SSD's on new PC's

happyhero

Hi I am thinking of buying a new PC and have ended up doing the usual of looking at doing something to my old PC and deciding in upgrading instead but that made me look at SSD's on Amazon and I saw how people swapped a drive for one of these and were amazed at how much difference it made.

I see many new PC's come with a normal dive and a SSD of varying sizes but what are they being used for is it for the programs , i.e. Windows, Office etc., or is the SSD intended for the work you do or files/photos/music you save?

I would have guessed that if they make so much difference that it would be best to put the programs on them to speed the basics up, would you agree?

Why if these drives are so much better are they putting an ordinary drive in the PC as well as the SSD why not just put 2 SSD drives or one big one, is this just down to cost or are there other reasons?

Strider590

SSD for the OS and programs/games/etc

HDD for storage and anything that doesn't benefit from those fast access times.


In the real world however, those lines tend to blur.

googler

The SSD is intended for the OS and the programs, and the regular disc for data.

The SSD will have a small capacity, the regular disc large.

Large capacity SSDs are expensive. You get a 120Gb for £50, where £60 gets you a 1Tb regular drive.

Cycrow

The main reason you still get normal HDD's in new pcs is just cost and space.

a 2TB HDD, costs about £60, for the same price, you will get a 120GB SSD, which is quite a difference in size

SSD's tend to be much smaller in capacity, with the larger ones costing alot. Things have changed considerably in the last year however, as the price of them continues to drop and their size increases.

Most people tend to put the OS onto them, which will help the boot speed of the computer. As well as their most used programs

b33r

Purely Cost. Anything over 256Gb in SSD starts getting a bit pricey. Put the OS, frequently used programmes and "current" documents on the SSD, put everything else (videos, picture archives, music etc.) on a storage (regular HDD) drive.

Don't forget to back up either regularly or automatically by getting more discs and configuring RAID

happyhero

Thanks guys for the rapid answers and probably a bit off topic but this PC that I fancy has a fairly big SSD and what looks like great spec, yet is so cheap in comparison to anywhere else, ie try Dell for instance is there a reason I should be aware of. I cannot seem to match this spec anywhere else for the same price let alone any less?

http://www.medion.com/gb/shop/gaming-pcs-medion-erazer-x5379-e-pc-310020101.html?wt_mc=gb.intern.StdProducts.welcome.on-ma&wt_cc1=1_1&wt_cc2=Intel-Placement3&wt_cc3=MEDION%20ERAZER%20X5379%20E%20PC

grumbler

happyhero wrote: »

I see many new PC's come with a normal dive and a SSD of varying sizes but what are they being used for is it for the programs , i.e. Windows, Office etc., or is the SSD intended for the work you do or files/photos/music you save?

For the OS in the first place, then for the programs used most frequently, then for frequently used big files.
However, I think the main improvement you can expect is only in the startup time, starting programs and loading/saving big files.

For music and photos I think SSD isn't needed.

Why if these drives are so much better are they putting an ordinary drive in the PC as well as the SSD why not just put 2 SSD drives or one big one, is this just down to cost or are there other reasons?

Yes, SSDs are much more expensive in terms of the price of 1Gb.
1Tb HDD is ~£50 (or, say, 3Tb for ~100)
1Tb SSD is ~£250. Most common ones are 128-256 Gb.

Fightsback

What is the machine that you are thinking of putting an SSD into, make and exact model please ?

NB you can get a 250GB SSD for around the £65 mark now and prices are dropping all the time.

happyhero

I have currently have a Medion Intel Quad core Q8200 2.33GHz with 4 GB of ram and a 1.6 TB hardrive and 32bit system and I use several browsers with many tabs open at once for the finanancial type work I do at home.

I find after 5 years with this PC it takes forever to load up about 10 minutes before it responds properly and it feels taxed when I have all the tabs open, ie a bit slow. My broadband is coming through at about 8.

It also has Vista on it which seems to be slowly heading towards not being so supported.

So although I could try to sort it out I think many problems would get sorted better with a new PC with Windows 10 and a SSD etc.

bluenoseam

Even in terms of programs, not all need to be on the SSD, I've got my OS & my most commonly played game on there (WoW...) but almost all the other games on the mechanical drive. It should also be noted that I've only just switched to an SSD with the new build, I don't notice that much of a difference between Warcrack & say Starcraft which is installed on the mechanical drive.

Love the fact windows however starts up in about 7 seconds & closes down in less than that!

grumbler

As based on my experience, extra RAM can make a big difference for several browsers with many tabs open, but AFAIK you'll need to upgrade to 64bit for this.

My old PC with 4Gb was always struggling to cope close to 90-95% of memory in use.
The new one always uses more than 4Gb, mainly because of the FF with 2-3 windows and numerous tabs.