SSD vs Hdd

[MaSonZ]

birthday is cpmong up and i plan on spoiling myself alittle. ive seen a lot of rigs with Ssd's for the os. my question is would it be of benefit to put my os on one as opposed to my hdd? also, any suggestions if it wpuld be of benefit.

[Tigger29]

birthday is cpmong up and i plan on spoiling myself alittle. ive seen a lot of rigs with Ssd's for the os. my question is would it be of benefit to put my os on one as opposed to my hdd? also, any suggestions if it wpuld be of benefit.

Positives = Faster boot time, faster load time, no stutters while loading textures, etc.

Negatives = A technology still in its infancy.. on maybe not an infant anymore but maybe a toddler, when it crashes you lose EVERYTHING, SSD's gradually get slower as you use them - even though they are better than they were this is still a factor, sometimes firmware updates blank out the drive (although I've heard they are better with this too), special settings have to be made in order to take full advantage of one.. especially if you're running XP or Vista.

For me?  Still not worth it.  It doesn't bother me to have to wait 90 seconds or so to boot windows and 5 seconds or so to load a program.  I'm not completely sold that the extra performance of an SSD is worth the hassle.  Perhaps in another couple of years I'll change my mind when the technology becomes more mature and less expensive.

[Delirium]

Unless you have money to burn, don't buy the SSD just yet. Until the newer operating systems can limit the amount of writes on the drive (not to mention until AH allows you to designate a different folder for films, screen shots, etc) they are going to have a limited life cycle.

You're better off with a Raptor, but those things also fail more than Tyrannis on the forums. Well, maybe not that much. 

[TequilaChaser]

it all depends on what you want out of your PC, performance wise.....

I debated long and hard whether to remain using the regular platter type Hard Drives  to upgrading to the supposedly faster Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000 RPM Hard Drives to upgrading to a decent sized SSD ( 64 GB , 80 GB, 120 GB , 128 GB  range )

I decided to go with a particular manufacturer of SSD because the life span was spec'ed for min. of 5 Years.............. so my options and choices weighed out that it was worth the extreme increase in performance that I could be using for a basically guaranteed 5 years service life on the SSD

I had originally decided to bite the bullet and bought the 450 GB WD Velociraptor 6.0 GB/s SATA III , which performed damn near identical/equal to my hitachi 1 TB 7,200 RPM & hitachi 1.5 TB 7,200 RPM drive ..............which both of the hitachi's cost less together than the WD Velociraptor.......

well, I then bought a 128 GB SSD 6.0 GB/s SATA III  and it costs $5 less than that same WD Velociraptor....... but the performance is breathtaking


some SSD's  firmware / drivers  have had severe setbacks and plagued with problems, but their are a few out there that are damn near problem free and very stable


Delirium brings up a valid point, and it plagued me on my first time around.........  I film almost every flight, and films will eat up a Hard Drive's storage space very quickly.....

I seriously hope HTC ( Aces high ) will eventually give us an option of saving our films to our own desired folder / drive!  instead of the automatic films saved to films sub directory like it currently is....

all though, Aces High was like click the Icon , blink your eye, you are logged in....... no hesitation in going from clicking on n Arena to being in the Tower

no hesitation from pressing the PC Power Button to typing in your password to log on to your desktop ( If You Use a  Password to log in )........  I like to see what is loading and I do not use the startup logo screen, I want to quickly scan everything from controllers initializing to memory quick test to IRQ settings, etc....  so I had to initiate a 10 second pause in my boot up sequence in my BIOS........... without it I was instantly looking at my desktop login screen

Graphics programs loaded at the bat of an eye..... AutoCad loaded like I was clicking   notepad instead.........

an SSD is just another PC component.......... like a PSU  or a GPU  or your Memory ( hell an SSD is Memory to be honest........  it is Flash Memory DIMMs  stacked on to a controller card then inclosed in a case for the SATA type SSD's  anyways.....  some of the PCIe type SSD's are open/uncovered  controller cards with Memory DIMM's on them............ just like a video card

some people buy very cheap $30 dollar PSU's ( Power Supplys ) ........... while some people will buy good quality $199.00 PSU's....  <-----  same  scenario can be applied towards video cards,, sound cards,  hard drives,  PC Cases.....  Monitors, Joysticks/Game Controllers, Keyboards,  Mouses,  System Memory,  Motherboards......... etc.......

I look at SSD's  like I look at any other Computer Component these days.......  after experiencing the exceptional performance increaseover the old regular HD's


sorry........ I went on a rant there ......... hope some of this makes sense



TC

[Delirium]

Delirium brings up a valid point, and it plagued me on my first time around.........  I film almost every flight, and films will eat up a Hard Drive's storage space very quickly.....

I seriously hope HTC ( Aces high ) will eventually give us an option of saving our films to our own desired folder / drive!  instead of the automatic films saved to films sub directory like it currently is....

Way ahead of you, brother,  note the date when I asked for this wish.

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,274478.0.html

[Tigger29]

SSD's are UBER and I'm a Fanboi so I'll defend them to my death! 

Oh there's no doubt that an SSD brings a level of speed unheard of as compared to a normal HDD but the true question is.. just how useful IS this performance?  If I had to choose between the speed of a SSD or the storage space of a HDD for the same amount of money I'd have to admit that I'd rather have the storage.  Why?  Because aside from shaving 60-80 seconds off of my boot time and 4-5 seconds off of loading programs there really is no performance benefit to be had from an SSD that I would be able to take advantage of.

Now in your case you use autocad which does do a lot of disk writes so I'd imagine it would boost your performance by quite a bit *BUT* I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of home computer users wouldn't even know how to touch that software let alone use it for any kind of productivity.

In my case (and probably many people here) the most processor intensive programs I run is Aces High and Flight Simulator X - and in that case installing an SSD would be for the most part a waste of money, unless having a (traditionally) unreliable and possibly problematic drive is worth booting to windows 60 seconds faster.  I definitely won't see any performance increase in aces high - other than loading faster.  Heck I usually use that time to recycle some beverages anyway!

I think the SSD craze right now is more about placebo effect than anything.  They see windows boot faster and as a result think their computer is faster all around but this isn't really the case.  I've seen people sink thousands of dollars on SSD arrays only to brag about how much better their FPS is in WoW, then a few months later they complain because they lost everything to a crash...

By the way that quote was just me being funny.  I really didn't think your post was all that fanboyish..

[MrRiplEy[H]]

In windows 7 you can create a symlink that will link any folder you wish to any location you desire. I.e. another drive for example. That way AH thinks it's saving everything to a default location but actually the data goes to an another drive.

[Skuzzy]

Took Microsoft long enough to implement symbolic links as that tech has been around since 1979.  What is the user interface to it?

My home computer boots to the desktop in 5 to 6 seconds.  I really do not see the need for an SSD, for me.  Even when I working on a large video project, I never notice any type of stalls or lags.

Storage is more important for me as some of these newer HD video projects are consuming 400GBs of space for a few hours worth of video, before transcoding.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Took Microsoft long enough to implement symbolic links as that tech has been around since 1979.  What is the user interface to it?

My home computer boots to the desktop in 5 to 6 seconds.  I really do not see the need for an SSD, for me.  Even when I working on a large video project, I never notice any type of stalls or lags.

Storage is more important for me as some of these newer HD video projects are consuming 400GBs of space for a few hours worth of video, before transcoding.

Example (you need admin privileges to do this, open command prompt 'as administrator'):

To create a symbolic link named MyDocs from the root directory to the \Users\User1\Documents directory, type:

mklink /D \MyDocs \Users\User1\Documents

Borrowed shamelessly from: http://www.windows7home.net/how-to-create-symbolic-link-in-windows-7/

Here's an interesting new product: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1744/1/ OCZ Revodrive hybrid which uses revodrive SSD as a cache + 1Tb spinner hd.

[ink]

Took Microsoft long enough to implement symbolic links as that tech has been around since 1979.  What is the user interface to it?

My home computer boots to the desktop in 5 to 6 seconds.  I really do not see the need for an SSD, for me.  Even when I working on a large video project, I never notice any type of stalls or lags.

Storage is more important for me as some of these newer HD video projects are consuming 400GBs of space for a few hours worth of video, before transcoding.

damn......I thought mine was fast

I have my OS on a 7,200 HDD... I picked up a 10,000 RPM Velociraptor and have just AH on that drive, pretty happy with this old system....but damn...5-6 seconds and your at desk top....I would like to see that setup.

[Skuzzy]

Its Windows XP ink.  No way to make Windows 7 boot that fast.  I have 4 500GB Seagate NS model type drives.  No arrays, just straight up disks.

I have never timed how long it takes to get Aces High up and running, but I know it is only a couple of seconds, or so.


It is a long laundry list of things to do to consistently get that type of performance.

Nothing really special about the hardware, but the tweaking I do to ensure everything is on a synchronized clock.  Intel chipsets like 64Mhz boundaries.  Just FYI.

[ink]

Its Windows XP ink.  No way to make Windows 7 boot that fast.  I have 4 500GB Seagate NS model type drives.  No arrays, just straight up disks.

I have never timed how long it takes to get Aces High up and running, but I know it is only a couple of seconds, or so.


It is a long laundry list of things to do to consistently get that type of performance.

Nothing really special about the hardware, but the tweaking I do to ensure everything is on a synchronized clock.  Intel chipsets like 64Mhz boundaries.  Just FYI.

 im running xp myself....

2 TB of storage...haha...I remember my first comp I traded for some tattoo work, just for AH.....got it around 04, it was a 10 gig system, and man I thought that was huge

where are we gonna be in 10 years

[Skuzzy]

My first hard drive was a Shugart 8" hard drive which stored a whopping 8MB of data.  It served as a not-so-portable space heater as well.

I had 4 of those before the first 5 1/4" full height 5MB drives came out.  I waited until the 5 1/4" full height drives hit 30MB and with a SCSI interface before I got rid of the space heaters.

[ink]

 


your 





 

[Skuzzy]

your 


 

If you are just figuring that out,....then you are sloooooowwwwwww.