Point of SSDs?

[Bob Jim]

Hi,

 

 

So everyone knows that SSDs are meant to offer amazing boot times and application loading times, that everyone should get one, that they are amazing, everyone should bow down to them....!!!! Right...? No.

I cannot see the point of SSDs unless you are just building a crazy overkill system/have money to burn. Sure, ~25 seconds less boot time is ok, but... if you cannot wait 25 seconds more for your computer to boot up then tbh you are flat out impatient and need to change. As for people leaving and coming back to their computers often, just sleep it! And application boot time makes even less sense. What application actually takes that long to boot up anyways? Maybe loading a massive photoshop project or something.... or wait.... too big for SSD. What a shame.... Could someone PLEASE explain why everyone seems to love SSDs so much?

 

Thanks

[ZetZet]

SPEED. It's not just boot. EVERYTHING is faster.

[brokencross]

Write/Read speed, is it that hard to understand?

[Altecice]

Its not just about boot times its about load times of everything. Programs will launch quicker and are ALOT more responsive... I would have agreed with you a few years ago when they were really expensive but now its almost silly not to include one for a computer build for holding the OS.

[cesrai]

Write and read speed but about access time I'm not so sure.

Things feel more responsive and I can install an OS in less than 20 minutes with drivers included.

[Megahurt]

The systems just feels a lot more responsive, everything opens quicker, and can greatly reduce stutter when the system needs to acces the drive.

[Dzzope]

Hi,

 

 

So everyone knows that SSDs are meant to offer amazing boot times and application loading times, that everyone should get one, that they are amazing, everyone should bow down to them....!!!! Right...? No.

I cannot see the point of SSDs unless you are just building a crazy overkill system/have money to burn. Sure, ~25 seconds less boot time is ok, but... if you cannot wait 25 seconds more for your computer to boot up then tbh you are flat out impatient and need to change. As for people leaving and coming back to their computers often, just sleep it! And application boot time makes even less sense. What application actually takes that long to boot up anyways? Maybe loading a massive photoshop project or something.... or wait.... too big for SSD. What a shame.... Could someone PLEASE explain why everyone seems to love SSDs so much?

 

Thanks

Because the slowest thing in a system before SSD's was the storage..

 

If your booting a system, thats 25 sec.. Sure.. Plus steam.. plus skype... plus whatever else you run... plus chrom with 20 windows open..

 

It makes everything faster.. if you used a system with an ssd for a weekk and went back to HDD, you'd understand.

 

Is it the be all and end all... no.. but if you can squeeze $80 into the budget it'll get you a pretty good 240GB ssd.. they aren't that expensive but if it's to choose between that and a better GPU in a gaming rig(to a point)... go the GPU..

[NeatSquidYT]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4VsdfdZfyc

[minibois]

1. maybe a fresh install takes 25 seconds longer to boot on a HDD, but a new one.. No..

2. Many people use programs that take a long time to open.. Including Photoshop, but also a lot of other programs.

3. You seem to have made an opinion on SSD's already, so I don't feel like coming up with more stuff that wont impress you.

[minibois]

-snip-

What people with SSD's say to people with HDD's:

 

[Doughnutnator]

You don't have to defragment it, faster, safer, no noise.

 

Once you get a SSD you never go back. it's way better than a HDD

[AlwaysFSX]

And they're reliable as hell, you can throw it at a wall and not worry. SSDs are amazing and everyone should use them.

[AnnoyedShelf]

Hi,

 

 

So everyone knows that SSDs are meant to offer amazing boot times and application loading times, that everyone should get one, that they are amazing, everyone should bow down to them....!!!! Right...? No.

I cannot see the point of SSDs unless you are just building a crazy overkill system/have money to burn. Sure, ~25 seconds less boot time is ok, but... if you cannot wait 25 seconds more for your computer to boot up then tbh you are flat out impatient and need to change. As for people leaving and coming back to their computers often, just sleep it! And application boot time makes even less sense. What application actually takes that long to boot up anyways? Maybe loading a massive photoshop project or something.... or wait.... too big for SSD. What a shame.... Could someone PLEASE explain why everyone seems to love SSDs so much?

 

Thanks

They're not super expensive (at least now), ultra durable (dropping one won't destroy your data), and the performance gains are amazing.  You can go from waiting 5 minutes loading into a BF4 multiplayer game to loading in in under 30 seconds.

[AnnoyedShelf]

What people with SSD's say to people with HDD's:

 

[GlassBomb]

What other people have said, it's about having a faster, and more responsive system. Harddrives is a large limiting factor for moderns computer, and even SSD's to some part is holding back what can be achieved with something like NVMe.

 

Here are some results that PCPer did when they first got their hands on the Intel 750 SSD's that's using NVMe. At the bottom you will see a fast 'modern' harddrive, the 10k RPM Velciraptor. All the lines in the middle are different SSD's. Some in RAID, but most are not. And then try and figure out which one is the NVMe drive.

 

 

EDIT: Sanic tax.

[d4jsp]

Once you go SSD, you'll never go back to the hard-drive, EVER!

[Dzzope]

What other people have said, it's about having a faster, and more responsive system. Harddrives is a large limiting factor for moderns computer, and even SSD's to some part is holding back what can be achieved with something like NVMe.

 

Here are some results that PCPer did when they first got their hands on the Intel 750 SSD's that's using NVMe. At the bottom you will see a fast 'modern' harddrive, the 10k RPM Velciraptor. All the lines in the middle are different SSD's. Some in RAID, but most are not. And then try and figure out which one is the NVMe drive.

 

NVMe is the interface, not really relevant, how fast is fast enough question... (I think current are fast enough for home users).. but yea, can't waittill they get a good standard that runs over pci-e for connecting 2.5" NVMe SSD's with 3d nand and decent prices.. thats gonna be amaze-balls.

[GlassBomb]

NVMe is the interface, not really relevant, how fast is fast enough question... (I think current are fast enough for home users).. but yea, can't waittill they get a good standard that runs over pci-e for connecting 2.5" NVMe SSD's with 3d nand and decent prices.. thats gonna be amaze-balls.

 

I however do like that it's not your storage drive slowing down the system if you're using an NVMe drive. That there are other bottlenecks slowing it down

[Dzzope]

I however do like that it's not your storage drive slowing down the system if you're using an NVMe drive. That there are other bottlenecks slowing it down

Euugh, I think I would have to kill myself if my ram / cpu / motherboard were the bottle necks...

 

I remember when ram was... My first personal machine (family had a 386 before that) the ram cost about $1.40 per Mb... HDD was huge at the time at 40Gb.. and my old Ti 4800se (still have that) on a duron 1ghz single core.. (they had JUST reached 1ghz on factory clocks)

[creatip123]

There are 2 contexts to view this, working/professional use, and personal use.

 

In working/professional uses, it really speeds up in applying photoshop filters, rendering 3D, rendering video editing, etc. It doesn't even have to be the main storage device. Applications like photoshop can select a drive to be the 'scratch disk', where it does all the heavy tasks. The scratch disk doesn't have to be C:\ or the file's storage disk, it can be any disk, even a USB thumb drive. 

 

For example, say a heavy filter in photoshop takes 10 seconds to apply with normal HDD, and 5 seconds to apply with SSD. 5 seconds difference seems negligible, right? But wait, that's for 1 filter and 1 picture. What if it's 3 filters/picture? The difference is now 15 seconds. What about 100 pictures? 1000 pictures? 

 

Of course in capitalism business world, time = money. More time = more money gained. If say a company have the option to invest $80 more (for an SSD instead of normal HDD), to gain $1000 more income, should/would they do it or not? 

 

For personal uses, it brew down to 1 word: convenience. For example, to play a game, say BF4. Do you need:

 

- gaming mouse/keyboard? Nope, a basic $5 mouse + keyboard will do the job.

- medium - high GPU card? Nope, the minimum requirement for BF4 is "Graphics card with at least 512 MB of VRAM and support for DirectX 10", which describes about 99% of onboard video adapter on the market

- a decent headphone/set and/or speakers? Nope, it will run (output sound) with a $10 headset and/or speakers

 

So why do people go for decent gaming mouse + GPU + headphone/set? Isn't it an overkill? Like I said, 1 word: convenience. 

[X_Rated_Box]

It also doesnt get slower the more it is packed

[alpenwasser]

I have a picture library with a few million images on an HDD ZFS array. Sorting and

searching through that for something takes several minutes. On an SSD setup, this could

be cut to seconds, but for the time being I can't afford 3 TB of SSD storage. Sure,

sequential read/writes are better on SSDs compared to HDDs, but random access is where

the real money is. As soon as you start having a high IOPS count, lots of operations on

lots of small files, HDDs are not just "not quite as good as SSDs", but are quite frankly

just pathetically slow.

Then there's the whole shock resistance and power saving thing for laptops, the fact

that you can make an SSD in many more form factors compared to an HDD, and I'm sure

there's more, but that's what comes to mind off the top of my head.

[Doobeedoo]

Wtf, you have something that is good and you go bash about it cause you don't see the point of using it? Ok. It makes system responsive, everything opens instantly when you spam click multiple stuff and multitask.