What would you choose, SSD or HDD?

heh, the movie crap.. i have 5tb of storage on my home server for movies. but to be fair, you can't even WATCH those 500gb worth of movies while on the go how many weeks of movies that would be? that's what i ment with "if people would really think about it, most of their data has no place where it is"

and yeah, i hate external disks, too..

but without movies, you could live well, very well, with a 160gb intel ssd, which is about typical for a gamer. 80gb would work more or less if you remove the games.

oh, i forgot system restore, as i don't use it *hugging my windows home server a second time in this post i guess*

 

True, but I hate choosing which movies I will copy over to my HDD you know? And if I wanted to watch a movie that I forgot to load onto my HDD, then fudge. Because depending on the occasion, I'd like to have all my movies with me, kind of like how people like having all their music on their iPods I guess. However, unlike them, I actually watch all my movies at least a few times.

 

hehe. sure, it would be a change of habit. then again, nowadays, one could nearly stream it over cellphone network from the home server

i'm no movie watcher, espencially no on-the-go movie watcher. having a projector in full hd with 2m width, i got used to that and even then, i don't need a big collection, espencially not with me.

in your case, i would go for one of two solutions: one, a 2 disk (or even 3 disk) laptop, so i could go with the ssd for all my stuff, and the second one for the movie bulk. or a wireless external hdd that you can plug into power, and then directly access it with no wire (yeah, too lazy to plug in cables. terrible ) i would even consider just a netbook with a 500gb hdd or so in for that purpose

 

Les,

during my researching SSD's, benchmarks were all I had to go by. Comparing one to another, benchmarks seem to be the only way to do it online.

However, I have never believed in benchmarks - the Seagate 7200.4's being a recent case in point. (They bench as the current 'best', but in reality a Scorpio Blue is better).

When I finally got a chance to actually use these SSD's; 'underwhelmed' is being kind.

I will still test this new tech in my own systems as soon as I get the chance to; with the criteria that I'm interested in and I hope that for me, they do live up to their hype.

As to providing a benchmark - sorry not interested (I'm sure the 'net has many examples). They correlate so poorly to my informational needs, that they are a waste of time to even download and run.

Could you provide an example of finishing your 'work' faster on an SSD vs. a mechanical HD?

 

I recently completed compiling a report of several thousands of pages with Adobe pro for the most part. On a typical system with a hd it was a killer to work so I always ended up bringing my own system in. Even now...opening up that file is almost instantaneous with the ssd whereas with the hd, grab a coffee.

I really wish, while I was creating this pdf and altering image files for inclusion and whatnot, I would have done some comparisons as there were so many times that the differences were so obvious. I have to admit that my testing days of ssd are pretty much behind me now...lucky if I get the time to jump in once or twice a week.

 

Les,

Thank you. Even this answer is more helpful than some I've received lately.

 

Here's a link to a post I made on Photography on the Net. It compares using Adobe Lightroom using HDD vs SSD. I didn't think the test would show much difference as they're both processor-intensive. I was quite surprised to find that the second task (rendering 1:1 previews of 100 raw images) was 42% faster with the SSD.

This is a task that I perform often. I thought it felt faster since the SSD went in but I| hadn't measured it until asked.

 

hollis_f,

Thank you for the link and yes, I too use LR2.5 to convert some of my images with.

If I may clarify some points?

This test was not performed with the Scorpio Blue as a system drive, but as a second data drive, correct? If this is so, then in theory, the Scorpio was getting the most benefit out of the system for this test - compared to the SSD that contained the O/S and the data files.

What really strikes me is that you seem to have tested the SSD after the Scorpio (and the SSD was significantly faster). If you didn't reboot, then SuperFetch may be playing a part of the SSD's much better score. Again, if my assumption is correct and you did not reboot between these 'runs', could you repeat this test but first run the SSD then the Scorpio? Or, run them both, but reboot between runs?

Please, I'm not criticizing what you've posted, just want to be sure that any (obvious) variables are excluded from my research. Thanks!

Edit: Instead of 'reboot' between runs, what I meant to say was shutdown and restart (yes, there is a difference) - and please, definitely don't simply 'logoff' if you do want to repeat this test for me.

 

I would choose SSD and 256GB is more than enough for laptop storage. Buy an external HDD and use it to store data there.

 

can we politely request you to shut up until you did fair tests on real systems with them? because you spread your knowledge about your flakky tests on possibly utter crap systems as the one and only truth that is very missleading.

oh, and benchmarks help much, there, as they show you if it works as defined. if the benchmark is much lower, you messed the system up (like wrong sata driver, or similar things)

obvious one: djing: track loading gets much faster, let me quicker interact with the next track.
obvious two: application startup. i have quite some apps and switch randomly, not letting them all stay open all the time. it helps tremendously.
obvious three: code compilation. any bigger project i'm compiling is much much much faster, espencially thanks to the random reads and writes of the intel.
obvious four: work laptop now doesn't boot in 30 minutes including all apps and stuff, but in 3 minutes. and that with a crappy samsung, not a good intel. then again, cpu starts to be the bottleneck (and the os is a patch-installation like hell => a clean installation would help, too).

but it obviously doesn't change the performance of disk-unrelated stuff. but that is rare. it wouldn't be faster to render stuff in 3dsmax, f.e. don't do that much nowadays, but there, a core i7 would help.

 

The Scorpio is setup as a data drive.

I did do a reboot between tests (although I don't think Superfetch would make much difference anyhow as it wouldn't have known that the data files were the same. Besides, the preview rendering would have been done on the, newly created, DNG files.)

 

SSD
no more HDD for me



If You try SSD You will never go back to HDD.
I have OCZ Vertex 60GB for operating system and hdd for storage.This is the best way.

This is my laptop




I did few test


SSD OCZ Vertex 60GB



SSD Kingston 64 GB


HDD Hitachi 320GB 5400 rpm