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At what point do we start recommending that everyone get an SSD?
Look here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178455
That's a 120 GB SSD for $61, including shipping. For comparison, the cheapest SATA hard drive on New Egg is $49--and that's for a 320 GB, 5400 RPM laptop drive. If you don't need a lot of capacity, hard drives don't make a whole lot of sense anymore.
Now, 120 GB isn't that much. But 240 GB is quite a bit, and New Egg has six of those for $111 or less, including shipping. That's not really that big of a price premium over a hard drive anymore, and an awful lot of people could get by with 240 GB of storage and no hard drive.
What if, two years from now, a 240 GB SSD then costs what a 120 GB SSD costs today--barely more than the price of the cheapest hard drive you can find? Do we still recommend that anyone at all get a hard drive only and no SSD? Getting both a hard drive and an SSD will still make sense for people who need terabytes of capacity, of course.
Sadly, in spite of SSDs now making sense for nearly everyone outside of the severe budget range, OEMs still seem to be pushing hard drive only. Dell's idea of a $1200 "performance desktop" has storage with your choice of a 1 TB hard drive or a 2 TB hard drive--but no SSD either way. Some of HP's higher end desktops at least offer an option of a 256 GB SSD, and sometimes also a 128 GB SSD option, but some don't. And none offer a combination of both an SSD and a hard drive. The overwhelming majority of desktops on New Egg are still hard drive only.
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I could be wrong but my opinion is.
Many people, your average joe consumer have no idea what an SSD really is. Average Joe goes to Dell.com or HP.com or bestbuy.com and knows what a Hard Drive is, and considers the bigger the number the better. Most probably have no idea what the difference between 5400 / 7200rpm speed is, much less the performance difference between SSD & HDD
Say they offer a 120g SSD or a 1TB HDD. Even if they know what an SSD is they will choose a slow HDD just because its a bigger drive and for no additional money they get more space.
Your average consumer has no idea whats good hardware and whats bad. To many they look at price alone. The $800 pc must be better than the $700 pc which is better than the $600 pc.
Even on these forums where you might can assume most would have at least some elementary knowledge I have seen posts like. ~ Why wont this game run? I have a top of the line card, an Nvidia 620 with an I7 and a 1TB HDD, I should be getting 60 FPS on BF4 with this rig.~
Same basic thing, average joe is buying online or at bestbuy looking at price alone. And from a business standpoint why change it if its working?
Its funny that i see this thread this morning. A friend of mine just dropped off his pc to get put together. He bought all the parts and tried to assemble it himself but got hung up on hooking up all the cords so he decided to take it somewhere to have them finish it up.
The guy was looking through it and said " Why did you put this piece of crap in here". He was referring to the WD 1T black HD that he bought for his rig. Dumbfounded my friend said " crap? what do you mean crap? Thats the WD Black 1T HD" And the guy basically said " its like you bought a corvette and voluntarily put a limiter in it so it cant go over 70 mph"
The tech guy started talking about SSD and how most slandered HDs are shit compared the the SSD. Said SSD basically are a bunch of flash drives hooked together within this small box. So are SSD the future? If your building a new rig, should we all be buying SSD? and what size should you get? Is there a difference in capacity? Very interested in knowing what is fact about SSD vs HardDrive debate.
Hedonismbot: Your latest performance was as delectable as dipping my bottom over and over into a bath of the silkiest oils and creams.
Brand manufacturers tend to get the cheapest solutions and give us as little information as possible. They boost over 2 TB harddrive but doesn't mention the actual speed and do the same with memory...
People who know their computers builds their stuff themselves anyways.
My harddrive build:
1 Corsair Force 3 SSd 120 Gb
1 4 TB Seagate (the slow one for movies and stuff
2 Hitatchi 2 Tb drives (got a great deal on them)
2 Seagate and 1 WD 1.5 Tb drives (2 are raided in my icebox on e-sata)
and yes, the SSD is still kinda small but it is mainly for system and a few games anyways.
The tech guy is right, SSDs are a lot faster, don't get hot and uses way less electricity. Also they don't need to be defragged and don't make noice.
There were some theories that a SSD would only live 2-3 years before breaking but I owned a bunch and don't even know anyone who had one breaking on them.
Combo drives are crap though, I recommend a SSD for system and important games and a larger regular HD for movies, music and other stuff where size is more important than speed.
SSD's are getting close, but it has to be at a size where I do not have to deal with multiple drives. I remember having an I: and a J: drive back in the old Dos partition days... It was a pain in the neck to deal with c d e f g h i j...
I also don't want to reinstall everything...
Hence I only consider 1TB drives so I can clone my hard drive to it -- if I do it as an upgrade...
Sure my next PC will have one as the primary drive, but upgrading to it... Thing is computers are lasting so much longer now... Oh and my PC doesn't have III only II. Thing is the i950 processor is still decent today. The NEED to upgrade every other year is gone these days.
At $420 for a 1TB drive, they are getting close to my buy range.... Thing is when I get my next computer I would want to MOVE the drive to it and the build sites are not set up for that kind of thing.
Really those places should let you ship them an SSD and/or a video card for new system purchases. They could charge a fee for it.
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Thanks for the reply. So SSD for OS and games. Well, games like say AA im guessing. And you could use a well to do HD to store all your music, movies and pics on. I remember the tech guy saying something about "if you dont want to go with a SSD, you should invest in a Raptor" Going to guess its a faster HD then most on the market.
I do have another question. Would using a SSD make web browsing faster? Pages load quicker and or even live streaming? Im sure other factors would apply in how fast it would respond but just pertaining the SSD its self, would it quicken load times for web site and or streaming videos?
SSD is a must for all of my games. My movies, music and sparingly used programs reside on a HDD.
People should have switched to SSD's for gaming and general applications YESTERDAY.
It really does make a huge difference...load times, boot times, responsiveness. Just an overall better computing experience.
The time you will truly appreciate the SSD most is when you first install it and for that first time notice the difference compared to your old HDD. It's like "Damn, I should have switched long ago".
Price is getting decent nowadays but don't settle for some 3rd tier brand. Get something with at least a 3 year warranty.
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It would quicken the load time for anything on it but when you surf you get most streamed in through the net. Anything in the cash memory is fast but not anything new.
There are more or less 3 ways to increase that. First you could get a faster net, then you could get a faster browser (try Opera, surfing with it is faster than IE and Firefox). the third thing to do is using a squid but as far as I know you could only do that in Linux and it needs a huge swap file.
The games the SSD do most for are games that loads while you play, anything you only load once will just be faster to start.
Starting windows will also be a lot faster once you pass the POST (when you see loading windows).
I have a 740 gb games folder and I hate reinstalling stuff.
The load times don't' seem that big a deal for me and I'd hate to take something off "just" to try a new mmo for instance.
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I found the same thing. I run a 120gb ssd main drive for my OS and a 3tb games drive. I've put games on the SSD before and didn't find they loaded that much faster and for an mmo it really didn't make enough difference to justify the annoyance factor of constantly having to move stuff on and off to make room.
I like that my computer will restart in 12 seconds and recommend that people get their OS on an ssd C: drive but for me a massive conventional drive is still the way I'm going for games.
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I bought an OCZ Agility 120 GB in 2009 and got 4+ years out of it before I replaced it on general principle due to its age. I occasionally see posts on the Internet where someone claims to have bought 10 SSDs and they all died quickly, and I think that the person is doing something wrong.
It should really be standard, yes. Particularly for laptops, the battery length of mine increased a lot together with the speed (almost 5 times faster to start with the drive just cloned over) when I plugged in a Samsung 250 Gb into it.
The difference is still so much that regular drives are dated for anything but media drives unless you make a raid which still is slower but at least not as much.
I know several people who had issues with their combo drives, with current prices it is usually a lot better performance wise to get a small loose SSD and a larger regular drive than a combo. Only possible exception would be on a laptop with 1 drive space which you need a lot of space on and can't jack an e-sata drive in for some reason.
Also, I noticed no change in speed on my old Intel SSDs after 4 years before I sold them to a buddy. If they do get slower it is not enough to notice.
SSDs are great, I love the one I have and the 10 second power on to functional use is awesome.
When it comes to overall performance there isn't much to gain AFTER you initially load whatever you're intending upon using. Even in games alot of the stuff that is repeatedly needed is loaded in either vCard memory or RAM and anything that is needed on demand is typically pre-loaded prior to it's need (optimization).
If I were on a limited budget and needed to build a gaming PC I would ensure I have a decent processor, a good vCard and good and sizable ram. While storage shouldn't be an afterthought, upgrading to an SSD can often be delayed because it's generally only load time that you're saving.