solid state drive question

[Maxheadroom]

i have the 150gb velociraptor as my main OS drive and im thinking of getting a SSD to replace it with, but will only be able to afford a 64gb drive possibly stretch to a 90gb unbranded drive,
im wondering if it is worth the money considering im comming from a velociraptor will i notice the extra speed much?
also at 64gb a lot of stuff will need to be installed on another drive (probably the raptor) so wont this mean that the things that are installed on the other drive will only run as fast as that drive will go?

thanks

edit to add : i guess i could buy a second 150gb velociraptor and run it in RAID would that be as fast as a ssd?

 

[Les]

Well.....

What you are considering is exactly the route that most are taking nowadays which is the ssd for boot drive and applications along with the hdd for storage. I personally run a Crucial 64Gb ssd with Samsung 1.5 Tb drive.

Les
The SSD Review

 

[pparks1]

edit to add : i guess i could buy a second 150gb velociraptor and run it in RAID would that be as fast as a ssd?

It would be nowhere near as fast as an SSD.

The key to SSD speed is not necessarily raw throughput (megabytes per second), but rather the lack of random access time. The drive can move from file to file, anywhere on the disk in approx 0.1ms. Compared to a spinner drive that usually runs around 12.0-15.9ms....that's a huge improvement.

The key to using an SSD is keeping your OS and applications on the SSD...and keep a spinner drive for data and storage. Unfortunately, for gamers...SSD's aren't ideal as these installs consume huge amounts of disk space and can fill an SSD in a heartbeat.

I have an 80GB SSD and have a couple of games installed (Call of Duty World at War and Star Craft 2), and I'm at about 50% used on my SSD.

 

[WDAexodus]

Definately worth it. Just like others said keep your OS and major applications on it and use your spinner for mass storage. You'll notice a substantial decrease in load times.

 

[apollodominion]

SSD are good but depends one what you BUY!! i upgraded from WD Voloci RaporX 160gb drives to 2x Intel 128GB SSD SATA3.0 and is realy Fast and there in RAID-0

 

[Maxheadroom]

thanks for the info, i think SSD is the way forward really

 

[whs]

The key to the OS performance is access time. And that's where the good SSDs (e.g. OCZ and Intel) can beat any rotating disks (Raid or not) about 150 to 1.
A 60GB SSD should be ample if you move your user data to the Raptor. I am running 3 systems with SSDs and none has more than 20GBs of used space - and I have a lot of programs (but no games).
To save space, I deleted the hiberfile (saves 4GBs with my 4GB RAM) and the shadowstorage (restore points). I do imaging instead. For that, the Raptor would be useful too. You can take a full system image in less than 4 minutes (that is Macrium timing).

 

[Dave76]

The SSD is the way to go.

Don't get a cheap or unbranded SSD, the performance will likely be poor.

Intel or OCZ are good, also Crucial Real SSD if you have 6Gb/s board.

Check the AnandTech site for benchmark comparisons.

AnandTech SSD Bench

Select any two SSDs and compare them side by side.

4k Random read and writes are the most important.