Underwhelmed With SSD?

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VGplay

Gawd
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For Christmas I got an Intel 80gb X25-M G2. I flashed the drive, fresh installed Windows 7 Professional, and setup TRIM. But I can't say I'm blown away by the improvement.

I had previously been using a Western Digital 640gb Blue WD6400AAKS as my boot drive with the Windows 7 RC installed. I was expecting the biggest difference in Photoshop and Premier Pro, but they still load in the same about of time as when they were installed on the 640gb. All of my programs are installed to the SSD, my media for Photoshop and Premier are on the 640gb, with everything else scattered around my other hard drives.

I have a 13" MacBook Pro with the stock 160gb hard drive and I was expecting to want a SSD for it, but it doesn't feel sluggish or anything like that (I know its not a direct comparison, but its what I have without restoring my 7 RC image to the 640gb).

Did I miss a step when setting everything up? Or do I just have the patience to not care about the differences?

Q6600 running at 3ghz
Gigabyte EP45-UD3P
8gb DDR2-1000 RAM
eVGA 8800GT 512mb
Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic
 
Run a benchmark to make sure it's running properly.

I love mine, but I'll admit I am plain impatient at times so it's nice not to have to wait that 3+ seconds for Firefox/apps to load up as soon as I hit desktop.

I do not see the Window welcome screen at all, I just zip right past that.

It is not for everyone, especially at the current cost but some will find it worth it. Would I buy another at the current $250-$300 price tag? Hell no, but I simply had to have 1 to try. I would however consider a second if I can get the same deal I did with this one. I basically bought W7 Ultimate, and got the SSD for $185, or $205 each piece. I was planning to buy the SSD and W7 Pro........for more the following week when this deal popped up. I was quite pleased.
 
Something sounds off.

For me on the same SSD when I click Photoshop it's up and ready to work within 5-6 seconds, even with a ton of filters.

Might want to run a CrystalMark bench on it for kicks.
 
I think the hype is a bit much, personally. I didn't notice any huge improvements going to my X25-M either other than in stuff like 4K benchmarks.
 
Volkum said:
I think the hype is a bit much, personally. I didn't notice any huge improvements going to my X25-M either other than in stuff like 4K benchmarks.
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x2

they're nice to have and I wouldn't go back to a mechanical for an OS drive, but the speed isn't exactly blistering (or not as much as it's hyped)

load times and file transfers seem to be the biggest benefit in day to day use that I've noticed. That and not waiting for the drive to spin up if it's been idle for a while.
 
SSD's are starting to get too hyped. They ARE great. They are the fastest drives you can get.

However, if you have a GOOD modern 640Gb, 1Tb, or 300Gb Velociraptor and tons of ram, then you won't be blown away by the performance as those drives are all already really good drives and you already only use your harddrive when absolutely necessary (most of your stuff should get loaded in to ram and stay there).

Yes, SSD's will improve your boot times, and make some things faster. But they're not for everyone..... at least not at their current $/gb .

Now if you have an old crappy harddrive, especially in a laptop or netbook that might be limited with the amount of ram you can put in it. A good SSD can help give your overall system performance a boost. Plus it can slightly increase your battery life, and possibly make your laptop run cooler & quieter.
 
BIG HYPE. Especially for the Intel drives with way too much emphasis placed on IOPS and 4K. Intel has deep pockets and calls the shots.

As for the speed between 7200RPM HDD and SSD... unless you are a medium multitasker or greater + reboot your computer daily: there isn't a huge difference between SSD and traditional hard drives. As a single-tasker, expect to see shavings of mere seconds.

As for the speed between SSD brands, I actually see the most substantial differential between the Intel and Indilinx drives on large sequential reads/writes. Otherwise in daily use, I see little difference between my OCZ Agility and Solid 2 and X25-M. Perhaps the Indilinx controller is tuned for greater longevity, as small random writes are far more brutal than large sequential ones.

My favorite part about SSD is actually zero noise and mechanical wear, small profile, greater portability and endurance, and then speed... in that order. Where SSD is truly worth a major premium over HDD is in servers and older laptops. That's no joke.
 
dr.stevil said:
x2

they're nice to have and I wouldn't go back to a mechanical for an OS drive, but the speed isn't exactly blistering (or not as much as it's hyped)

load times and file transfers seem to be the biggest benefit in day to day use that I've noticed. That and not waiting for the drive to spin up if it's been idle for a while.
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+3
However, I am running 8 VMs on an SSD with room for more whereas 3 VMs would bring a regular HD to a crawl.

So, it is heavily application dependent similar to how more cores can improve the user experience.
 
I threw a 64G Kingston in my macbook (2gb ram) and it was an enormous improvement over the 5400 rpm seagate momentus . Battery life didnt change really at all which was odd but whatevs, it still gets me though 4 classes without a charge.

Maybe put the ssd in your mac and see if its better used there.
 
As others have said, your take on SSD will depend on your usage... But I can't imagine you wouldn't notice a difference in Photoshop loading on a SSD vs a HDD... Unless you usually click it and then walk away or something, then yea, a SSD would be pointless. :p Or unless for some reason all the corresponding files are already cache'd permanently on your RAM and you never happen to load it while multi-tasking, etc. Dunno, I agree that for some people it's still a colossal waste of money, for me they're awesome, I just can't see how you wouldn't notice a difference doing something like loading Photoshop.
 
Average users probably don't use Photoshop @ $700 retail. They use mainstream 7200RPM 1TB drives and Corel Paint Shop Pro, total retail value $150. If you can afford Photoshop, SSD cost probably isn't a big issue.

The biggest problem should be those who try to oversell products to consumers who don't need them. First x64, then multi-core processors, and now SSD. My advice is to test-drive SSD at a friend's house before making the purchase.
 
In my opinion, it's not one of those metrics that you can measure on a chart very well. I notice it most often when I'm using a web browser, it no longer has that split second delay when I look at a older tab. Small things like that I notice.
 
Astonishing how people seem to marginalize SSD performance here.

MB/s is the bomb then? IOps doesn't matter? Only for booting etc? Then why do we need disks anyway; just disconnect your disk after boot up and you'll be fine right? No application ever needs to use it. *cough*

No, what you actually need is a 64-core CPU; HDD performance is already SO HIGH (almost one full megabyte per second of random read !!!) that it can't be a bottleneck. No the CPU must be the bottleneck. By the way what does "IO wait" mean? It shows up to 100% cpu usage on my system so my CPU must be the bottleneck!!!

(don't miss my sarcastic tone in my post, or you'll read it all wrong. :)
 
SSDs do indeed make little sense for most people, including myself. I spend 99% of the time working in some editor like Visual Studio whilst switching between documentation on the secondary monitor and Firefox tabs. I rarely touch the HDD unless I'm loading Visual Studio or some document from disk, which takes mere seconds. An SSD wouldn't make me program any faster, wouldn't make my compiles or video encodes faster (can you say CPU-limited?), and generally it's very difficult for me to see where an SSD would be beneficial to me.

Or maybe I'm just a really patient person ;)
 
video rendering/transcoding is not a casual task of many people. And its a task you have to wait for anyway; whether it takes 10 minutes or 25 minutes; does it matter? You're not like sitting 10 minutes staring to the screen are you? What does matter -- to me -- is the waiting times for things i AM waiting for. Opening firefox, launching an application -- basically anything that forces me to wait and waste my time staring at the screen. While it should be the other way around; the human should be the bottleneck; not the system.

No, you will do something else; multi-task or go eat/make coffee/whatever. So i would say most CPU-bound applications' performance is questionable and depends highly on the user scenario. If all you do is rendering HD movies; then yes CPU is your bottleneck. But then you're one of the 0.00001% users with specialized usage patterns.

However, for 99.9% of all common users, they experience their computer becoming slow because of random disk access. Their CPU usage is under 10% but still everything appears jerky: the mouse doesn't move or respond to clicks; applications freeze and parts of the GUI are unrendered. Basically, it feels like a Pentium 1-age PC. Everything you click or do will take a long while and the HDD doesn't really stop rattling from one sector to the other.

Because such ordinary people have no knowledge about computer performance; they simply conclude the PC is old and buy a new one. A new PC with fresh install, non-fragmented HDD; so its fast for the first few months. But after heavy usage and lots of installing/uninstalling, it behaves pretty much like the older PC again - the Core i7 isnt able to do much work as its waiting for data on the HDD all the time.

System disk performance is the biggest bottleneck for most people, and very much unrecognised. If you would give some random person a netbook with Atom CPU and an SSD; they would experience it being faster than a Core i7 system with older HDD - especially if the OS has been in use for awhile so fragmentation forces the HDD to seek lots more.
 
No one is diminishing SSD. But I won't marginalize those who are "underwhelmed with SSD" either. They have legitimate points based on their usage patterns.

I personally own three SSD myself and love them as a power user. Unfortunately for SSD, their advent came after inexpensive multi-core processors and 333GB+ platter hard drives, so their impact has been dramatically lessened for the average consumer. Not to mention SSD's "advent" itself is mere months long with the releases of an SSD aware OS (Windows 7) and the Intel G1 and G2 and Indilinx drives. Everything that came before was truly overhyped stuttering CRAP. So at least we're now making real progress now.
 
People that barely multi-task or just multi-task between light always-open apps (a browser and a text editor for instance) and people that rarely ever load any 'heavy' apps should definitely not be investing on a SSD, period. Even for something like game level load times the difference is not gonna be impressive (varies too much, some games see substantial benefits while others are barely impacted).

For others, myself included, it's one of the greatest upgrades I've ever experienced... And yeah, I do notice the SSD impact's on a lot of other little places within the OS, but I don't think those small improvements would be caught by the average user, at all. One of the best places for SSD is actually in laptops, even relatively underpowered ones... You replace a substantially slower 5,400 RPM drive w/a SSD and the difference is a lot more noticeable; plus the laptop runs cooler, and possibly uses less battery power (depending on what the user's doing), so there's multiple benefits beyond performance.

Plus you obviously boot or hibernate/restore a laptop way more often than a desktop (usually while waiting anxiously in front of it). Unfortunately it's much harder to sell a mainstream user on a laptop w/a small SSD for a price premium when one with a drive that's 4-5x larger is cheaper... So mainstream adoption could take quite a while (catch 22 scenario w/prices/manufacturing).
 
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23 second boot and 2 second shut down alone is worth the cost for me. Also in most games when I say first nobody can hear me..... because I'm first.
 
Finally got my Intel X25-M 80GB (G2) yesterday. After 24 hours I have to say I'm damn impressed with it. It took 10 minutes start to finish to install W7. All apps are freaky quick (Chrome especially) Havnt tried games or photoshop yet. I would say im overwhelmed rather than underwhelmed.
 
put an ssd in your machine and use it for a month. then go back and put in a hdd and go back to using it. there isnt one person who would then be 'underwhelmed'
it is with regular usage, and once you get used to it after time, that going to a platter drive again will make you crazy they are so slow. you dont know what youve got till its gone fellers.
just my two cents.
 
If you have the room after an OS, installing your most frequently played games to an SSD will dramatically speed up performance while playing. If you play a game with a lot of scenery changes that is constantly loading textures or models you'll see a big difference from an HDD. A good example being an MMO type game.
 
For myself I saw a difference and I still have windows 7 on the same drive you had and switch between the SSD and that drive from time to time.
 
SSD clearly excels over HDD in OS booting... probably the reason why most real world SSD vs. HDD examples start there. Once inside the OS, however, the differences aren't nearly as astounding in moderate cases. This real world video by Intel is illustrative as to why some might be "underwhelmed."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EJI-CgyjHU

While the SSD easily beats the 7200RPM HDD, it keeps pace during average tasks a lot longer than most were lead to believe. And this video was made well before the introduction of 500GB platter hard drives.
 
are you watching the same video as i am? because in that video the ssd was twice as fast. literally. actually more than twice as fast look at the TIMER bro.

also even thought the ssd is "only" twice as fast, consider that is with a laptop. its processor is not fast enough to really see the speed difference. the ssd is loading faster than that processor can process. the hdd is loading slower than the process can process. if you had a fast ass desktop rig the difference would be even more pronounced as the processor would be able to keep up with the ssd. in that case the ssd is toasting that processor.
 
The real question is 'is the SSD Nx faster than the HDD?', where N is the price per GB of an SSD divided by that of an HDD. 2x doesn't even come close, so for most people it'd have to do a lot better than that to be worth it. If SSDs were twice or just as expensive as HDDs/GB, it'd be an entirely different story.

SSDs are bloody expensive. Unless you have more money than sense you better have a darn good reason to use one over an HDD.
 
Computurd said:
put an ssd in your machine and use it for a month. then go back and put in a hdd and go back to using it. there isnt one person who would then be 'underwhelmed'
it is with regular usage, and once you get used to it after time, that going to a platter drive again will make you crazy they are so slow. you dont know what youve got till its gone fellers.
just my two cents.
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QFT

I used to think the same thing as the OP...I've been using a G.Skill Falcon 256GB SSD for months now but last week I had to RMA it and temporarily switched back to my Western Digital 640GB Black Edition drive...I can definitely feel the difference...things are not as snappy...it might only be a half a second here or there but you can definitely feel it after using an SSD for a prolonged period of time
 
Computurd said:
are you watching the same video as i am? because in that video the ssd was twice as fast. literally. actually more than twice as fast look at the TIMER bro.

also even thought the ssd is "only" twice as fast, consider that is with a laptop. its processor is not fast enough to really see the speed difference. the ssd is loading faster than that processor can process. the hdd is loading slower than the process can process. if you had a fast ass desktop rig the difference would be even more pronounced as the processor would be able to keep up with the ssd. in that case the ssd is toasting that processor.
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Perhaps someone can find a more recent video of SSD vs. 500GB platter HDD on a desktop. The fact is that real world SSD data is much rarer than synthetic benchmarks, it's no coincidence either. However, I see the HDD keeping pace for the first 10-15 seconds until the multitasking becomes too intense and faced with poorly translated software like iTunes.

You interpret the data like an impatient enthusiast. Where hyperbolic statements are commonly made about one CPU crushing another over mere percentage points or FPS.

I'm looking at the data more realistically, basically like the average computer user: a light surfer and computer user. For them the recommendation to purchase the smaller SSD that costs 3-4x over the large HDD is imprudent. And while they know little about data integrity, they do know a lot about value.
 
as far as actual benchmark numbers, here is my CrystalDiskMark benchmark scores when using my Western Digital 640GB mechanical drive vs my G.Skill Falcon 256GB SSD...

88831580.jpg
ssdr.jpg
 
Hamish Campbell said:
If you have the room after an OS, installing your most frequently played games to an SSD will dramatically speed up performance while playing. If you play a game with a lot of scenery changes that is constantly loading textures or models you'll see a big difference from an HDD. A good example being an MMO type game.
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That's probably the only example though, except maybe some flight sims or open-world games... With the vast majority of games you won't see any performance improvement at all from a SSD (beyond level loading times).
 
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Elledan said:
The real question is 'is the SSD Nx faster than the HDD?', where N is the price per GB of an SSD divided by that of an HDD. 2x doesn't even come close, so for most people it'd have to do a lot better than that to be worth it. If SSDs were twice or just as expensive as HDDs/GB, it'd be an entirely different story.

SSDs are bloody expensive. Unless you have more money than sense you better have a darn good reason to use one over an HDD.
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That's very subjective too tho, $150-220 is not bloody expensive to me... Even if it's for 60-80GB. I don't need more capacity at all for my OS & apps. It's basically the same as what my GPU or my CPU cost too, and even if the SSD is not 4x faster as a $60 HDD in every single task, it's still a heck of an upgrade for me (and my purpose, which includes heavy multi-tasking, etc.). With certain tasks it's not a big difference, at other times it's way more than a 10x difference.

Same way a quad-core is probably unnecessary for the majority of stuff I do on the PC (outside of video encoding and some games), most enthusiasts would still opt for one over a cheaper dual core tho. Whether it is because they partake in the occasional heavy tasks that benefit from it, or because they just like having the latest and greatest.

That logic also overlooks one of the scenarios where SSD excel the most, laptops, where they're replacing a much slower 5,400 RPM drive. In that case it's not only significantly faster but it runs cooler and uses less power (which may or may not lead to increased battery life, but at the very 'least it'll toast your nuts less :p )... Plus laptop users obviously boot or hibernate/resume their systems much more often than desktop users. SSD are obviously not for everyone, but for a true enthusiast they're easily a no-brainer upgrade at this point if you're looking to upgrade anything at all, imo.

Obviously there's gonna be scenarios where more RAM or a faster CPU will still provide more tangible benefits, but a SSD is a pretty damned good overall system upgrade.
 
nice clips computrd.

Question though. If you ran these tests or actually did something similar how much of a difference would there be between the different ssd drives? I am still fighting to decide between OCZ solid 2, agility or Intel.
Would there be an actual difference between these drives or not even noticeable unless benchmarking? I do not care about benchmarks, just realworld performance. Thanks
 
it is pretty widely agreed that between the vertex or intel you should go with whichever one is cheaper at that time. they are so close in real world performance. iddlinx or intel controller basically .
 
^^yea btw those videos up there pretty much sum it up. the bottom two clips are with a standard vertex 30gb costs 90 bucks after mir.
underwhelmed my ass.
:)
 
I'm launching applications not in memory like they were already sitting on the taskbar. I'm very happy with mine.
 
Computurd said:
it does too make a difference in gameplay. you spend more of your time in a gaming session around your low fps number than your max. read this one page and look at the minimum FPS chart. answered.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=14
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I'd be very surprised if you could replicate those results with any other single-player game beyond Crysis GPU benchmark (which isn't even actual gameplay anyway). A SSD can have an impact on gameplay, but I wouldn't expect a difference on anything beyond a complex sim or a MMORPG... Most games simply aren't constantly loading a ton of stuff in the background during gameplay ('least not in a way that would be bottlenecked by a HD).
 
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