Also the average person does not require the space that massive HDD's that are being sold enmasse provide. Made up statistics incoming but i wouldn't be surprised if over 50% of the people who buy 1 TB HDD don't even use up half the space they paid for.
I thought that too until I looked at my old drive and saw it was at 800 gbs. And that's all games and deleting mmos I no longer play. I think once you stop buying boxed copies of games not having a physical disk makes you less inclined to delete an old game. Couple that with games getting into the 30 and 40 Gb size and these drives can start filling up quick.
Anecdotal evidence makes you an average person not.
I mean, don't get me wrong i get where you're coming from. But you're clearly a power user and not an average person.
Also, just out of curiosity, what games are you playing that are 30-40gb?
Also the average person does not require the space that massive HDD's that are being sold enmasse provide. Made up statistics incoming but i wouldn't be surprised if over 50% of the people who buy 1 TB HDD don't even use up half the space they paid for.
I thought that too until I looked at my old drive and saw it was at 800 gbs. And that's all games and deleting mmos I no longer play. I think once you stop buying boxed copies of games not having a physical disk makes you less inclined to delete an old game. Couple that with games getting into the 30 and 40 Gb size and these drives can start filling up quick.
Anecdotal evidence makes you an average person not.
I mean, don't get me wrong i get where you're coming from. But you're clearly a power user and not an average person.
Also, just out of curiosity, what games are you playing that are 30-40gb?
Pretty happy with my Intel 520 SSD. Windows 8.1 with disabled quickboot boots in less than 12 seconds from cold boot. Although yeah, I get to use the term "This game is not worth the write cycles" :DD There are many of those lately too!
The only game that sticks to the SSD on my PC is Guild Wars 2 which is around 20 gigs. The rest I quickly move to HDD or simply install there .... because they are not worth the write cycles
The average pc user, even gamer, is more concerned with having more storage than they are with getting a slight performance increase with considerably less storage at a still higher price point.
The average pc user just wants their crap to load and games to play. Spending slightly more on a 3rd of the storage so that the computer and applications boot 2 seconds faster really isn't a deal to most people.
The example I read about the guy who was told he put a limiter on his PC by installing a HD is nonsense. The guy was only trying to sell him something he doesn't really need, and the performance increase isn't making that big a difference. Were talkîng about time measured in MILLISECONDS, and an SSD does not increase frame rate in games no matter what intel says. SSD and gaming performance is a myth perpetrated by a company trying to sell its product to people who don't need it.
The people that benefit the most from an SSD are the ones who need to run multiple programs at once, like people that bot multiple game clients at the same time. An SSD would be of more benefit to me doing digital art than it ever would to someone playing WoW, unless that guy was botting six WoW clients on the same machine, and I would still get more of a benefit out of it.
Cost is one Avenue for justification. The other is when not having an ssd puts one at a disadvantage, like when dealing with loading screens in Gw2 wvwvw.
Since a couple of years ago IMO.SSD as a boot/OS drive is a must!
Yea even when they were more expensive a 60gig ssd was a great boot drive. My rig has a 60 gig boot drive, 240 gig for games, and a 1 tb HDD for media. If it wasn't for 1080p video I really wouldn't have a need for a HDD.
For laptops, I have no idea why you would use an HDD. I would use an ssd for its ability to suffer an impact from a fall alone.
Also the average person does not require the space that massive HDD's that are being sold enmasse provide. Made up statistics incoming but i wouldn't be surprised if over 50% of the people who buy 1 TB HDD don't even use up half the space they paid for.
I thought that too until I looked at my old drive and saw it was at 800 gbs. And that's all games and deleting mmos I no longer play. I think once you stop buying boxed copies of games not having a physical disk makes you less inclined to delete an old game. Couple that with games getting into the 30 and 40 Gb size and these drives can start filling up quick.
Anecdotal evidence makes you an average person not.
I mean, don't get me wrong i get where you're coming from. But you're clearly a power user and not an average person.
Also, just out of curiosity, what games are you playing that are 30-40gb?
Is anyone on an mmo gaming site an avg user ?
Yea, i get that. But I was talking about people in general and not just us gamers.
The whole argument of "SSDs are to expensive" doesn't even hold up when talking about mmo gamers exclusively either. Given the overwhelming benefits we gain from using one to not using one, and with how cheap they already are now, any gamer who doesn't have one is merely gimping themselves.
The average pc user, even gamer, is more concerned with having more storage than they are with getting a slight performance increase with considerably less storage at a still higher price point.
The average pc user just wants their crap to load and games to play. Spending slightly more on a 3rd of the storage so that the computer and applications boot 2 seconds faster really isn't a deal to most people.
The example I read about the guy who was told he put a limiter on his PC by installing a HD is nonsense. The guy was only trying to sell him something he doesn't really need, and the performance increase isn't making that big a difference. Were talkîng about time measured in MILLISECONDS, and an SSD does not increase frame rate in games no matter what intel says. SSD and gaming performance is a myth perpetrated by a company trying to sell its product to people who don't need it.
The people that benefit the most from an SSD are the ones who need to run multiple programs at once, like people that bot multiple game clients at the same time. An SSD would be of more benefit to me doing digital art than it ever would to someone playing WoW, unless that guy was botting six WoW clients on the same machine, and I would still get more of a benefit out of it.
It's not a slight performance increase. If you built a $600 computer with a good SSD and a $2000 computer with no SSD and otherwise spent the money sensibly on each, and then asked someone who wasn't at all tech savvy to use both for a bit and say which computer was faster, he'd say that the $600 computer with the SSD was faster--and that it wasn't close.
Yes, we're talking about time measured in milliseconds, at least for hard drives. For SSDs, it's often in microseconds. For system memory, it's nanoseconds. For some CPU purposes, it's picoseconds. But if something reliably takes 100 picoseconds longer on this CPU than on that one, that can mean that this CPU is considerably slower than that one. Small time differences multiplied by doing something an enormous number of times can easily add up to things that are noticeable to humans. For example, the main thrust of DirectX 12 is to reduce the performance hit of certain operations that currently take tens or hundreds of nanoseconds on typical hardware.
Also the average person does not require the space that massive HDD's that are being sold enmasse provide. Made up statistics incoming but i wouldn't be surprised if over 50% of the people who buy 1 TB HDD don't even use up half the space they paid for.
I thought that too until I looked at my old drive and saw it was at 800 gbs. And that's all games and deleting mmos I no longer play. I think once you stop buying boxed copies of games not having a physical disk makes you less inclined to delete an old game. Couple that with games getting into the 30 and 40 Gb size and these drives can start filling up quick.
Anecdotal evidence makes you an average person not.
I mean, don't get me wrong i get where you're coming from. But you're clearly a power user and not an average person.
Also, just out of curiosity, what games are you playing that are 30-40gb?
Is anyone on an mmo gaming site an avg user ?
Yea, i get that. But I was talking about people in general and not just us gamers.
The whole argument of "SSDs are to expensive" doesn't even hold up when talking about mmo gamers exclusively either. Given the overwhelming benefits we gain from using one to not using one, and with how cheap they already are now, any gamer who doesn't have one is merely gimping themselves.
The only improvement it will have on an mmo is when you boot the client. It will have no noticable effect on how the game performs.
Just semi-hijacking as you're all talking about SSD. Apologies to OP
My brother recently bought a PC which came with a 2TB HDD and a 64gb SSD. He left me to set it all up for him. I figured "why not install the OS to the SSD?" which I did. As soon as Windows was finished installing and I went to see how the PC ran, it was unbelievably laggy. Firefox was taking like 2 minutes to load up, web pages were running extremely slow etc. I made sure there were no unnecessary processes/programs running, and even restarted several times, but it still ran like crap.
In the end I just decided to reinstall the OS on the 2TB HDD instead, and now a week later it's been running smooth as hell all week. No lag, no stuttering, nothing. My brother and I are quite confused about this, as we'd heard many great things about SSD in the past, and we couldn't understand why the whole PC was running like crap. We figured it may have been down to the fact that the SSD was only 64gb, and Windows 8.1 which we installed seemed to take around 35gb or so. Could that have been the case, was the SSD just too small?
Just semi-hijacking as you're all talking about SSD. Apologies to OP
My brother recently bought a PC which came with a 2TB HDD and a 64gb SSD. He left me to set it all up for him. I figured "why not install the OS to the SSD?" which I did. As soon as Windows was finished installing and I went to see how the PC ran, it was unbelievably laggy. Firefox was taking like 2 minutes to load up, web pages were running extremely slow etc. I made sure there were no unnecessary processes/programs running, and even restarted several times, but it still ran like crap.
In the end I just decided to reinstall the OS on the 2TB HDD instead, and now a week later it's been running smooth as hell all week. No lag, no stuttering, nothing. My brother and I are quite confused about this, as we'd heard many great things about SSD in the past, and we couldn't understand why the whole PC was running like crap. We figured it may have been down to the fact that the SSD was only 64gb, and Windows 8.1 which we installed seemed to take around 35gb or so. Could that have been the case, was the SSD just too small?
Exactly which SSD was it? Some of the early SSDs were terrible, and prone to behavior like that.
Also the average person does not require the space that massive HDD's that are being sold enmasse provide. Made up statistics incoming but i wouldn't be surprised if over 50% of the people who buy 1 TB HDD don't even use up half the space they paid for.
I thought that too until I looked at my old drive and saw it was at 800 gbs. And that's all games and deleting mmos I no longer play. I think once you stop buying boxed copies of games not having a physical disk makes you less inclined to delete an old game. Couple that with games getting into the 30 and 40 Gb size and these drives can start filling up quick.
Anecdotal evidence makes you an average person not.
I mean, don't get me wrong i get where you're coming from. But you're clearly a power user and not an average person.
Also, just out of curiosity, what games are you playing that are 30-40gb?
Is anyone on an mmo gaming site an avg user ?
Yea, i get that. But I was talking about people in general and not just us gamers.
The whole argument of "SSDs are to expensive" doesn't even hold up when talking about mmo gamers exclusively either. Given the overwhelming benefits we gain from using one to not using one, and with how cheap they already are now, any gamer who doesn't have one is merely gimping themselves.
The only improvement it will have on an mmo is when you boot the client. It will have no noticable effect on how the game performs.
The details vary wildly from game to game, but in many games, an SSD will make loading screens much, much shorter. If a game tries to load a lot of stuff while you're playing without a loading screen sometimes benefit greatly from an SSD, though it depends on how aggressive about loading they are. Vanguard, for example, should have put an SSD on the system requirements to play the game.
Just semi-hijacking as you're all talking about SSD. Apologies to OP
My brother recently bought a PC which came with a 2TB HDD and a 64gb SSD. He left me to set it all up for him. I figured "why not install the OS to the SSD?" which I did. As soon as Windows was finished installing and I went to see how the PC ran, it was unbelievably laggy. Firefox was taking like 2 minutes to load up, web pages were running extremely slow etc. I made sure there were no unnecessary processes/programs running, and even restarted several times, but it still ran like crap.
In the end I just decided to reinstall the OS on the 2TB HDD instead, and now a week later it's been running smooth as hell all week. No lag, no stuttering, nothing. My brother and I are quite confused about this, as we'd heard many great things about SSD in the past, and we couldn't understand why the whole PC was running like crap. We figured it may have been down to the fact that the SSD was only 64gb, and Windows 8.1 which we installed seemed to take around 35gb or so. Could that have been the case, was the SSD just too small?
Yep, that is why. Due to the size, you'd have to choose between an OS or a game. If the drive was larger, you could get by with the OS, a few choice programs (like Firefox or Chrome), and a game.
It's the same problem you would run into with a normal drive. The closer you get to 80% capacity, the slower the system is going to run.
Raquelis in various games Played: Everything Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6 Wants: The World Anticipating:Everquest NextCrowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
I think the technology has matured enough at this point that they're worth getting. Price for some of the larger capacity drives can be a bit of a barrier to some though. I have a 128gb and looking back I wish I had a 256gb so I could have more apps/games installed on it. I have Windows 7, some misc apps and only one game installed on my SSD. Other games have to be installed on one of my old mechanical drives.
There's game releases getting up to over 40gb in size nowadays, so I don't think SSD will be cost-effective for newer games for a while.
I did a major upgrade to my PC recently, which made it almost a new machine. It has a new motherboard, I7 processor, 16 GB memory, new R9 graphics card and a 2 TB hard drive. However, although I did consider putting Windows on a SSD, in the end decided against it as two people in my guild have had SSD failures. They don't give any warning like conventional hard drives do, they just die and everything on them is lost. I decided not to take the risk. A 7200 RPM, hard drive with Windows 8.1 fires up from sleep really quickly and is fast enough for me for the time being.
Yea, i get that. But I was talking about people in general and not just us gamers.
The whole argument of "SSDs are to expensive" doesn't even hold up when talking about mmo gamers exclusively either. Given the overwhelming benefits we gain from using one to not using one, and with how cheap they already are now, any gamer who doesn't have one is merely gimping themselves.
The only improvement it will have on an mmo is when you boot the client. It will have no noticable effect on how the game performs.
That's not true at all. It depends on the game, it's assets, and the rest of the system. In many small games I saw no real impact past the load, or screen loads. In heavier games I saw very noticeable impact and in a couple mmos (LotRO in particular) I saw a massive improvement. I got a 25+ FPS bump in LotRO from running an SSD with hi-rez textures. That game hits the hard drive a lot.
It is very situational how much of an impact it will have on an individual game performance. However, overall the entire system runs smoother and application performance is better.
In Lineage 2 it makes a huge difference. The real pvpers use SSDs because when you port around the world you want the game to load as fast as possible. You don't want to port somewhere and have a 5 second black screen load only to see your character dead on the ground killed from a war tag that you never saw. I cant speak for other games but I can say first hand it makes a difference in Lineage 2.
What they are saying is that an SSD will always require power because its pretty much a bunch of memory chips. They probably have an internal battery as well. If they lose power entirely, they will probably be wiped clean. An HDD only requires power when its reading or writing information because it creates a physical 0 or 1 on a platter. So if you are not doing much reading and writing, it will require less power overall. When an HDD is reading and writing it will use more power.
When it comes to post loading, an SSD makes an impact with Microstutter. This is due to the fact an HDD has to wind-up in order to retrieve info where as an SSD does not. However, the comment that its vastly useful post load is false. A developer who requires more than 70 MB/s reading off a disk drive for a game is doing their programming wrong at this current point. No matter what disk drive you use, doing large active reads from a hard disk is a bad idea for real-time games. Its much better to load it into memory and move into 64-bit computing. This is either done by loading the assets into memory before hand, or by loading the necessary assets and staggering loading the remaining assets once in the game. For real-time gaming, the real data transferring happens from the memory modules to the GPU.
To me the benefit of an SSD is loading applications and the OS, and installing updates/applications. Will the general consumer care about waiting 2 or 3 more seconds to open an application at the expense of several hundred dollars and possible data instability? If the consumer is on a budget, would they rather get something that might reduce micro stutter or something that will increase frame rates? Will Microsoft ever make it easy for using two different drives and not use hard coded installation paths? Right now to me that's the cost of using an SSD, and something I can probably deal with but not something I expect my parents to deal with.
I don't see any reason to upgrade to one yet when my 7200 rpm drive works fine. I'm sure something else will come along that improves on the current tech before I ever upgrade to a SSD.
My laptop has a hybrid drive and it is nice to boot into Windows in <15 sec. That being said, what's the big deal with waiting another 30-45-sec with a mechanical drive? Have we become that impatient? (rhetorical, I know the answer...I see it driving to work on the highway every day) I'm not buying an SSD until I can get a TB for <$200. Shaving seconds of load times doesn't matter to me...it is seconds. I'd rather funnel the money into games or a CPU/GPU/PSU upgrade. That's just me though.
If I am missing the point of the value of having an SSD someone please enlighten me....
What they are saying is that an SSD will always require power because its pretty much a bunch of memory chips. They probably have an internal battery as well. If they lose power entirely, they will probably be wiped clean. An HDD only requires power when its reading or writing information because it creates a physical 0 or 1 on a platter. So if you are not doing much reading and writing, it will require less power overall. When an HDD is reading and writing it will use more power.
Solid state drives do not require power when the machine is turned off. That's why you can unplug an SSD, take it to a different computer, plug it in, and the data is still there. For that matter, that NAND flash is non-volatile (the technical term for "doesn't lose data when it loses power") is the reason why USB flash drives can transfer data from one computer to another.
Nor do SSDs have internal batteries meant to power the entire drive. Some high end models have had a supercapacitor to be able to power the drive long enough to clear the cache and shut down gracefully in the event of power loss, but you're probably looking at a fraction of a second for that.
The site that vgamer linked to is probably very old. It proposes RAM drives as one of the two kinds of solid state drives. RAM drives were a viable option for some things six years ago because SSDs were still so bad, but it's been a while since I heard much about them. RAM drives do use far more power for a given capacity, and do get wiped when they lose power, just like system memory.
Hard drives use far more power than SSDs at idle. For example, here's what Western Digital says about their Caviar Green hard drives:
The lowest power drive in the whole lineup is 3.7 W at load, 2.1 W at idle, 0.4 W in sleep mode. By comparison, SSDs are often about that high at load, almost invariably much lower power at idle, and sometimes even lower power at active idle than the hard drive is in sleep mode.
And remember that Caviar Green is Western Digital's low power line. A 2 TB Caviar Black is rated at 10.7 W when active. And even those numbers are steady state, when the drive only has to keep platters spinning at the same rate that they're already spinning at. Trying to spin up platters takes far more power, as a solid platter spinning at 120 revolutions per second has a fair bit of kinetic energy that has to come from somewhere; Western Digital put some Caviar Blue drives at over 30 W for that.
Another key point to remember is that except under very unusual loads (e.g., synthetic benchmarks), SSDs are nearly always idle. A small read might take a hard drive 10 ms, but the SSD can do it in 0.2 ms and return to idle. For any battery life considerations, the idle power consumption is basically all that matters. And some SSDs are under 0.2 W there, though others go over 1 W.
My laptop has a hybrid drive and it is nice to boot into Windows in <15 sec. That being said, what's the big deal with waiting another 30-45-sec with a mechanical drive? Have we become that impatient? (rhetorical, I know the answer...I see it driving to work on the highway every day) I'm not buying an SSD until I can get a TB for <$200. Shaving seconds of load times doesn't matter to me...it is seconds. I'd rather funnel the money into games or a CPU/GPU/PSU upgrade. That's just me though.
If I am missing the point of the value of having an SSD someone please enlighten me....
It's not just boot times. Every time your computer makes you wait, unless it's a large Internet download, you'd probably have to wait a lot less if you had an SSD. That includes program load times, zoning in games, and a lot of slight delays that you've probably grown so accustomed to that you don't realize that it could be otherwise.
How much value is there in a computer that just does what you tell it, when you tell it, rather than getting around to it sometime later? I see quite a bit.
Comments
Anecdotal evidence makes you an average person not.
I mean, don't get me wrong i get where you're coming from. But you're clearly a power user and not an average person.
Also, just out of curiosity, what games are you playing that are 30-40gb?
It's really preferable to get both if you have need for space. Like lot of pictures, videos, music or games.
Once I find money I will change my ultrabooks HDD into SSD and same for my other desktop. The speed is very noticable once you have gotten used to it.
Is anyone on an mmo gaming site an avg user ?
Tera is 34 SWTOR is 25
My largest single player games are 16-18 GBs
If you're short on money and you buy an ultrabook, you're doing it wrong. Especially an ultrabook without an SSD.
Pretty happy with my Intel 520 SSD. Windows 8.1 with disabled quickboot boots in less than 12 seconds from cold boot. Although yeah, I get to use the term "This game is not worth the write cycles" :DD There are many of those lately too!
The only game that sticks to the SSD on my PC is Guild Wars 2 which is around 20 gigs. The rest I quickly move to HDD or simply install there .... because they are not worth the write cycles
Storage over performance.
The average pc user, even gamer, is more concerned with having more storage than they are with getting a slight performance increase with considerably less storage at a still higher price point.
The average pc user just wants their crap to load and games to play. Spending slightly more on a 3rd of the storage so that the computer and applications boot 2 seconds faster really isn't a deal to most people.
The example I read about the guy who was told he put a limiter on his PC by installing a HD is nonsense. The guy was only trying to sell him something he doesn't really need, and the performance increase isn't making that big a difference. Were talkîng about time measured in MILLISECONDS, and an SSD does not increase frame rate in games no matter what intel says. SSD and gaming performance is a myth perpetrated by a company trying to sell its product to people who don't need it.
The people that benefit the most from an SSD are the ones who need to run multiple programs at once, like people that bot multiple game clients at the same time. An SSD would be of more benefit to me doing digital art than it ever would to someone playing WoW, unless that guy was botting six WoW clients on the same machine, and I would still get more of a benefit out of it.
Yea even when they were more expensive a 60gig ssd was a great boot drive. My rig has a 60 gig boot drive, 240 gig for games, and a 1 tb HDD for media. If it wasn't for 1080p video I really wouldn't have a need for a HDD.For laptops, I have no idea why you would use an HDD. I would use an ssd for its ability to suffer an impact from a fall alone.
Yea, i get that. But I was talking about people in general and not just us gamers.
The whole argument of "SSDs are to expensive" doesn't even hold up when talking about mmo gamers exclusively either. Given the overwhelming benefits we gain from using one to not using one, and with how cheap they already are now, any gamer who doesn't have one is merely gimping themselves.
It's not a slight performance increase. If you built a $600 computer with a good SSD and a $2000 computer with no SSD and otherwise spent the money sensibly on each, and then asked someone who wasn't at all tech savvy to use both for a bit and say which computer was faster, he'd say that the $600 computer with the SSD was faster--and that it wasn't close.
Yes, we're talking about time measured in milliseconds, at least for hard drives. For SSDs, it's often in microseconds. For system memory, it's nanoseconds. For some CPU purposes, it's picoseconds. But if something reliably takes 100 picoseconds longer on this CPU than on that one, that can mean that this CPU is considerably slower than that one. Small time differences multiplied by doing something an enormous number of times can easily add up to things that are noticeable to humans. For example, the main thrust of DirectX 12 is to reduce the performance hit of certain operations that currently take tens or hundreds of nanoseconds on typical hardware.
The only improvement it will have on an mmo is when you boot the client. It will have no noticable effect on how the game performs.
^ This
The only reason I haven't done yet is I don't want to have to call MS to let me install my OS again (stupid license/installation restrictions)
Raquelis in various games
Played: Everything
Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6
Wants: The World
Anticipating: Everquest Next Crowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
Just semi-hijacking as you're all talking about SSD. Apologies to OP
My brother recently bought a PC which came with a 2TB HDD and a 64gb SSD. He left me to set it all up for him. I figured "why not install the OS to the SSD?" which I did. As soon as Windows was finished installing and I went to see how the PC ran, it was unbelievably laggy. Firefox was taking like 2 minutes to load up, web pages were running extremely slow etc. I made sure there were no unnecessary processes/programs running, and even restarted several times, but it still ran like crap.
In the end I just decided to reinstall the OS on the 2TB HDD instead, and now a week later it's been running smooth as hell all week. No lag, no stuttering, nothing. My brother and I are quite confused about this, as we'd heard many great things about SSD in the past, and we couldn't understand why the whole PC was running like crap. We figured it may have been down to the fact that the SSD was only 64gb, and Windows 8.1 which we installed seemed to take around 35gb or so. Could that have been the case, was the SSD just too small?
Exactly which SSD was it? Some of the early SSDs were terrible, and prone to behavior like that.
The details vary wildly from game to game, but in many games, an SSD will make loading screens much, much shorter. If a game tries to load a lot of stuff while you're playing without a loading screen sometimes benefit greatly from an SSD, though it depends on how aggressive about loading they are. Vanguard, for example, should have put an SSD on the system requirements to play the game.
Yep, that is why. Due to the size, you'd have to choose between an OS or a game. If the drive was larger, you could get by with the OS, a few choice programs (like Firefox or Chrome), and a game.
It's the same problem you would run into with a normal drive. The closer you get to 80% capacity, the slower the system is going to run.
Raquelis in various games
Played: Everything
Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6
Wants: The World
Anticipating: Everquest Next Crowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
I think the technology has matured enough at this point that they're worth getting. Price for some of the larger capacity drives can be a bit of a barrier to some though. I have a 128gb and looking back I wish I had a 256gb so I could have more apps/games installed on it. I have Windows 7, some misc apps and only one game installed on my SSD. Other games have to be installed on one of my old mechanical drives.
There's game releases getting up to over 40gb in size nowadays, so I don't think SSD will be cost-effective for newer games for a while.
In Lineage 2 it makes a huge difference. The real pvpers use SSDs because when you port around the world you want the game to load as fast as possible. You don't want to port somewhere and have a 5 second black screen load only to see your character dead on the ground killed from a war tag that you never saw. I cant speak for other games but I can say first hand it makes a difference in Lineage 2.
Im confused. I read here that some people said SSDs consume less power, yet this site says the opposite. Which is it?
http://www.solidstatestorage.co.uk/adssd.html
What they are saying is that an SSD will always require power because its pretty much a bunch of memory chips. They probably have an internal battery as well. If they lose power entirely, they will probably be wiped clean. An HDD only requires power when its reading or writing information because it creates a physical 0 or 1 on a platter. So if you are not doing much reading and writing, it will require less power overall. When an HDD is reading and writing it will use more power.
When it comes to post loading, an SSD makes an impact with Microstutter. This is due to the fact an HDD has to wind-up in order to retrieve info where as an SSD does not. However, the comment that its vastly useful post load is false. A developer who requires more than 70 MB/s reading off a disk drive for a game is doing their programming wrong at this current point. No matter what disk drive you use, doing large active reads from a hard disk is a bad idea for real-time games. Its much better to load it into memory and move into 64-bit computing. This is either done by loading the assets into memory before hand, or by loading the necessary assets and staggering loading the remaining assets once in the game. For real-time gaming, the real data transferring happens from the memory modules to the GPU.
To me the benefit of an SSD is loading applications and the OS, and installing updates/applications. Will the general consumer care about waiting 2 or 3 more seconds to open an application at the expense of several hundred dollars and possible data instability? If the consumer is on a budget, would they rather get something that might reduce micro stutter or something that will increase frame rates? Will Microsoft ever make it easy for using two different drives and not use hard coded installation paths? Right now to me that's the cost of using an SSD, and something I can probably deal with but not something I expect my parents to deal with.
My laptop has a hybrid drive and it is nice to boot into Windows in <15 sec. That being said, what's the big deal with waiting another 30-45-sec with a mechanical drive? Have we become that impatient? (rhetorical, I know the answer...I see it driving to work on the highway every day) I'm not buying an SSD until I can get a TB for <$200. Shaving seconds of load times doesn't matter to me...it is seconds. I'd rather funnel the money into games or a CPU/GPU/PSU upgrade. That's just me though.
If I am missing the point of the value of having an SSD someone please enlighten me....
Solid state drives do not require power when the machine is turned off. That's why you can unplug an SSD, take it to a different computer, plug it in, and the data is still there. For that matter, that NAND flash is non-volatile (the technical term for "doesn't lose data when it loses power") is the reason why USB flash drives can transfer data from one computer to another.
Nor do SSDs have internal batteries meant to power the entire drive. Some high end models have had a supercapacitor to be able to power the drive long enough to clear the cache and shut down gracefully in the event of power loss, but you're probably looking at a fraction of a second for that.
The site that vgamer linked to is probably very old. It proposes RAM drives as one of the two kinds of solid state drives. RAM drives were a viable option for some things six years ago because SSDs were still so bad, but it's been a while since I heard much about them. RAM drives do use far more power for a given capacity, and do get wiped when they lose power, just like system memory.
Hard drives use far more power than SSDs at idle. For example, here's what Western Digital says about their Caviar Green hard drives:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEMQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wdc.com%2Fwdproducts%2Flibrary%2FSpecSheet%2FENG%2F2879-701229.pdf&ei=phuNU4HmEdStsATf74D4Aw&usg=AFQjCNGivAqxiMNlPQ3Wnn9ABcGTUA5SKg&sig2=FxmUy0kauPUezlPMHiITdQ&bvm=bv.68191837,d.cWc
The lowest power drive in the whole lineup is 3.7 W at load, 2.1 W at idle, 0.4 W in sleep mode. By comparison, SSDs are often about that high at load, almost invariably much lower power at idle, and sometimes even lower power at active idle than the hard drive is in sleep mode.
And remember that Caviar Green is Western Digital's low power line. A 2 TB Caviar Black is rated at 10.7 W when active. And even those numbers are steady state, when the drive only has to keep platters spinning at the same rate that they're already spinning at. Trying to spin up platters takes far more power, as a solid platter spinning at 120 revolutions per second has a fair bit of kinetic energy that has to come from somewhere; Western Digital put some Caviar Blue drives at over 30 W for that.
Another key point to remember is that except under very unusual loads (e.g., synthetic benchmarks), SSDs are nearly always idle. A small read might take a hard drive 10 ms, but the SSD can do it in 0.2 ms and return to idle. For any battery life considerations, the idle power consumption is basically all that matters. And some SSDs are under 0.2 W there, though others go over 1 W.
It's not just boot times. Every time your computer makes you wait, unless it's a large Internet download, you'd probably have to wait a lot less if you had an SSD. That includes program load times, zoning in games, and a lot of slight delays that you've probably grown so accustomed to that you don't realize that it could be otherwise.
How much value is there in a computer that just does what you tell it, when you tell it, rather than getting around to it sometime later? I see quite a bit.