SSD's

[Pyx]

Why You Absolutely Need an SSD (source: Anandtech.com)

Compared to mechanical hard drives, SSDs continue to be a disruptive technology. These days it’s difficult to convince folks to spend more money, but I can’t stress the difference in user experience between a mechanical HDD and a good SSD. In every major article I’ve written about SSDs I’ve provided at least one benchmark that sums up exactly why you’d want an SSD over even a RAID array of HDDs. Today’s article is no different.

The Fresh Test, as I like to call it, involves booting up your PC and timing how long it takes to run a handful of applications. I always mix up the applications and this time I’m actually going with a lighter lineup: World of Warcraft, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Firefox 3.5.1.

Other than those three applications, the system was a clean install - I didn’t even have any anti-virus running. This is easily the best case scenario for a hard drive and on the world’s fastest desktop hard drive, a Western Digital VelociRaptor, the whole process took 31 seconds.

And on Intel’s X25-M SSD? Just 6.6 seconds.

A difference of 24 seconds hardly seems like much, until you actually think about it in terms of PC response time. We expect our computers to react immediately to input; even waiting 6.6 seconds is an eternity. Waiting 31 seconds is agony in the PC world. Worst of all? This is on a Core i7 system. To have the world’s fastest CPU and to have to wait half a minute for a couple of apps to launch is just wrong.

[...]

I don’t know how else to say this: it’s an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive. It’s the difference between a hang glider and the space shuttle; both will fly, it’s just that one takes you to space. And I don’t care that you can buy a super fast or high flying hang glider either.

[Jaera]

meh! who cares about load times within reason! :@)

[Pyx]

I know I will enjoy mine (yay, I finally ordered the WoW rig!).

[Jaera]

shame on you! its all about the fps baby!

[Elhaz]

Work out the number of pixels less. its not much.

anyway check your crysis warhead fps, I bet it isnt much more than 30. it feels more because of the motion blur.

Well, with my bad maths skills I came up with 230400 pixels less. Lot's of numbers, yes. But I think I'll still keep this silly console res TV.

And in warhead, my fps most of the time was 40-45. In crysis I got 48-56 most of the time. Wasn't warhaed supposed to be more "lighter"?

[Jaera]

nope. was supposed to be more optimised, but it also had a more graphical effects.

[Zarhan]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... SSD_market

Maybe not yet time to shell out for that SSD. I mean, if your motherboard can have a cache that keeps your wow.exe and windows startup fast...

[Pyx]

Too late, bought it and loving it

[Alikh]

Intel is coming for you! They'll grab your beloved SSD from you and torture it with you watching helplessly. Soon, you'll wish you had never bought one.

[Pyx]

But, but, mine is from Intel ...

[Pyx]

Finally a more decent benchmark, which can put SSD's in perspective.

[dyron]

Friend of me is using 2 of them now and so far they seem very nice. Only downside we did see so far is when defragging them they will become slower but i think its since they use different kind of tech so its not realy needed to defragg. He did need to make them fresh again before they did reach the speed they should again

[Jaera]

i heard defragging is bad for them owing to them having a limited number of writes before buggering up.

[Pyx]

Aye, defragging = bad, TRIM & Windows 7 = good.