Show Us Your WEI [4]

An SSD for your OS and programs, and a HDD for all of your data is the better way to go, in my opinion.

yeahh, but wont having your "other files" like music and movies on a regular HDD slow down editing apps like sony vegas or audacity?

If the program you are working with is installed on your SSD, then you are going to have better performance. A mechanical hard drive is plenty fast enough to hold data while another program accesses it. Also, an SSD does more than just make booting/rebooting quicker. It will open programs MUCH faster than a hard drive, and working inside those programs will be much faster as well. Once the application retrieves the data it needs on the hard drive, it doesn't have to keep accessing it. Your OS and programs/applications go on your SSD and music, pictures, and videos will be on your hard drive.......that data doesn't care whether its on an SSD or HD.

sorry, i think i wasn't clear in my last post. i meant to ask wont having a program like sony vegas installed on an SSD and having all the media files on a traditional hard drive be a bottleneck when i want to render say a movie? the program is reading the data off of a traditional hard drive, even though its installed on an SSD.

when me and my buddies play battlefield 3, they often get in the game a whole minute before i do LOL

I think in that case, when it initially retrieves the data from the HD, it stores the file in RAM while you are working on it. It doesn't take but an instant to retrieve it from the hard drive. Your friends getting in the game faster is probably an internet issue, and not a loading issue. An SSD makes very little difference when it comes to games........that is the general consensus anyway. I have all of my games on my SSD but only because I play about 2-3 games maximum at a time. I have a 128GB SSD and even with a few games on it I barely use 60-65% of the drive.

essenbe said:

I have a 256GB SSD and the OS, programs and games are installed there. Opening a game, it will open faster, but running a game is no difference than running it from a mechanical hard drive. That is my experience anyway. I believe once the game opens, everything runs out of ram except for the very few games that have to access the drive to load new maps. I don't own any of those, so I can't say. But, I can say I have 2 computers with an SSD for OS and programs. One has the exact same games installed on an SSD, the other has the exact same games on a traditional hard drive. The games installed on the SSD load faster, but actual game play is exactly the same. I don't do video editing so can't answer about that, but I see no reason it would not be much the same.

pretty much the same experience my friend describes.

i probably wont make the move the SSD just yet for 2 reasons, its still pretty expensive and i dont have 6GB SATA on my mobo. not worth the switch in my opinion. when i DO get an SSD, it will probably be my next system build. nothing worth keeping in this setup, except the case ;D

essenbe said:

I wouldn't be too concerned by not having a 6Gb/s port on your computer. It really makes no difference except in benchmarks. I have the same SSD in a 3Gb/s laptop as I do in my 6Gb/s desktop. If I run a benchmark, the desktop will always show higher, but actual usage, there is no difference. For an OS drive, the only 2 numbers that matter are the 4KB read speed and the access time. As I recall, they are both the same or very close to it.

This is 100% true. My friend is using my old Intel X-25M and I have a Samsung 830, and the Random 4k Read/Write speeds are pretty close to the same. My access times are a tad faster, but it's a lot newer drive and technology.

If you got an SSD now, it could follow you into your next build.......just keep that in mind.