SSD - Worth the Price

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XvMMvX

[H]ard|Gawd
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Not sure were to put this but I am considering a SSD for my gaming PC. Does anyone have one and do you feel that the price was worth it.

The one I am looking at is 160GB for around $300. I have plenty of space on standard 7200RPM drives, but with just 160GB it would make the number of games I can have installed at one time limited. With just a few AAA titles installed I could eat through that in no time so i would have to pick and choose.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?
 
XvMMvX said:
Not sure were to put this but I am considering a SSD for my gaming PC. Does anyone have one and do you feel that the price was worth it.

The one I am looking at is 160GB for around $300. I have plenty of space on standard 7200RPM drives, but with just 160GB it would make the number of games I can have installed at one time limited. With just a few AAA titles installed I could eat through that in no time so i would have to pick and choose.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?
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I've been thinking the same lately. I know it's a spectacular upgrade but the price/space ratio isn't worth it to me. I've been interested in the hybrid drives, since they seem to run only a couple of seconds slower than an SSD after they've been booted on a few times.
 
I have an 80GB SSD and have little issue with space. I keep my most played games on the SSD and use mklink to keep my other games on my larger hard drive.

It goes something like this:

1) Move game folder to HDD
2) Open a cmd prompt
3) mklink /j "old game folder" "new game folder"

Once the link is created Steam will think it's still on the primary drive.

You can also use Gamesave Manager. It has this function built in.
 
Generally speaking you would use a SSD for your operating system and other programs to load fast. Most people put there games on a secondary drive. The only real benefit SSD would give you in games is with loading screens loading up faster. When it comes to actual gameplay SSD has no real benefits.

Is it worth it is up to you, if you are running a computer with pretty good specs a good SSD drive will make your operating system run noticeably faster. You will also defiantly see a difference when loading programs on the drive.
 
Personally, I don't feel that the performance boost out ways the cost. They are fairly new so they are over priced,I would wait a bit for them to come down. Though if you have the money burning a hole in you pocket would say go for it, or get a 600gb WD VelociRaptor for around the same price.
 
i went to a sdd, but i was worried that it would not last that long, and it would need to be treated like a baby. so thats why i got rid of mine, but now i have 470 sli setup, i think i may need a sdd, because now i think my bottleneck is my wd black
 
While I LOVE 10k drives...I won't be going back from SSD.

I run a Sandforce driven (Microcenter branded) 64GB SSD (the $99 sale made me try it finally) with my OS...a few files...and BFBC2. I love that I can hit power button and be in BC2 in about 1 minute.

I have 16TB of storage for images, music and movies so for me 64GB was not an issue AT ALL.

I still like raptors for some people because you can get 150GB for $119.00...

Also making an image of a 64GB SSD is so easy and fast that if it ever needs replaced...who cares!? (well aside form my wallet a lil')
 
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I don´t know, I just went to a C300 128gb and sure it is fast but in all reality my previous 640 black is pretty damn close even though the benches put the C300 much faster. The SSD is nice but I am not seeing a HUGE difference.
 
While I love SSD's and won't go back to the regular drives, they aren't worth the price imho. The speed increase, while noticeable, isn't budget friendly, and if you really need to ask if it's worth it, probably isn't.
 
I will never go back to a HDD. I'd dump the i7 and go back to a Core2 Duo before I gave my SSD up.
 
I'm interested but the prices for the sizes you get just aren't where I want them to be yet.
 
I upgraded from a WD 640, which already had a average read of 90MB/s (118 max), to an SSD which reads about 220MB/s.

I don't notice a difference in performance except that Windows boots faster. Applications/games all seem to take the same amount of time.

The truth is, games don't really benefit from disk throughput past a certain point. To test my theory, I created a ram disk and bench marked it at around 8,000MB/s. I then copied an entire game folder over to it and launched the game. It didn't load any faster than off my 220MB/s SSD. What does that tell you? It was only one game though, but like I said, my other stuff isn't loading any faster off the SSD than the HDD anyways.

Point is, if you already have a HDD that's benching around 100MB/s, it's not going to really be noticeable on the new drive IMO. Perhaps some games like MMO's that are constantly streaming data, but that may be the exception and not the rule.

I see a lot of people talk about how much faster there systems are with SSD's. Well, that may be because of a lot of factors other than the speed of the SSD. Maybe their old system was full of crud, or just needed a simple reinstall, or even their old HDD was just slow and upgrading to a faster HDD and a clean install would of fixed a lot of performance issues. SSD's are great for some things but they are not the end-all-be-all to performance increases that some may want you to believe.

I definitely can't recommend an SSD for everyone if you consider their higher cost, limited effective usefulness, and limited capacity.
 
SSD was definitely worth the price for me. Probably one of my most noticeable upgrades I've had in quite some time. I bought a Crucial C300, and while I wouldn't recommend that drive, I would recommend something else SSD. lol.
 
purely from a gaming perspective, i don't see how the benefit justifies the cost. everything loads plenty fast enough for me on my WD Caviar Black 1TB. in BC2 and Black Ops i always have the map loaded and am waiting for the round to begin. when SSD's are around the same price/GB as current hard drivers, i'll consider swapping over.
 
Some games can take up to 20-30 seconds to load fully for me but for me it just isn't worth the cost. When they come out with a 500GB+ solid state drive for less then 200$ I'll probably bite but that will probably take several years at least.
 
I found it to be a huge difference. It just feels like nothing slows my system down now. They always make these stupid statements on multicore processors like "makes multitasking a breeze!" But they're full of shit. An SSD makes multitasking a breeze because accessing lots of things off of the hard drive one after another really really kills traditional platter-based drives.

I used to cold boot my system in the morning and after logging into Windows have about 30 seconds to a minute of dead time when I couldn't do jack diddly fucksquat. Now, I open Firefox about 1 second after logging in and it opens just like it would if the system had been on for hours.
 
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Picked up a 120GB SSD recently, and so far I haven't been terribly impressed with what it's done. Sure, fast boot-ups and that sort of thing, though I generally don't notice that since I put my computer to sleep instead, and it pops right out of that anyway.

Sure, faster at everything drive-related, but I am far from convinced that the performance gain is worth the price at this point. The only real benefit I am seeing - gaming wise is quicker loads (which is good) and being the first one into games that don't have waiting periods to start playing. Games like Red Orchestra, where being first in means first choice for the weapons you want.

Came from a 300GB Raptor, and really can't say that it's worth it at this point? But it's only been a couple of weeks, maybe as time goes on the differences will become more apparent. To each their own I guess.
 
krameriffic said:
I found it to be a huge difference. It just feels like nothing slows my system down now. They always make these stupid statements on multicore processors like "makes multitasking a breeze!" But they're full of shit. An SSD makes multitasking a breeze because accessing lots of things off of the hard drive one after another really really kills traditional platter-based drives.

I used to cold boot my system in the morning and after logging into Windows have about 30 seconds to a minute of dead time when I couldn't do jack diddly fucksquat. Now, I open Firefox about 1 second after logging in and it opens just like it would if the system had been on for hours.
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I'd say you had some other problems than just your hard disk. Now, granted, things will probably be quicker if you're hitting your disk cache, but that can easily be resolved by adding more RAM.

Now, I'm not stating that a SSD won't be faster, but if you're seeing tremendous speed differences, you might want to defrag your disk, delete unnecessary items, etc. I have 4 SSD's, in a raid to create 2 different drives, but my Steam drive is still on my 600 GB Raptor, and haven't seen any reason to move it.
 
i'm in the same boat as OP - on the fence for upgrading to an SSD. i'm pretty sure i'll pull the trigger sometime this summer. this thread is a good mixed bag on opinions for upgrading. the way i look at it is this:
if you want to see a very nice performance increase in Windows load time/general Windows tasks and a few key programs or games, go for it unless cost is your #1 concern. buyers remorse might set in otherwise
if you can get over being able to installing only a few games, i think you'd be able to make the switch. being able to load first into a game (like Red Orchestra 2, for example) would make it a nice benefit.
 
To me every enthusiast should have at least a 60gb SSD as their boot drive. All you need room for is Windows and your most used applications like Photoshop, MS Office, your most played games, etc...

The rest of your games, movies, mp3's, pictures, etc. gets stored on another large capacity hard drive.

The main benefit of an SSD is not necessarily the fast transfer rates but the lightning quick random access reads. When you have a program that has to read lots of small files scattered all over the drive such as Windows the SSD truly shines.

When I installed my SSD I noticed what I call a buttery smoothness in my system performance. I have an older CPU, Core2Duo E6750 and while it was sufficient to get the job done I would get mildly annoyed at times with my computer. Once I got my SSD my irritation went away, it was almost like getting a CPU upgrade.
 
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Johnked6 said:
To me every enthusiast should have at least a 60gb SSD as their boot drive. All you need room for is Windows and your most used applications like Photoshop, MS Office, your most played games, etc...
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I would be very careful on this. Probably I'd go for a minimum of 100 GB as you'd be surprised at just what gets installed on your boot drive, even if you tell programs to install elsewhere. My OS drive is one of the SSD raids I have, and it takes 68 GB. My disk cache, user directory, all games & programs, etc., are on other drives, but over time, they install their own things on the drive which I cannot control which all add up.
 
Q-BZ said:
I'm interested but the prices for the sizes you get just aren't where I want them to be yet.
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Sounds like you could benefit from looking at hybrids too. I had put them down as a middle-of-the-road do-nothing tech, but I saw a video comparing performance in real-time and was impressed. The video is by Seagate, but what independent benchmarks I've been able to find have shown similar results:

http://youtu.be/Kss98VdhSj0
 
Running a 64GB SSD with i7, and for me the difference was night & day in terms of response time for most everything. Boot time goes without saying...

For games, the real difference I can see is when playing MMO's. Zoning in is much, much faster, and the biggest difference is the elimination of stuttering when loading new textures on-the-fly, making for smoother gameplay. MMO's in particular use many, many more textures than SOLO or MP games, so the difference is more pronounced there.

That being said, I also run BC3 & TF2 off the SSD, cause every millisecond counts :D
 
For a gaming rig (considering that this is in the gaming section) I wouldn't call a ssd a priority. Other than a few games that stream data directly off of the hdd like Wow you won't notice a difference in actual gaming. Load times will improve a bit, general system performance is a bit snappier, and they are great for multi-tasking but as far as actual gameplay goes I would still say that a cpu or gpu is far more important.

Jellylesg said:
Sounds like you could benefit from looking at hybrids too. I had put them down as a middle-of-the-road do-nothing tech, but I saw a video comparing performance in real-time and was impressed. The video is by Seagate, but what independent benchmarks I've been able to find have shown similar results:

http://youtu.be/Kss98VdhSj0
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Those drives are impressive for a 2.5" hdd but a good desktop drive like the 1TB WD blacks or the F3 spinpoint walks all over these drives.
 
I already installed a 128 gb Aopen SSD drive in my EEE netbook, and it's a world of difference between that and the old 5200 RPM drive which used to be in there. Things are just so much snappier. It's worth it.

Though I wouldn't use it for data storage, that's just not economically feasible. You should load all of your most accessed programs and applications and OS on the SSD and get a nice big magnetic platter style drive for extra space. I've become a big fan of external usb hard drives, some of them are 1 TB for less than a hundred bucks on sale!
 
not worth it for me, mycomputer is on 24/7 and with 8G of ram, plenty for superfetch, i can wait 10-30 seconds for a game to load versus save $200.
 
krameriffic said:
I found it to be a huge difference. It just feels like nothing slows my system down now. They always make these stupid statements on multicore processors like "makes multitasking a breeze!" But they're full of shit. An SSD makes multitasking a breeze because accessing lots of things off of the hard drive one after another really really kills traditional platter-based drives.

I used to cold boot my system in the morning and after logging into Windows have about 30 seconds to a minute of dead time when I couldn't do jack diddly fucksquat. Now, I open Firefox about 1 second after logging in and it opens just like it would if the system had been on for hours.
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Agreed. And like someone else said - buttery smoothness.

Multitasking is the biggest thing. MS Word 2007 opens in literally a second. Virtually no boot-up lag. No lagginess when compressing or decompressing files in the background, or copying files around. I can install a game onto the SSD and be doing something else entirely and not experience any lag. The OS is just so much snappier.

I must say, though, the difference is less noticeable on my laptop (A Turion X2) than on my quad Phenom II. But on the laptop I REALLY appreciate the faster shutdown/startup times and snappiness when I need to get something done quickly.
 
Given their price per GB, we're still a year away from SSD's being game drives. You can get a 1.5 TB Caviar Black for $100, or you can get a 64GB SSD for the same price. Thats 23 times the storage space and the difference in sequential reads (load times) is very negligible. SSD's still have the same purpose they did two years ago, boot drives, and it's the reason why the two largest hard drive makers in the world haven't started making dedicated ones yet. Anyone arguing different are only fooling themselves.
 
I didn't see any real benefit from running games off my SSD. The only really impressive difference was boot and login times, which are much shorter than when I was using an HD, but other than that, I didn't feel a major improvement. Considering the fact that games take up a lot of disk space, I wouldn't recommend an SSD for that purpose at this point in time.
 
Zero82z said:
I didn't see any real benefit from running games off my SSD. The only really impressive difference was boot and login times, which are much shorter than when I was using an HD, but other than that, I didn't feel a major improvement. Considering the fact that games take up a lot of disk space, I wouldn't recommend an SSD for that purpose at this point in time.
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That's pretty much the reason I don't own one at this time. I actually stopped installing games on my computer since my 1TB Drive (Formatted only 930GB) is almost full, well 750GB full but Windows restore demands the other 150GB and I have a 13GB WinXP partition so I only have about 20GB free at the moment.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Those drives are impressive for a 2.5" hdd but a good desktop drive like the 1TB WD blacks or the F3 spinpoint walks all over these drives.
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Are you sure? Every benchmark I've found seems to say otherwise. I have the F3 and it's a good drive but still a 7200RPM job.
 
I'm gonna be the odd one out here and say I dont think SSDs are worth it yet. It feels quicker, yeah, but not ZOMGTHISISAWESOME quicker. Compared to my WD black it boots a few seconds faster, but not a hell of a lot faster and I usually dont watch my computer booting anyway, I press the power button then do something else like getting a snack or a drink.

Once things are booted, yeah, again, its a bit quicker, but not blazingly faster. Occasionally I swap back to my WD black and really, I only notice the difference if I'm looking for it.

The one place I did notice a big difference was the loading times of CAE software. These programs normally take longer to open than your average game and having them on the SSD made things a lot quicker and improved my productivity. But that required installing them on my SSD which took up close to half the space, then I had to waste time further down the track moving the 1 to 2GB case files around to my storage HDDs because I kept running out of space.

Dont get me wrong, its an upgrade, yeah. But for a gamer I think that money would be better spent on a better GPU or CPU.
 
i use a ssd for os+apps+ wow and will install old republic on it once its out and i have a 2tb wd black for rest of my games and vids and it works great, dont really need to put all your games on a ssd unless you want faster load times
 
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