed/life. Garbage colleciton and TRIM are designed to alleviate this issue, but it most certainly is not immune to it.

Any good review site will most certainly point this out.
 
Game data is often not compressible because it's already compressed to begin with so the game can easily be distributed (not because it can't be), that fact in and of itself would only affect SF drives the most (which rely on compression to enhance flash memory's speed), but the fact that decompressing can be slowed down by other components (e.g. CPU/GPU) would affect all drives equally (your drive is irrelevant at that point, SSD or not). SSDs are still faster than regular HDD when dealing with large sequential transfers tho.

The only reason they're not widely used for everything is simply cost and controller maturity (reliability). Other people have crunched the numbers better, but even if you wrote data to modern SSDs 24/7 they'd still last you several years before flash decay would be a concern.
 
the last I read on above statement, is consumer drives form current generartions, if used the way they should be, theroetically will last longer then most use the computer they are in 10+years.

However with heavy use, where one does not allow TRIM garbage collection to take effect, in a system where it is constantly having to sift through its info, not only is there a speed penalty as bits get clogged with a need to erase thier contents, it drastically can reduce thier lifespan from 10+years, down to a handfull.

The biggest thing is data, needs a place to move, due to fragmentation, by having a large drive, or having a lean one, you allow the data to move as needed, and allow for TRIM and garbage colleciton to do thier thing better keeping speed higher and avoiding the possibility the drive doesnt last as long as it should.

I suppose, in one sentence, nothing is perfect, things do not work out as one expects nor intends them to.
 
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