What's Stopping You From Purchasing an SSD?

[Rob Williams]

If there's no SSD installed in your current rig, I have a simple question. Why? When SSDs first launched a couple of years ago, everyone shared the same reason: pricing. A 64GB SSD for $500 was less-than-ideal, and add on the uncertainty of a brand-new technology... it's easy to see why most people were a little reserved.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I just have my laptop. But it will accept a second drive, HDD, or SSD. Maybe I should upgrade.

 

[Rob Williams]

Maybe a better question to ask you is... what's stopping you from owning a desktop?

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I don't really need one. That's all. What do you think of the laptop vs. desktop vs. tablet debate?

 

[Rob Williams]

I couldn't survive on a notebook... I just couldn't. Notebooks are just too cramped and uncomfortable. It might not matter much for those who don't do a ton of work on them, but I don't think you fall into that camp, so I am rather impressed that you don't feel the need for a desktop. I love real peripherals and a big monitor. Not to mention the sheer power.

As for tablets, like most devices they serve their purpose, but your needs would have to be ultra-simple if you were using it for actual work.

 

[Doomsday]

Well, after having used the drive for almost a year now, I can honestly say that I couldn't imagine going back to a hard drive for the OS and applications. It's easy to write off that comment as an exaggeration, but it's true. Boot times... I don't care about. But when applications load without much lag at all, and the entire system as a whole feels far more responsive, it's hard to not appreciate the differences between an SSD and hard drive. I am sure many other SSD owners could back me up on this.

I back u up on this! I also cant imagine going back to a HDD as my primary disk!

 

[RainMotorsports]

We already had this convo lol so this is all funny.

What it will take is a 240-256GB drive in the 200 dollar price range. Performance is one thing but I still roll in the money per GB since I am a broke ass and need storage.

I was kinda pushing towards grabbing a small and fast one for a Fraps drive, but actually anything thinking they need todo that probably needs to check their math. 1080P at 60 frames per second at the extremely high bitrate they use which is something like 1500 mbps produces files around 4GB per minute. Thats only 68 MB/s pretty sure if you bought a drive in the last 2 years it can sustain that when its not full. That said when i get my SSD I will probably record to it because it can handle being 3/4 full and still taking files it has room for.

As far as notebooks, when your home how is something you dont have to look at uncomfortable. As a coder I have to keep moving or ill just leave the room I get nothing done. Thats why I went laptop and then my gaming led me to wanting a desktop again despite owning gaming notebooks. But the last year of my gaming laptops use it spent hooked to LCD monitors external mice and keyboards. It was the same experience as having a 3.3 Ghz Core 2 Duo and 9600 GT would have been

Shame that dock ports went the way of the dodo, something simple is still useful. Might be something to bring back for lightning bolt but i dont like the USB ones that of course cant utilize the gpu in the laptop.

 

[Rob Williams]

We already had this convo lol so this is all funny.

When was that? A convo on the forums, or between you and I?

What it will take is a 240-256GB drive in the 200 dollar price range. Performance is one thing but I still roll in the money per GB since I am a broke ass and need storage.

I do think that time is coming soon... perhaps in less than a year. We can already see some SSDs going on sale for close to $1/GB, and with the move to 28nm, we should see $0.80/GB or even less become the norm. All I can say about that is... I can't wait!

I was kinda pushing towards grabbing a small and fast one for a Fraps drive, but actually anything thinking they need todo that probably needs to check their math. 1080P at 60 frames per second at the extremely high bitrate they use which is something like 1500 mbps produces files around 4GB per minute. Thats only 68 MB/s pretty sure if you bought a drive in the last 2 years it can sustain that when its not full.

Theoretical performance only tells half the story here. While an SSD can sustain large transfers like that for the long-haul, hard drives tend to slow down as they are being used. I use an SSD for Fraps because that bottleneck is just gone. On an HDD, some games might work better than others, but you still can't match the reliability of capturing to an SSD (I say this as someone who used to only record to HDD).

 

[RainMotorsports]

When we were on vent with one of the OC guys.

Theoretically my dedicated recording raid array is 3 times faster than it needs to be, I am only asking it to sustain 68 MB/s empty a 60GB SSD will fill up in minutes it too has to be emptied. I empty it each day and encode everything while I sleep. Yeah I was backing up the system and needed to occupy the raid with some files until the format. Recording went to shit with the drives half full.

That said I was supposed to have a shit load of drives and then the flood happened. My sad little raid is 2 320GB 7200 2.5's that in synthetic testing barely beat out the 2TB 5900 rpm. Now if the real world results were similar some people are still confused about how a 2TB green drive even stands a chance. Its all about data density, more data passes by the head per rev with a larger drive.

I have a 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch thin SSD tray from OCZ i modded to fit above the external 3.5 bays and an SSD will go there one day. My plan was 2 1TB 7200's in raid for a boot another pair for record then the 2TB for backup and probably another 2TB for more backup. As i told you i dont even download movies or anything. I can fill up terabytes with my own content.

The prices of Mechanicals during the flood made the price per gb pretty moot. Im not spending 200 bucks on a hard drive, but if I am going to spend 200 bucks mind as well grab an SSD.

 

[Rob Williams]

When we were on vent with one of the OC guys.

Oh, right. I wrote this post up the night before we had that convo, so I am surprised I didn't think of it at the time.

RAID is indeed a bit of a different story, but I do believe access times comes into play also. Even if it's a sequential transfer (it almost never is perfect), latencies can either prevent a skip or cause it. When I used to record to a apt 100MB/s hard drive, I used to have troubles recording certain games. But on an SSD I've yet to meet a game that has caused me an issue.

That said, it might not be a problem even so for a RAID. All you can do is test and see

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Word of wisdom, don't use RAID as a boot device... really, it's not worth it. First, there is no real increase in speed with RAIDing hard drives except for streaming data, the OS and apps will load just as slowly as a normal HDD (since access time is the bottleneck). If it's as a RAID 1, you might as well use something like Acronis doing partial backups every other day. The other problem is the hassle, sometimes the OS will play nice, some times it won't, and since it's a boot drive, it'll be hardware RAID, which them means transferring to a new system will be problematic.

I've used RAID as a boot drive, and it caused nothing but problems in the long run, not to mention minimal speed increases for the work I was doing. Use raid for maximum availability of large amounts of data, or really high throughput of streamed temp data. For anything else, there are usually better options.

As for the topic at hand, my biggest concern with SSDs apart from price is reliability. So many horror stories of corrupt data or failed drives, it puts me right off. I know they shouldn't be used for critical data, but it's just a headache I could do without. I know that for a lot of people, they can go error free, but anyone who knows me can testify to my 'luck' when it comes to problems, lol.

 

[RainMotorsports]

I havent done a RAID boot setup since my laptop but cant say it gave me any trouble. Started it when a reseller gave me a drive for free that matched the stock one, the higher up edition of my laptop comes standard with the 2 320's. I dropped it mainly for space but also my 500 GB drive I use for backup has a drop sensor so peace of mind in that.

Yeah all the issues that come with the controllers on SSDs is a scary thought. But failure aside the latest updates seem to be putting the latest models in a better place then they were.

I was looking at the Petrol series which doesnt have an impressive write speed but on sale at just below 1GB per dollar it looked almost attractive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227780 Currently at a normal price.

Obviously there are faster and more reliable drives to be had at a larger price.

 

[Optix]

After biting the bullet and using one for close to a year I can't use anything else for my boot drive. Sorry, I -won't- use anything else for my boot drive. I know that some are still complaining about the cost/GB but once you've used one that argument won't hold any water.

 

[RainMotorsports]

I know that some are still complaining about the cost/GB but once you've used one that argument won't hold any water.

I think the argument can easily hold water when the drive is a weeks pay. When you have to worry about losing all your data because you cant back it up since you spent the money on the SSD instead of a new drive. My most important files used to fit in a 500 gb drive but currently I have to do my backups to a 1TB drive that's failing. Just saying I live in reality where this entire computer shouldn't have even been bought.

If I bought a smaller than 120GB SSD to be that would be useless for anything but boot times and menial daily things. 120 GB seems fine for most of you but with a game payload of 150 GB at any given time and not being able to split the drives these go (seems steam has to be one or the other?) whats the point in having to use extra bandwidth (I am on a cap) and time to reinstall when I want to play. Or what would be the point in having all of my games on the mechanical?

Ive experienced 18 second boot times before. But its not worth spending money to get only that and maybe office to load up faster. Mind you that was free, XP on my laptop boots quick as mofo after you get the drivers right. My desktop? The P8Z68 couldnt get past the bios in 10 seconds.

If I was still on a laptop and I was not gaming a 120 would be perfect actually. Fast suspend and resume times from hibernate. I have 2 HDD bays so it would be pretty doable. My desktop was built for gaming and the only component in it that was more than 190 dollars was the graphics card and that is something that is necessary because of its purpose. Had I not been gaming with a community I would not have built the machine at all.

Pretty stupid reason for owning a computer I guess. Just saying being able to afford a drive the benefits and encompasses everything I use on a weekly and at worst monthly basis is important to me. Until that becomes affordable I need to spend alot more money than an SSD costs on other things.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

My laptop's good for pretty much anything, including gaming (has a radeon mobility 5850). I hear you about the peripherals. Also, there's really no way to open it up easily. I also have a lot of driver crashes on this laptop, which sort of remain an enigma to me.

 

[RainMotorsports]

My laptop's good for pretty much anything, including gaming (has a radeon mobility 5850). I hear you about the peripherals. Also, there's really no way to open it up easily. I also have a lot of driver crashes on this laptop, which sort of remain an enigma to me.

Mine had to be retired from gaming its 3 years old now. Its 9800m gs overclocked as far as it is makes it no better than a desktop 9600 GT. The core 2 duo also doesnt hold up well against games like bad company 2 even with the overclock the game uses 80 to 95 percent and a punkbuster sweep will easily lag out the game.

Useless as a laptop now too. Shopping for the desktop murdered the battery. Great access with a single bottom panel and ive had it stripped a few times.

 

[Kayden]

I've read through many of the comments and the biggest reason I keep hearing is cost, it's still pricy especially when compared to raptor drives per gig vs $1. Now, I just got my SSD on Thursday, which has been a long time planned since my 500gb WD black died several months back, so keep in mind my exp is very limited with it thus far but as of right now I could not be happier.

The biggest improvement for me is boot time. Rob, I know you said that your that boot time isn't a major factor for you but for me it is, especially when I have to reboot with updates or have several programs starting slowing it down. I personally have 10 items starting up that are in my tray, that does not include the others I cannot see like adobe or acronis to name a few. I went from 3 to 4 min boot to 51 seconds and 21 of it is the bios, this has literally changed my perception of cost vs gig argument, mainly cause if I just use this for my OS and limit game installs to 1 or 2 MMO's this 120GB will be more then sufficient.

I think the other major reason is because it is one thing to look at numbers on a review vs real world personal experience, you wont know how drastically this will change your perception until you see it for your self, this is why I believe it still has not caught on. Now, will I proclaim that it is a worth while investment for a persons OS at the very least? Hell yes, but I don't think SSD's are ready to take over my primary gaming needs. I plan to stick to traditional HDD's until the cost per GB changes, but that wont for several years I think.

 

[marfig]

I tend to attribute value to something based not on comparative prices (like comparing the price of an SSD $/GB to a HDD), but almost exclusively on my own personal requirements.

Why not an SSD, then? My need for disk IO performance is still not that much of requirement that I feel justifies paying the premium prices behind SSDs. What this means is that while I would appreciate more disk IO performance, my current machine already operates at more than satisfying levels for all my needs.

There's a few exceptions, of course. I'd like to transfer data between disks faster than I currently do. But again, not that much that can justify an SSD price.

 

[Merlin]

I'd like to, it's just transfering the OS and all my programs. And I don't really need the speed......Now, if I built another machine, then yes, I would go with a faster drive

 

[Corey Naish]

I'd like to switch to an SSD, and now that the 520 series is launching... I just think I might! For the rest of my machine however, I'm waiting on Ivy Bridge and Kepler.