[Hardware Question] SSD just for the OS?

[csThor]

I am in the process of planning an upgrade for my PC (don't bother telling me to wait, I'm still on an ancient Athlon XP 3000) and I am wondering if it does make sense to invest a bit of money into a small SSD hard disk just for the OS (which is going to be Win7 Professional). I'm thinking about a small drive, just 60GB or so (since the larger ones are still far too expensive for my taste) plus a normal 1000GB SATA-600 HDD for the other programs.

Is anyone deeper into that one? What do you think?

[T}{OR]

Personally I would go for it. Although my choice would be a slightly bigger SSD, something around 120 GB. For both OS and games. For everything else - 1TB HDD's are very affordable nowadays.

Or you can go with the smaller now for the OS and then when prices drop - buy a bigger one. In any case my vote is YES.

[Fafnir_6]

This is what I have done in my newest machine. I have Win7 Pro installed on an 80GB SSD. Couple that with i7-920 and 12GB of DDR3 and Windows boots in 30 seconds. This is a VERY fast computer in all other respects. I am very please with this setup and encourage you to go for it.

Cheers,

Fafnir_6

[csThor]

Like I said larger drives with SATA-600 are too expensive ATM but your opinions have helped me. My current plan goes for this:

INTEL Core i7 960 4x3.2 GHz BOX
Asus (Retail) Rampage III Gene Republic of Gamers iX58
12GB Corsair Dominator PC2-12800 CL8 KIT
2.5" Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB
3.5" WD 1000GB WD1002FAEX 7200U/min 64MB SATA 3.0
ZOTAC (Retail) GTX480 1536MB mini-HDMI/DVI
Creative (Retail) X-Fi Titanium PCIe
Asus (Retail) BR-04B2T BD-Rom
Windows 7 Professional 64bit OEM

[Feuerfalke]

Most surely on my wishlist.

The SSD got postponed by the HOTAS Warthog, though.

[Madfish]

If you got 12gigs of ram you could either use a ramdrive and boost system speed or just rely on windows caching in all the data from the drive.
Most SSD's aren't that much faster than good S-ATA drives in sequential read. In gaming you may have faster load times but mostly everything is cached in the VRAM and RAM so yeah.
Of course it's nice if browsers and other software open up fast but with a small SSD you will run into trouble once it starts to fill up.
I'd recommend aiming for 120gigs or you will probably have to compromise. You can, for example, put the pagefile into a ramdrive or the users directory on the data drive (your 1TB disk) but well, if you can spend the money, sure, go for an SSD. If you really need to save money and can't afford the 120 I'd recommend to wait until they get a bit cheaper. 64gb is really a bit small. I'd consider 80 as the minimum.
But that's just my personal experience of course.

[Feuerfalke]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/21

[Madfish]

Originally Posted by Feuerfalke

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/21

What would that tell us? Was it a question or a hint? Seeing your comment about the Warthog...

But then again, let me say something regarding the read and write speeds sequential written there. Yes, with an SSD you might get tripple read rate but that still doesn't mean a thing depending on what kind of user you are. I never wanted to say that SSD's aren't faster in sequential reads!

However, even with modern low-rpm 2TB drives like the Samsung F4 2TB for almost NO money at all (77€ for 2000Gb = 0,04€ per Gigabyte) you get 90+ mb/s read. Yeah, you get 261 with an Intel x25 or whatever (351€ for 160Gb = 2,1€ per Gigabyte). In other words you get 3x speed for 70x the price...
Or another approach: for one gigabyte of trippled SSD speed you get 52 gigabytes of mechanical drive space! So that's really something that's worth thinking about.

To each his own but let's do some gamer- /user-math.


The GPU has 1VRAM availabe in average (lower for some people, higher for others but let's just assume).
Most people have RAM at around 4GB, some a bit more but rarely a game uses more than 2GB (never seen that yet, even 1GB is rare).
So we can say for sure that the average is about 2GB data read as a max. Worst case is probably still about 3GB max. That means 22-33 seconds load time if things would depend on the drive.
Yes, you can get that down to about 8-11 seconds. But after the game has loaded things wouldn't make a difference anymore.

And to be precise this means we're back to benchmark numbers again. In the real world no game loads 3TB data after it's started. It'll load in smaller chunks and usually getting a considerable amount of the engine up and running in the background already for most modern titles. Even in shooters like Battlefield:BC2 or MoH you have low loading times because of that.


The same goes for applications. If you open and close them all the time, reboot your computer all the time and expect everything to pop up instantly then yes, a SSD is a good investment. But 64gb isn't enough for that!
On the other hand side, on my workstations I rarely close apps. I just open them, leave em running, hibernate the computer if necessary (0,5W standby). In other words: most of the stuff is in the RAM anyways. My pagefile get's either reduced to 0 or very low numbers or, if necessary, use a ramdisk/drive.

So yes, it's a user decision that has to be made individually. You can't just throw an SSD into a system that idles around all day long or only sees sequential read every now and then. Unless you don't care about the money and don't want to wait for a better pricepoint to jump on the SSD train. For gamers it's usually just not worth it. For simmers there are also better ways to spend money but that's another story...

[Insuber]

Go for 80 GB. Some units (namely Intel ones) are really fast but slow down when they are >90% full. Additionally with a bigger SSD drive you can install IL2 on it and enjoy fast startups ...

I bought an Intel 80 GB SSD, and I don't regret the 220€ I had to shell out, because this single upgrade resolved all my issues of slow loading of XP and IL2. There is enough space for Win XP, a couple of IL2 installs and some other stuff, and the drive is still filled at 70%.
I have also a1TB Samsung drives and a couple of 500 GB, Samsung, as work horses.

Cheers,
Insuber

Originally Posted by Madfish

If you got 12gigs of ram you could either use a ramdrive and boost system speed or just rely on windows caching in all the data from the drive.
Most SSD's aren't that much faster than good S-ATA drives in sequential read. In gaming you may have faster load times but mostly everything is cached in the VRAM and RAM so yeah.
Of course it's nice if browsers and other software open up fast but with a small SSD you will run into trouble once it starts to fill up.
I'd recommend aiming for 120gigs or you will probably have to compromise. You can, for example, put the pagefile into a ramdrive or the users directory on the data drive (your 1TB disk) but well, if you can spend the money, sure, go for an SSD. If you really need to save money and can't afford the 120 I'd recommend to wait until they get a bit cheaper. 64gb is really a bit small. I'd consider 80 as the minimum.
But that's just my personal experience of course.

[infirebaptize]

Originally Posted by Madfish

If you got 12gigs of ram you could either use a ramdrive and boost system speed or just rely on windows caching in all the data from the drive.
Most SSD's aren't that much faster than good S-ATA drives in sequential read. In gaming you may have faster load times but mostly everything is cached in the VRAM and RAM so yeah.
Of course it's nice if browsers and other software open up fast but with a small SSD you will run into trouble once it starts to fill up.
I'd recommend aiming for 120gigs or you will probably have to compromise. You can, for example, put the pagefile into a ramdrive or the users directory on the data drive (your 1TB disk) but well, if you can spend the money, sure, go for an SSD. If you really need to save money and can't afford the 120 I'd recommend to wait until they get a bit cheaper. 64gb is really a bit small. I'd consider 80 as the minimum.
But that's just my personal experience of course.

+1

I would go for ramdrive, SSD are overpriced and hyped. 8GB to load game files leaving 4GB for OS. And i would buy two separate hard drives say (2) x 500 GB, i use one for windows and the second one for gaming.