Are SSD's worth it?

[orangecat]

Just a faster boot times.

Not entirely true its just more then boot times. When opening folders or software on your SSD the load times even just for opening Windows Explorer are a ton faster. it overall makes your day to day computing experience way better IMO. I can't live without my SSD.

[phillychuck]

There are videos on youtube from the early days of SSDs showing a system booting up and like 30 applications opening at once, side by side with a HDD.  That was one of the first things that made me want one.

 

There are no moving parts, no 'fragmentation' that matters for throughput.  Some firmwares are better at keeping the drive speedy over time, and TRIM (the OS command to tell the SSD to tidy itself) being essential, so no dinosaur windows plz.

 

I spent $230 on the first 128gb SSD, still at 99% life and running in a secondary system.  Spent $170 on the 250GB SSD I'm using now, its not about space tho, its the speed.

[solomongrundy]

what? If I'm running Windows 8 I shouldn't bother with a SSD? Sense, you make none.

If you're going to run windows 8, I wouldn't bother.

For a windows 7 system though, the benefits of having a good SSD for your boot drive are definitely more apparent.

Just keep your program files and OS on the SSD if you get one.

[jbr]

Just a faster boot times.

 

Not true.

 

They also eliminate texture popping,  LOD switching and microstutter issues in games that stream a lot of data off the drive.

 

The Arma series benefits from SSD's enormously for example.

 

The ability to Load/Save files much faster also saves money if you rely on a fast turnaround on your work.

 

File searches are a hell of a lot faster......Video rendering speed in increased.

[jbr]

can be mounted sideways without gravity affecting the needle, cause there isnt one.

HDD's don't use a needle.

The read/write head floats on a cushion of air created by the spinning of the platters.

[phillychuck]

HDD's don't use a needle.

The read/write head floats on a cushion of air created by the spinning of the platters.

 

That brings up another aspect of SSD, people care so much about how reliable SSD are, bang on a HDD a little too hard when its spinning and that airplane crashes into your data destroying it.

[Elbstrand]

Basically everything is faster and better with SSDs :D

[nickpc]

yes

[Humbug]

We enthusiasts always talk about bottlenecks. Well mechanical HDDs are massive bottlenecks to the rest of our system which don't have moving parts and process data at unimaginable rates. There is no other way to make your PC feel as fast as it should be in general windows, loading times and responsiveness etc. If I was to dumb this down for a non-techie I would say a mechanical HDD cannot feed data as fast as the rest of the system can process it.

 

SSD's have limited read and write speeds compared to tradition HDD's. They do have greatly improved read and write speeds though

:huh:

[TTesla]

Worth it? YES YES YES. expensive? Sorta, but more expensive the hdds

[SubTract]

YES! :)

It will make more noticeable difference in every-day use than anything else you could upgrade.

[Jebonia]

If you are building a rig over $1l, i think you should have an SSD in it. I personally took a while to join the SSD Bandwagon. I have BF3 installed on my ssd and helps me. I get into the maps really fast. Most of the other people don't load in as fast as me. I usually get to take the first set of mcoms because the enemies have not loaded in yet. Whether or not you think this is worth the price is your decision and no one else. That is the beauty of building a pc. You choose the parts for your needs.

[Godlygamer23]

SSDs also don't require defragging. They do require Trim, which can be performed automatically by your OS[that supports it] or by the SSD itself(garbage collection).

[Eric1024]

Most day to day workloads consist of random IOPS. This means lots of small files being opened (starting your computer, opening a game, opening a program, etc). Starting a large program usually involves opening hundreds to thousands of small files. On an hdd these means hundreds or thousands of seek operations, which might take about 10ms each, meaning you only get about 100/second, or 100 IOPS. SSDs on the other hand can get up to 100k iops, which is a 1000x speedup. Granted most SSDs aren't that fast, even a slow SSD can push 20k IOPS, which is still 200x what an HDD can do. The difference is especially obvious with a fragmented HDD vs SSD because SSDs don't suffer from fragmentation slowdown. 

[ErickS89]

I personally don't store games unless I buy several SDDs and run in Raid0 as at this point in time SSDs are not cheap well size to price ratio anyway.

Intel or Samsung, you can't go wrong.

 

Personally just get a few 4TB hDDs and a 256GB or 512GB SSD for your main apps and the others for games.

[Lays]

totally worth it, also get something like intel 520 series or samsung 840 pro, they offer 5 year warranties which means they expect the product to last well over 5 years, if not 7-10 years.

[CwGoh]

Get one. Especially is the build is your main one where you'll be doing work on it. The 4K random performance really helps to eliminate those hangs when you've got a million programmes open. If it is purely for gaming, just get a hard drive and use the extra cash on a better GPU.