SSD - Observations

[Victor S]

I put my first one in last night. A Crucial M4 64gb.
Boots maybe a 20-40 seconds faster. It's a significant difference.
Knocked my system imaging time to a spinner from 4 to 3 minutes.
Obviously faster reads are seen in both those cases.
I forgot to note the time on a system image restore.
Changed my WEI disk score from 5.9 to 7.8. Whoopie.
Not using Access or Oracle or Photoshop or any really data-heavy apps.
So for what I usually do, which is browse the net, watch Youtube, read/send e-mail, and play games, the difference hasn't added up to much more than a hill of beans.
When I install a game on the drive, I'm sure it will load faster; that will be a plus when playing something that requires me to reload a lot because I'm getting my butt kicked. But I might not notice - because I'll be mad about getting my butt kicked.
My hardware was fast enough already that I had no complaints.
That's all personal perception, of course.
I don't regret buying it - it cost me about 30 bucks on Amazon after getting the $50 gift for signing up for their CC, and that will cost me some time to pay the first bill and then cut up the card.
Anyway, just some observations. SSD's are the future, but if your computing habits are similar to mine, and you have decent spinners, think a bit before spending too much on them. They are far from "necessary."
Nice, but not necessary. If you do decide to buy, enjoy! I kinda, sorta do.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

the difference hasn't added up to much more than a hill of beans.

Were you surprised by this?

I generally agree with your observations, but detect some level of disappointment or surprise in your tone. You seem underwhelmed.

What did you expect to happen that did not actually happen?

 

[pparks1]

Anyway, just some observations. SSD's are the future, but if your computing habits are similar to mine, and you have decent spinners, think a bit before spending too much on them. They are far from "necessary."
Nice, but not necessary. If you do decide to buy, enjoy! I kinda, sorta do.

Anybody who told you that an SSD is "necessary" needs to not give advice. They are nice, and they are big performance gainers, but far, far from necessary. I run SSD's in a couple of boxes, but not in all of them. I easily live without them in a number of boxes.

 

[Victor S]

the difference hasn't added up to much more than a hill of beans.

Were you surprised by this?

I generally agree with your observations, but detect some level of disappointment or surprise in your tone. You seem underwhelmed.

What did you expect to happen that did not actually happen?

It was as pretty much as expected. I still haven't done some app loading that may let the SSD shine a bit. I do appreciate the boot and imaging gains. I'm big on imaging. Since I had move about 200 gig to make my system changes, I wish I had all SSD.
I have seen here a push to buy SSD's for performance gains, but maybe that's in my head. Since I'm a bit of a tech geek, it wasn't a stretch for me to get an SSD for my system drive. I mostly wanted to change my system a bit for the sake of change.
But I've seen posts here where those a bit down on the tech scale mostly buy trouble when replacing a perfectly adequate spinner with an SSD.
My post was largely directed at them. The "typical" PC user - if their usage is anything like mine, won't see much real world performance gain with an SSD over a good spinner. And to discuss it a bit. I nearly always learn something when "discussing."
Couldn't really talk about this until now, since I didn't have an SSD.
Again, it's mostly personal perception. I use 7200 rpm Caviar Blacks on this box.
I can hardly stand doing anything on my other box that has 5000 rpm WD's.
But it was perfectly fine when it was all I had.

 

[Victor S]

Anybody who told you that an SSD is "necessary" needs to not give advice. They are nice, and they are big performance gainers, but far, far from necessary. I run SSD's in a couple of boxes, but not in all of them. I easily live without them in a number of boxes.

I haven't noticed a "big performance" gain. Certainly a net gain in the couple of instances I've mentioned - booting and imaging 17gb. Nothing to write home about. Otherwise, in my daily PC use, I wouldn't know I have that SSD.
But it's early, and I might be pleased with app loads later.

 

[cluberti]

Hard disks (mechanical) do a pretty good job of sequential I/O, so much so in some cases that the SSD speed increase in this area is negligible (from a human observation perspective). The place you're going to see a real improvement in SSD over a spinner is in random read during write (especially random write) and vice-versa, as well as seek times. This means things like running virtual machines, booting your box, or anything that deals in smaller files in a random fashion. Loading programs may or may not be faster depending on how the program loads, and usually playing media or anything that's already memory or CPU-bound won't see an improvement either.

If I have a choice, I always choose the SSD, but going with a mechanical drive (especially a hybrid) is usually sufficient for most needs anyway.

 

[whs]

You will obviously not see much of a performance improvement in operations that do not involve the disk - e.g. when browsing the web. But overall the system is a lot snappier.

I use SSDs since 4 years on 6 systems and never looked back. Every time I have to fix a friends system with spinners I get nervous. I am used to my 15 to 24 second boot times and don't want to wait when I call a big program.

For imaging, which I do 3 times per week, it is less of a deal because that can run in the background.

 

[Hopalong X]

I haven't noticed a "big performance" gain. Certainly a net gain in the couple of instances I've mentioned - booting and imaging 17gb. Nothing to write home about. Otherwise, in my daily PC use, I wouldn't know I have that SSD.
But it's early, and I might be pleased with app loads later.

It was the same here last year when I went with my first SSD. I was using Cav Black 7200 HDD's as you.
SSD was a nice imporvment but not a big deal.

I had cloned the image of my spinner HDD to the SSD then unplugged the HDD.
That way if a problem occured I could boot to the still functional HDD.
After a week no problem so I plugged the HDD back in to reformat it for storage.

I booted to the HDD instead just to give it one last go with the OS.
It was so slooowwww!
Perception I realize.

Going from HDD to SSD didn't seem a huge improvment but going BACK to the HDD was incredibly obvious.

 

[Victor S]

Going from HDD to SSD didn't seem a huge improvment but going BACK to the HDD was incredibly obvious.

I think you're right. I'll never go back!

 

[pparks1]

I haven't noticed a "big performance" gain. Certainly a net gain in the couple of instances I've mentioned - booting and imaging 17gb. Nothing to write home about. Otherwise, in my daily PC use, I wouldn't know I have that SSD.
But it's early, and I might be pleased with app loads later.

My boot times were cut a bunch, my virus scans and malware scans are faster, my imaging if faster, loading games is super fast, i don't have to bother with defragging anymore. Applications install faster. Those are the performance gains. I say it's a big gain because if you went from say 4GB of RAM to 8GB of RAM, you would see nowhere near as much performance gain.

 

[whs]

You are absolutely right. Dollar for Dollar, an SSD is the best investment if you are looking for performance. No upgrade of any other component in the system will yield a comparable result for the same amount of money.

 

[DeaconFrost]

I'm not sure what your goal was with this post, as most people understand what and why they would add an SSD or hold off for now.

So for what I usually do, which is browse the net, watch Youtube, read/send e-mail, and play games, the difference hasn't added up to much more than a hill of beans.

Again, I'm a bit confused. Why would you expect that an SSD would speed up your internet access? These things you mention are all mostly dependant on the speed of your internet connection, before any hardware specs get involved.

 

[pparks1]

@Deacon, I don't think the OP thought his internet would be faster, but based on how much people rave about SSD's, I can see some people making an incorrect assumption that the addition of an SSD would make a night and day difference on their PC and they would be absolutely blown away.

For example, WHS absolutely loves his SSD's and seems to have 1 in every system he uses. So, for him, these devices have become a critical component to the point where it doesn't seem like he would own a system without an SSD. On the flip side, I have an SSD in my primary desktop and my laptop...and that is it. None of my other boxes have an SSD, none of my other boxes are slated for SSD upgrades. They are perfectly fine, right where they are. The desktop computer that I use at work, more than any other computer, has a Western Digital Caviar Blue spinner in it. I have 0 need whatsoever to have an SSD in this machine.

I rarely hear somebody say after gettting an SSD that they regret it. But like this OP, I have heard people say that the change is there, but not as significant as they thought. Somewhere along the line, their expectations were set at too high a level.

 

[DeaconFrost]

I rarely hear somebody say after gettting an SSD that they regret it. But like this OP, I have heard people say that the change is there, but not as significant as they thought. Somewhere along the line, their expectations were set at too high a level.

The only regrets I've seen are from people who had their drives misaligned, or were expecting too much, as you said. There was a recent thread in which a person cut their boot time down from 54 seconds to 24 and was asking what was wrong...that the system wasn't "instant on". I'd be willing to bet someone put that idea in their head...that an SSD could give an instant on computer, and cure cancer at the same time.

 

[pparks1]

Well, take my desktop computer that I use at work for instance. It "rarely" get's rebooted. It's on a UPS to keep it up in the event power goes out. I have scripts and such which run overnight, so turning the computer off to save electricity isn't an option. So, from a bootup standpoint, an SSD in this computer would provide very few benefits.

This desktop computer predominately provides local storage for me for virtual machines and such. I have about 1.5TB on this desktop. So, with my storage needs, SSD's provide no real value.

The applications that I use the most on this particular computer include 1). notepad 2). google chrome 3) vmware client 4) vmware workstation 5). filezilla client 6). MS word 7). MS Exel. These particular apps are tiny, and load instantly from a spinner, so no advantage to an SSD here.

So, my needs here, don't dictate an SSD as needed. It would really be an absolute waste of corporate dollars to put an SSD into this machine.

 

[DeaconFrost]

You seem to think I was disagreeing with you, or at least that's the assumption I'm making. I completely agree that an SSD isn't the magic bullet for every computer.

 

[whs]

For example, WHS absolutely loves his SSD's and seems to have 1 in every system he uses. So, for him, these devices have become a critical component to the point where it doesn't seem like he would own a system without an SSD

You are absolutely right. No way in the world would I ever put the OS on a spinner again. But, of course, I know the limits of the SSDs and do not expect my internet to get any faster.

 

[pparks1]

You seem to think I was disagreeing with you, or at least that's the assumption I'm making. I completely agree that an SSD isn't the magic bullet for every computer.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I knew that you weren't disagreeing with me. I was just using an additional post as reinforcement material to the point we were marking.

You are absolutely right. No way in the world would I ever put the OS on a spinner again. But, of course, I know the limits of the SSDs and do not expect my internet to get any faster.

And that is where we differ, although a fan of SSD's, I would in many cases stick with a spinner for the OS drive. I just built a new file server for home use and I used a spinner there for the OS.

 

[Victor S]

And that is where we differ, although a fan of SSD's, I would in many cases stick with a spinner for the OS drive. I just built a new file server for home use and I used a spinner there for the OS.

Though I think we're in agreement about most of this, I'll always use a SSD for the OS from now on. But I keep my OS and app footprint small, and use image restores as my "system restores," housekeeping, and virus protection. I don't see my images as getting past about 20gb, so a 64gb SSD works well for that. Still room for a couple/few big games between restores.
I already like the seconds saved with booting and imaging. And I image cold, not background.
So I "feel" and see that. Ghost logs the time right there in front of me.
I expect to get better load times with games, but haven't added any yet.
whs mentioned virus scans, which I hardly ever do, but I ran AVG against the same folder on the SSD and on one of the WD Cav Blacks, 47 gb, 13,000 files.
The WD took 64 seconds, the SSD 46 seconds. About a 28% gain.
Now if you go back to the spinner from the WD, you can look at that as a 39% loss. Perception!
There's no doubt the SSD is faster, but unless I'm doing a logged benchmark similar to the above, I wouldn't notice the difference on anything I would normally run in the background.
See no difference in opening a 500k Word doc. Might be some, but can't tell.
Noticed the find all files was faster with the SSD. Because I looking for it.
Again, that's just me. Others doing more data-heavy read/writes will see more difference.
Going to an I7, SATA 2, and the Cav Black spinners was the biggest performance gainer I've seen - after putting a Winchester HD in my original IBM PC.
The SSD improvement pales in comparison. Still like SSD's. Depends on where you started from and what you're doing.
I'm more of a space freak than a speed freak.
Just picked up half a gig by compressing the Installer folder. Not recommending that, just saying.

 

[pparks1]

Going to an I7, SATA 2, and the Cav Black spinners was the biggest performance gainer I've seen - after putting a Winchester HD in my original IBM PC.

Well of course, if you buy a whole new PC, with all new parts, it's going to be a substantial gain.

I think when we say SSD's offer great bang for the buck, we mean that if you put $100 into an SSD, or $100 into a higher end CPU, or $100 into a higher end video card, or $100 into more RAM...chances are the $100 spent on the SDD will make more or a difference.

I'm using an 80GB SSD at home and my OS drive is around 50GB used now. But that's running Diablo III and BF3, both of which are consuming nearly 40GB of space alone. But instead of 25 second load times, my games load in about 5 seconds and am off gaming.