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Solve : I want an SSD; do I really need one??

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Unusually for me, I am starting a thread. I have noticed consumer SSDs getting quite cheap these days. I am thinking of adding one to a 2 year old Shuttle SN78SH7 small-form-factor PC: AMD Phenom II 3 GHz, maximum RAM installed (4 GB). At the moment it is booting from a 100 GB system partion on a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda ST3500 ROTATING hard drive (7200 rpm, 16 MB cache). I also have an older 250 GB IDE drive installed. The machine only has 2 3.5" bays, but there is plenty of room to stick a 2.5" SDD somewhere.

What I have in mind is to get a 128 GB ssd, possibly an OCZ Octane or a Samsung 830, and clone my current OS partition onto it. I am up-to-speed about the things needed - align partition to 4K boundaries, make sure TRIM is enabled, etc, and I know how to get my Windows partition on to the SSD. I am not asking how to do any of those things. Also I have read about lots of SSD myths and alleged "wisdom" and I am prepared to find my way through all that. What I am asking, however, is do I really need to do this? Lots of people on hardware forums say "This is the one upgrade you have to do" and "the effect is amazing!" etc. The machine is by no means slow - I would quite like apps to open even faster, I suppose, and a faster boot would be nice (it's about 45 seconds to the login screen at present) and I can easily afford the price of the SSD (around $100-$125 in USD) but I am still unsure about whether I am just hankering after spending money on technology just for an excuse to get the Shuttle's case open and play around.

Any thoughts?

ST, I too have been following this relatively new memory storage format and will tell you where i am coming from at the moment. I am not really concerned about the reliability of the devices as i believe they do seem to function well. However my current thought is that the limited gains (generally in the access speed arena) are OFFSET in my mind by the lower capacities currently available (although they seem to be getting higher by the month) and the considerably higher cost than a non SSD hard drive. I intend to hold off for now until i see improvements in both the capacity and the pricing which i feel are continuing to head in that direction. This past week there was an announcement of some form of molecular study breakthrough that opens up the potential for a radical quantum leap in memory storage capacity (both in size and speed) to the point of rendering all current memory methods obsolete. So to say if being at the leading edge of technology (which if i read you right is not your primary motivator) then there will always be the promise of something new on the horizon and one needs to ask what will i gain and is it worth it. For me at the moment the answer in so far as SSD's is no.truenorth I get what you are saying about not needing to be at the leading edge of technology, and when SSDs cost much more per GB I could easily ignore them. It's just that these days the price of an SSD bigger than my Windows partition is something I can afford (It's what my wife spends on a pair of shoes). If it really does make one *censored* of a difference I may go for it.
Sounds to me like you have "talked" yourself into the acquisition. truenorthI think you may be right. If my Shuttle could take 8 GB of RAM I would probably have done that instead. I know I have a weakness for buying tech things that I don't really need - I have a little plastic "hobby box" which contains 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB, 4GB (3 of these), 8 GB, 16 and 32 GB pen drives. I bought each one when that size became cheap so now I have 11 pen drives but I only ever use the last one I bought, and it is never full. I'll probably get a 64 GB one in a couple of months. However I know a guy at work who is much worse than me, he is always buying new gizmos for his digital SLR, or his motorcycle, or another TV or whatever. His "I can afford it" threshold is maybe 5 or 10 times mine, and he makes the same salary as me. He does not have a wife to restrain him like I do.

A few words from an old man about history repeating itself. As a retired P. Eng. who spent his life in the Broadcasting industry, I watched the art of analog audio and video tape recording come to be, primarily through the efforts of a company called Ampex. Through the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's and in to the 1980's, from mono to stereo to 8-track to 24-track and on and on. Then things began to change with the advent of digital. Today analog tape recording is history (like my slide rule).

Also today, the "mechanical spinning hard drive" is on the verge of extinction, and in a very short time will follow the tape recorders. The only question is the timing of when you make your move to an SSD. If you wait a year, it's almost certain the next computer you buy will be SSD. I can totally relate to " I have a weakness for buying tech things that I don't really need" as i am constantly having to create storage space for my technology that is never going to come back in fashion.On your "flash drive" collection. I too adopted the same pursuit and have tons of them. However some time back i discovered the WD MY Passport line of external HD and for not that much more (if even) the cost of a 64 gb Flash drive you can get a 250 gb My Passport and it is not that great of a difference in size, Currently the two portable storage devices i use the most are the 250 gb My passport and a Crucial 64gb Voyager Flash drive.
everything else is collecting dust. So far be it for me to be telling you what you can waste (oops spend) your money on. Enjoy your SSD when you get it.truenorthQuote

The machine only has 2 3.5" bays, but there is plenty of room to stick a 2.5" SDD somewhere.
My tower has one of these SSD's just hanging off the SATA power/Comm plug at a 45 degree angle with it resting on its end to the bottom of my minitower. They are so light that there is no way just resting there that it will come unplugged. My drive came with a 2.5" to 3.5" bracket, but I am already fully populated with 2 x 3.5" drives, one for Windows 7 and the other for Windows XP Pro SP3. Both of my 5.25" bays are also populated with DVD-R and RW ROMs.


I went with 2 of the inexpensive OCZ SSD's an AGILITY 90GB SSD and a VERTEX 60GB SSD. Bought them both for under $60 each. The 90GB was like $59.99 and the 60GB I got for $54.99 and then a rebate on both drives gave me $5 off each one bringing them to $54.99 and $49.99.

I installed one in my netbook and the other into my gaming system as a slave. This drastically improved performance with my Toshiba Netbook with boot time and battery life. But given that 60GB is tight for OS + games, I decided to go for strictly gaming performance with my SSD in my gaming tower. I copied World of Warcraft ( @ 32GB ) to this 60GB drive and instantly I noticed the difference. The game use to start and I'd have a loading bar for about 15 seconds before I actually got into the virtual world of the game, and this was reduced to 6 seconds. Teleporting in the game from one area (map) to another area (map) use to take about 5 seconds and this was DROPPED to 2 seconds. In addition to that I was amazed that other features of this game also were bottlenecked by my Seagate 500GB SATA II drive such as lock picking and mounting onto a flying machine etc. These abilities use to lag slightly but I thought it was just the nature of the game until running off SSD and having quicker lock picking and mounting of flying machine etc.

My 60GB SSD is SATA III, but is running degraded at SATA II since my motherboard is SATA II. I was going to upgrade my motherboard for SATA III for 6Gb/s data rate, but someone here said not to get tricked into thinking you will get 6Gb/s speed. The drives will only run so fast, your just raising the ability to communicate at 6Gb/s, but the drive may show no difference between SATA II 3Gb/s and SATA III 6Gb/s due to the drives speed limit.

In addition to games. I also played with SSD with running memory and hard disk intensive routines and there was a significant performance gain in SSD vs HDD. But when i found out about the ability to use System RAM as a RAMdisk with software to allocate RAM to act like a hard drive, I went this route since it blows the doors off SSD's in speed. Only problem I have now is having to get a new motherboard that maxes out at 16GB RAM, so I can make like a 12GB RAMdisk to really take advantage of that feature. I ran benchmarks with an IDE 160GB HD and RAMdisk running on 533Mhz DDR2 RAM, and the RAMdisk came in at 137x faster than the 160GB Hard Drive. Someday I hope to pass my games entirely into RAM and have instant loads of less than 1 second Just need more RAM capacity to do so

For me, both of these were worth the money.

My system is a mix of new and older guts in a 2003 model Compaq Presario S6030NX Minitower with IDE for optical drives, SATA for all my main drives, Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz AM3 CPU running in a AM2+ motherboard that is maxed out at 4GB 800Mhz DDR2 RAM. Biggest performance enhancements were the addition of the SSD drive and tapping into Direct System (Memory to Memory) executions with RAMdisk to remove the seeking information from Physical or SSDs. RAMdisking is insanely FAST, but you have to have a physical drive to have data to be mirrored to and from the RAMdisk on Start up and Shutdown, otherwise when the power is off , DATA is GONE! Hoping to have one tricked out tower someday when I can afford to pass more into System RAM for what could be called ... almost Direct Data Access from Memory to CPU without having to fetch thru a drive controller bottleneck which degrades maximum performance!

If someone looked at the computer from outside, they'd say OMG your still using that OLD THING! Not knowing that its been tricked out and modernized internally in an affordable manner through the almost 10 years I have owned it. ...LOL It still has the original sticker on the front of:

2800+ (2.08Ghz) AMD Athlon XP Processor
256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM Memory
80GB Ultra DMA Hard Drive
CD-RW Drive 48x24x48x Max Speed
DVD-ROM Drive 16x Max Speed

Only original part to my old computer is steel case and plastic, all other functional guts have been upgraded to more powerful. *So if it were a car, it would be like a Honda Civic with a small block V-8 under the hood, and not change its outside appearance, although that would require lots of cutting and welding and I haven't had to go to that extent with this case yet...LOL

As ill as it may sound, I wanted to make an IBM 8088 computer into modern Core i7 guts with outside 1984 case, but I just haven't gotten to doing that yet. Was thinking that would be the most awesome LAN Party computer to bring to an event. Look at this joker he has an 8088, then HOLY CRAP its got modern guts and is FAST! Like a RAT ROD Computer! That WOULD require custom fabrication of replacing the back face of steel with modernized card slots etc. I could do it, just haven't yet... LOL Pic below of the IBM 5150 case I want for that project.

[year+ old attachment deleted by admin]Quote from: DaveLembke on October 14, 2012, 09:09:47 AM
...I decided to go for strictly gaming performance with my SSD in my gaming tower. I copied World of Warcraft ( @ 32GB ) to this 60GB drive and instantly I noticed the difference. The game use to start and I'd have a loading bar for about 15 seconds before I actually got into the virtual world of the game, and this was reduced to 6 seconds. Teleporting in the game from one area (map) to another area (map) use to take about 5 seconds and this was dropped to 2 seconds. In addition to that I was amazed that other features of this game also were bottlenecked by my Seagate 500GB SATA II drive such as lock picking and mounting onto a flying machine etc. These abilities use to lag slightly but I thought it was just the nature of the game until running off SSD and having quicker lock picking and mounting of flying machine etc...

Thanks for that info. As a WOW fan, I have been making improvements including more DDR2 and most recently a new video card. Looks like next stop will be a SSD.


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