Yet another SSD vs HD question...

Hey all, I have a Gateway P-7811fx running XP Pro. The OS and apps are on a partitioned Seagate Momentus 200GB 7200rpm drive. I'm craving a SSD. What kind of improvements could I really expect with an OCZ Vertex drive? Would it be worth the cost of the drive?

Thanks in advance!

 

Depending on what you do on your laptop, you might not notice the difference. E.G. if you're surfing the web and typing documents in microsoft word, the difference will be minimum.

 

Lot of surfing, some light gaming, moderate PS work, etc.

 

SSD will have pretty much no effect on web surfing and light gaming. But photoshop will load a lot quicker and more responsive if you use a SSD.

Adding more ram, setting up a ram drive, point one of photoshop's scratch disk to the ram drive, will speed it up even more.

 

...on the contrary, it will make all the difference for a user who does a lot of word, surfing, multitasking with programs, etc. Every program will load instantly, and that's a very noticable upgrade.

 

Even against that 7200rpm drive?

 

One thing that you will definitely notice is the difference in noise and vibration. The SSD is silent, which is the last thing a 7200 rpm HHD is.

 

I went from a 7200 RPM drive on my desktop to a Vertex and it's extremely noticeable.

 

And there is no spin up time on a SSD.

 

I should add that I'm not making any statement about whether the drive is worth it, just that the performance boost is very large. No other upgrade will give you as tangible a boost in system speed and snappyness.

The prices are still very high though so it may not be worth it for everyone.

 

Thanks everyone for your input!

 

Lightly related, these kind of things are where ssd's really shine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Yeah, not a normal setup, but demonstrates how fast things could become with ssd's. So basically the difference can be seen when you open programs, load stuff and boot to windows.

 

+Rep for the wicked-amazing video!

 

Thanks Hope I don't have to wait too long for the end-user version of that !

 

you'll probably see a 15-30% increase in performance. I bought a 250gb OCZ solid series SSD for my computer and i saw a 21% increase in performance compared to the 1tb 7200rpm i had before. Now my computer is super silent (1 silent fan and everything else watercooled)

 

How exactly did you measure performance?

 

that was incredible

 

Yeah it was. The future of computing, no doubt!

 

I posted this in another thread on the forums, but here's one I took. It was taken with a full disk anti-virus scan going as well as an HDTune benchmark. basically, it was stressing the **** out of my drive, but applications still loaded almost instantly.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/mwn2njw2eig/SSdAppLaunch.mp4

 

The performance changes may be noticeable and make it faster, although the price may be just as significant as its upgrade to your system.

 

I'd like to take the opportunity to ask; Will upgrading to an SSD disc make any difference to the battery life? I'd personally imagine that an SSD would require less power than say a 7200 rpm hdd, but thats just my highly unqualified guess

PS Eric618, I'm surprised to find another TalkBass'er on here already, with me having registered on this forum today, howdy!

 

it's definitely worth it if you consider a new notebook instead to gain more performance. the ssd is much cheaper and results in much more of a performance gain than any new notebook, no matter how fast, without ssd will.

 

Depending on your laptop it can make quite a difference, I have one in a toughbook 18 and my battery time is now 9.25 hours vs the 7 I was getting before, on my wifes acer 8000series she gained 1h45 mins

 

Wow, this is like comparing a Ferrari to a Nissan Versa.

 

Very cool! I've only been here a few months, but I've been at TB for 7 years!

 

I have a P-6860FX, and I just today ordered the 120gb OCZ Vertex, but I won't have it until the weekend. I use the laptop for gaming purposes. I won't be doing any fancy RAID, I'll be using "compatibility" mode in the BIOS for the sata connection, and I'll be installing the Vista64 that came with the system.

Eager to run Left4Dead with it. =P

 

Use AHCI mode, if your laptop supports it.

 

Hey, I noticed you have an OCZ Vertex in your sig. When I was reading up on the Vertex series I noticed that some of the user reviews on Newegg mentioned that it doesn't work with AHCI. Do you know what that's about?

I'm a casual tech person, so I have absolutely no experience with RAID and don't know exactly what AHCI is, except that it's supposed to be faster than ide/ata in some ways.

I just wanna play games, and an SSD is supposed to cut load times, so I'm here to give it a whirl.

 

I'm using it with AHCI on my desktop. If you're running XP, you have to slipstream your motherboard's AHCI drivers into the installation or it won't work.

 

I thought so too, after I forgot to slipstream the drivers in my fresh XP install... Then I found this. Worked perfectly for me!


http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831