Will a SSD help my web browsing performance?

H

Hanakuso

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 3, 2011
Messages
1,462
I want to know if an SSD will help in anyway with web browsing, specifically in Internet Explorer 10.
 
Opening and closing the browser. The rest is pretty much all stored in RAM so the performance increase is negligible.
 
If you use the cache heavily it could help, but in that scenario I would put the cache (or the whole browser, but I don't use IE) on a ramdrive instead.
 
For a laptop I have with a Core 2 Duo, yes, it did help - but it still wasn't as nice as any newer system I use. Then again, that CPU is only clocked at 1.4GHz or somewhere about there (it's an ULV variant).

Even opening and closing a tab used to be an absolute pain on that system.
 
No one can actually give a complete answer with the info you provided. Is your machine utilizing its swap file now? How much RAM do you have? How many background programs/services are running?

The best answer to so far is, NO, will not effect your web browsing experience... after the browser has been started, as long as you are not RAM starved. If you are RAM starved, an RAM upgrade will give you more performance/$ than a faster swapping hard drive.

Load time of the OS and browser is another issue.
 
Matthew Kane said:
Absolutely.
Click to expand...

This.

I absolutely noticed an improvement going to SSD with my web browsing, and that was with 3G internet connection too. It made resources "snap" load... is what I call it :)

My parents (in their late 60s) also noticed an improvement when we went SSD in their system too from browsing to general snappy-ness in Windows.

Go SSD, don't look back.
 
Aesma said:
If you use the cache heavily it could help, but in that scenario I would put the cache (or the whole browser, but I don't use IE) on a ramdrive instead.
Click to expand...

I second this approach. I have my primary applications running from SSD but all the browser's caches are located on a RAMDisk. Virtually instantaneous loading. :D
 
RAMDisk > SSD for internet browsers.

Well actually, for pretty much anything, but 1) it's volatile, and 2) much more limited in terms of space.

If I could somehow get enough RAM in my system for a 1TB RAMDisk, I'd never buy an SSD again.
 
Xinmosni said:
RAMDisk > SSD for internet browsers.

Well actually, for pretty much anything, but 1) it's volatile, and 2) much more limited in terms of space.

If I could somehow get enough RAM in my system for a 1TB RAMDisk, I'd never buy an SSD again.
Click to expand...

Considering the cost of the battery backup system I would want in place for that, on top of the over 1TB of SSD storage needed for the nonvolatile backup, I can wait until memristors do the trick without all of the above.
 
fields_g said:
No one can actually give a complete answer with the info you provided. Is your machine utilizing its swap file now? How much RAM do you have? How many background programs/services are running?

The best answer to so far is, NO, will not effect your web browsing experience... after the browser has been started, as long as you are not RAM starved. If you are RAM starved, an RAM upgrade will give you more performance/$ than a faster swapping hard drive.

Load time of the OS and browser is another issue.
Click to expand...
This is for my work PC. We dont do anything fancy. Basically the two main programs are outlook and web browsers. It has 4gb of ram on Windows 7 64.

It's just we use web browsing so much that even a 1-2 second lag between new websites is annoying. If an SSD can reduce that by even 20% that would be nice. We recently upgraded to fiber and that has helped as well.
 
Max out your ram, create a ram disk, AND run an ssd.
You have no where else to go after that, so you'll be happy you have the "best" web browsing experience without going into too much detail.

...or do what I did in this situation and buy a Chromebook + ssd + 16gb ram for the old lady.
 
SSD will make a big difference in outlook if you have insanely large PSTs... run into that a lot lately
 
jeremyshaw said:
For a laptop I have with a Core 2 Duo, yes, it did help - but it still wasn't as nice as any newer system I use. Then again, that CPU is only clocked at 1.4GHz or somewhere about there (it's an ULV variant).

Even opening and closing a tab used to be an absolute pain on that system.
Click to expand...

It's probably paired with a shitty onboard GPU that can't keep up with all the typical Aero settings turned on. I've got 2 lower end laptops that are extremely responsive - One is a Pentium M 1.3 Ghz (single core) with 512mb DDR1 ram. It runs XP and flies in Firefox, doesn't take long for it to run out of ram and start hitting the disk alot though. The other system is a Turion 64 X2 1.6 ghz dual core with 1.5GB of ram. It runs 7 Home Premium and was kinda slow at first but with the effects turned down a bit (ie transparency gimmick) it flies as well now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top