Solid State Hard drives

[Raven]

My trusty old Seagate Barracuda hard drive gave up the ghost last night so I need to buy a new hard drive. I have been looking at the solid state drives and have found that they start at around £100 for 30-40 gig, obviously for this much I could get another 1TB drive and have plenty of change. Does anyone use a solid state drive? Does it make any real difference to boot times/access times?

I have a 1TB Samsung spinpoint so storage size isn't an issue, I like to keep a separate drive for my OS, Office suite, Steam client and a couple of often played games so a small drive would make more sense.

 

[Cromcruaich]

System will boot faster, but provided you have sufficient ram it wont make any difference to game play etc.

For the price i'm prepared to wait an extra 30 seconds. Maybe if I do a HTPC system i'd consider it.

 

[Furr]

I have a 80Gb Intel SSD that has Windows 7 on it and a 1TB drive partitioned for other programmes etc. Windows runs shit hot fast with the SSD, love it!

 

[Raven]

Yeah its actually the Intel SSD that I have been looking at. I will have to see how much Christmas has cost me and decide, thanks for the input

 

[Chilly]

my ssd makes my system SO much nicer to use. I dont use it for gaming 100% of the time tho so I find loading/using windows generally and other apps to be hugely sped up. windows boots to desktop in no time and you can load programs in under a second (if they are installed to ssd) which could normally take upward of 5 with slow drive times.

 

[Embattle]

SSDs really do give a computer a nice boost, personally I'm still holding off for a little while since some interest developments are coming.

 

[dysfunction]

Such as?

 

[Chilly]

SSDs really do give a computer a nice boost, personally I'm still holding off for a little while since some interest developments are coming.

fuck it. the speedup between spinning and current gen ssd is going to be 5-10 times the speedup between current gen ssd and next gen. Just buy now, you wont care about an extra 10MB/sec transfer in 6 months.

 

[cHodAX]

Forget the SSD, get 2 x Samsung 1Tb drives running in raid 0, blisteringly fast for less than a tiny SSD. The F3's are immense btw, especially for the money.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/10

There’s only one way to say it – the Samsung Spinpoint F3 is the fastest hard disk drive we’ve ever had the pleasure of testing here at bit-tech, having ripped through our benchmarks like a butchers knife through wet loo roll.

 

[Embattle]

Forget the SSD, get 2 x Samsung 1Tb drives running in raid 0, blisteringly fast for less than a tiny SSD. The F3's are immense btw, especially for the money.

bit-tech.net | Review - Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB Review

I've an F3 and they still can't touch SSDs, you need to understand a couple of factors when trying to compare even a raid setup of drives like F3. The main issue is that you can bundle as many traditional HDs in a raid as you like but they will still have a higher access time of around 12-14ms which is very fast but SSDs tend to manage around 0.1ms and in actual use it feels very different.

There are a few new controllers due this year, plus you'll see SATA 600 appear which will help esp with SSD Raid setups and at the same time more SSDs on PCIE cards should appear. The most important factor as always is probably going to see a reduction in the £/GB of SSDs.

 

[cHodAX]

I've an F3 and they still can't touch SSDs, you need to understand a couple of factors when trying to compare even a raid setup of drives like F3. The main issue is that you can bundle as many traditional HDs in a raid as you like but they will still have a higher access time of around 12-14ms which is very fast but SSDs tend to manage around 0.1ms and in actual use it feels very different.

There are a few new controllers due this year, plus you'll see SATA 600 appear which will help esp with SSD Raid setups and at the same time more SSDs on PCIE cards should appear. The most important factor as always is probably going to see a reduction in the £/GB of SSDs.

No, I understand all that bud. I still think it is a great option for mass storage at superb speeds though, those F3's are pushing transfer rates of 40% faster than the previous generation of drives which is astonishing for a 7200rpm drive. For access you can't beat SSD of course but I just don't think they are at the point where they are quite worth the money yet, 12 months time I think it is highly likely they will be.

 

[Raven]

I was looking at the F3s, I currently have an F1 which I am very happy with. I think I will wait until payday and get the intel SSD.

Again, thanks for the input

 

[Kryten]

I can't believe how quick the F3's are. I've both an F1 and F3 in my system - the F3 is quicker than the raid5 system I had in place (3 x 400gb Hitachis). For £60, any other standard HD choice is a bad one.

Still would recommend one of those Intel X25 jobbies - sehr, sehr gut!