SSD replacing hard drive, worth it?

boxst

I have to re-install Windows as all my dodgy installing / uninstalling of various programs has made it slow.

There are a few offers around for 64gb/SSD drives for £60-£70 and just wondered if it really did speed things up?

Any experiences or better prices?

Thanks.

Steve

S0litaire

It will be faster with anything that needs a lot of reading and writing to the drive, So it will Startup and programs will load faster, but things like games, you won't see much difference.

Note that Windows will take up anything between 6Gb - 20Gb (also +4Gb or so of swap and Hibernate files!) so the 64Gb will run out quickly.

If it's a Desktop then use your old HDD to store your My Documents and keep the SSD for the OS and Programs.

Hammyman

S0litaire wrote: »

Note that Windows will take up anything between 6Gb - 20Gb (also +4Gb or so of swap and Hibernate files!) so the 64Gb will run out quickly.

Not for most people. My main drive has never got near that despite having my entire music collection, plenty of games and software installed. You can always get a large capacity drive and a USB caddy for storing films, photos etc.

thebyp

Yes it does speed up your PC but it depends what you are doing. Intensive IO stuff will see the best return however the size will be a limiting factor.

I would quite happily recommend the drive just because of the speed boost at bootup, but by extension gaming and photoshopping is also much more snappy.

A.Penny.Saved

Intel has just announced some new SSD drives which promise to be quite fast but not the fastest but are meant to be fairly well priced.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/28/intel_320_ssd/

Pinkypants

Think noone has mentioned is that SSD should only be recommended on Windows7, I think. Something to do with them not being defragged.

If you have Win 7 use the SSD for programmes that you want to run faster and install all the rest of the programmes on a Slave HDD.

thebyp

you can use SSD's with Vista, XP and of course the various linux distros.

KillerWatt

thebyp wrote: »

you can use SSD's with Vista, XP and of course the various linux distros.

Don't know about the various *nix distro's, but XP & Vista don't offer TRIM support.

sharkie

the ram drive cards are MUCH faster, and more expensive. What you may need is a large data drive to store all the programs, and one of these drives for the os and swap file.

Not all ssd drives are created equal and have different specs.

youtube has some good examples of ssd systems.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-056-OC&groupid=1657&catid=1660&subcat=
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-057-OC&groupid=1657&catid=1660&subcat=

thebyp

KillerWatt wrote: »

Don't know about the various *nix distro's, but XP & Vista don't offer TRIM support.

Quite right, Vista doesn't have native TRIM support (but then Vista doesn't do anything voluntarily ) however there is 3rd party support available (Garbage, wiper etc) which will resolve the issue.

alexlyne

I have win7 on a 30GB OCZ vertex... and haven't looked back since. I actually have 2 drives that I RAIDed together on a sata 6gb mobo, and it flew. Until the array broke

Anyways, have them separate now and don't notice any difference tbh. But compared to a HDD these things A. fly, and B. keep flying even when you've loaded all you freeware/spamware/viruses etc onto the OS. All other computers I use now are horrible in comparison. 30GB is enough for OS and my main programs. Data (including my docs and temp directories) is kept on a HDD.

Look at the read/write speeds and IOps - I'm not an expert at all, but high IOps is better than fast r/w speeds, but few manufs state what these are, in which case look at r/w speeds.