ssd or hdd

i have a 500gb 5200rpm in my lappy and had a 320gb (original acer) in the dvd drive bay. the 320gb was never good (new with laptop) and has now failed again and is corrupted. i need a new 2nd drive.
for my money available, 500gb 7200 hdd for about £120 or maybe eg. OCZ Summit Series 120GB SSD for £250.
will the ssd be that much faster for 1) 3d cad, 2) gaming, 3) movie processing?
which progs are related to cpu/gpu and not disc access?

ssd's are still expensive, will they come down much in the next few months?

 

Have money, want to spend, go SSD. I hope that they do come down in price as well, they seem to work very well with W7 from what I have seen so far.

cheers ...

 

CAD, gaming, and movie processing are all largely CPU or GPU bound. An SSD will only allow your CAD application or games load faster. The prices will definitely come down over time, it's just a question of how fast. As a point of reference, a Samsung RBX SLC cost about $1000 at this time in 2007. Now you can get the same drive under $200; that's an 80% drop in price over two years.

At any rate, I'd recommend an Intel or Indilinx drive at this point, but the Summit isn't a bad choice either.

 

1) not sure, i dont handle 3d cad, but autodesk does load a lot faster all my maps.
2) Not really, just faster loading maps, you will enter faster and be more responsive changing zone, but game itself will be the same fps wise.
3) Making videos should be, watching movies i doubt you will see much difference.

But my ssd biggest thing is how fast and responsive the laptop is in general, all applications open in a couple of sec, the boot times are also decreased a lot, i don't regret my buy, in fact now im saving to change my desktop drive , but its still expensive.

 

SSD = Too expensive for now. Don't spend 100s of £ on a few seconds of load time..

500gb 7200 hdd will do just fine

 

1200Gb @15,000RPM is doing fine for me too

K-TRON

 

And how portable is your storage solution? Seems that the OP is looking for a mobile notebook HDD solution, not a behemoth desktop replacement computer which is really what the Octi-Tron is, no? Just a gigantic desktop computer stuffed in an oversized laptop shell.

Kind of hard to do HDD comparisons when you aren't even comparing apples to apples.

 

I would recommend HDD the way SSD are being recalled already indicate they are still not quite ready for mass consumption.

 

Its still proportionally more powerful per pound than the AW M17X
Attitudes like yours are exactly why I pulled my thread. I am sure you probably read it before I deleted the posts, cause you are a very knowledgeable guy. I would have thought you would have appreciated the mod alot more, but I guess not.

I know my comparison wasnt fair. I dont find SSD's worthwhile in any application other than the laptop, and the 1U server.
Outside of those applications, 15K drives work fine for me.

I am considering buying an SSD for my E1505, I just wish the Intel ones didnt jump up in price. I really wanted that 80gb one, but I dont find it worth more than $125, so I will keep my 7K320 until then.

K-TRON

 

Agreed. And probably overkill for 95% of the mobile computing community. Not to say that what you've done isn't admirable, because it is. Just that not everyone needs 15k RPM hard drives in a quasi-notebook set up.

I appreciate the premise of your mod, however, I don't see the functional application of it. To have an Optimus Prime-sized desktop replacement laptop on steroids that cannot be mobilized efficiently kills the whole idea of the "portable-ness" of a laptop in the first place.

Please understand that I'm more of a pragmatic type person, thus it wasn't my intention to knock your mod in any way.

 

well, i've had my finger poised over the 'buy now' buttons for both and, thanks to the comments below, i am still holding. if i go for the ssd i think i will regret 120GB but good 250GB's are big big money. i like the idea of quick responsive system but maybe thats all i will get.
the start-up times would be nice, but i have to wait for the laptop password, then the boot manager, choose an os, then start, then login. otherwise, win 7 from sleep is more or less instant anyway. 'another' os loads in 30 seconds from cold.
gaming will still be held by cpu/gpu
movie processing and 3d cad i think is held by cpu processing speed.
movies and rendering can be left overnight if too long.
battery life is not really that crucial.

i've just talked myself out of an ssd.

but maybe i should buy one 'because i can'
the cool factor is up there with the arguments 'for'
and where can i get an "SSD INSIDE" sticker to go on the laptop?
......to be continued soon

 

If I was you I wont get ssd because the ssd technology aint mature, and the product life is much shorter than HD. I also think 7200 HD will meet all your needs.

 

That's really untrue. While SSD technology is relatively immature, a properly designed drive should last much longer than a conventional HDD. Under fairly heavy use, Intel rates the X25-M for something on the lines of 80 years. This probably isn't true in practice, but the theory is fairly sound, assuming the lifespan of the flash cells are the limiting factor in SSD lifespan.

You do hear about SSDs failing fairly quickly here and there, but you also hear about HDDs failing fairly quickly here and there, too. There's going to be duds with both technologies, but I don't think there's that much evidence that SSDs meet an early death more often.

 

Enthusiasts once used to think the same way about PCI-e when it first came out and AGP was declared dead. The point is that the "cool factor" has a shelf life, and the extra money you spend to obtain it will definitely not be worth it in the end.

In a nutshell, investing in bleeding edge tech is always expensive (and risky!), cool factor be damned. Personally, I consider the SSD scene to be immature with much to live up to to match the overall affordability and ubiquity of modern mechanical HDDs. Will SSD replace HDD? Eventually yes, but most certainly not now, and not for awhile.

The cool factor of new, expensive technology, like SSD, is not worth the premium you pay to brag that you've got an SSD in a laptop when a 7,200RPM hard drive is a much more economical and astute investment. Let SSD work out its kinks until its a much more mainstream and affordable product. You'll thank me later for it.

 

Not if he has an important and practical use for it now. True, they're much less economical than a HDD, but that all depends on your application...and your pocketbook.

 

I believe that with both technologies, the device will be obsolete well before average failure time.

 

The OP mentioned that the pros of buying an SSD was its cool factor and the ability to brag that he's got one in his laptop. Hardly an important or practical use of an expensive and somewhat immature technology.

 

@garetjax and others: the cool factor argument was a joke and not really where i am at. as i said, i have talked myself out of a ssd for now. i will get a 500gb 7200 and use that as my main disk. i can image my existing one on to it. but a 500gb ssd, now that would be cool..... as you said "somewhat immature technology" theres always the worry of being in the betamax club (showing my age there, and no i didnt buy one)

 

You know guys, those doubters should think of this. The more that hard drive speeds are important to you, the better SSDs are.

Users that aren't considered computer experts:
-Ok, at some point you must have had your laptop/desktop(more likely laptop nowadays) have a problem and you needed to take to your friend that knows about computers or taken it to a repair shop. Those dozens of applications that open at the start, malware/virus/trialware/whateverware slowing your computer down. Well, the fast speed of an SSD might enable you to do more of those virus/spyware scans and enable faster troubleshoot when needed. You guys probably don't use lot of space anyway.

Portable/Laptop:
-SSDs might not always give you better battery life, but they give you more consistent, predictable battery life
-They give less heat, which means a cooler running CPU/chipset/video card, which might translate into better operating conditions for your battery.
-SSDs are one of the only ways to get your laptop "feel" like desktop

Enthusiast users that don't need unsatiable amount of space:
-You are a freaking enthusiast with possibly lots of money. Why not get an SSD rather than spending money on RAIDed Raptor drives? It's faster than the 2x Raptor anyway
-For space you can always store your pictures/videos, aka non performance critical, but massive space hog apps in your regular cheaper few TB hard drive.

There is basically not many that can't benefit from an SSD.

 

People already invest large amounts of cash in getting faster processors, more memory, better graphics cards, etc. But how much of that investment isn't really used to its full potential because of the bottleneck caused by slow HDDs?

You can spend hundreds of pounds on the latest multi-core, super-gigahertz, processor just for it to sit there twiddling its thumbs waiting for the data to get fed to it.

When I was looking at getting an SSD I ignored benchmarks, except for those involving real-world applications. What I found was enough to persuade me. Since then I've done a comparison of using Adobe Lightroom to render preview images from raw files. I'd have said beforehand that this was a mainly processor-intensive task, and that SSD vs HDD would have little effect. I was extremely surprised to find that using the SSD was twice as fast as using the HDD. I presume this is an example of thumb-twiddling.

 

@hollis_f: doh! i said i talked myself out of a ssd already.
now you are talking me into it again. thats a nice setup you have though ''160GB SSD Boot drive + 500GB Scorpio Blue Data drive''. i want, i want (but do i need)
i used to be indicisive, but now i'm not so sure.
how about this?
Intel-X25-M-160GB-SATA-2-II-SSD-Disk-Drive-X25M-34nm

 

What do you mean do you need it? Cost notwithstanding, this one is a no brainer.

 

If/when you buy simply because you can and not because of an immediate and measurable benefit, then that decision is truly a 'no-brainer'.

Buy based on need.

Make sure you have a return policy that you can live with and test for real improvements before simply 'believing'. If, after your testing, there are not enough improvements for you - use that return policy and let the manufacturers know we are using our brains and our wallets to buy more performance.

Right now, depending on your specific setup - an SSD is a gamble that only sees the dealers - uhm, manufacturers - really winning.

 

heh, all that paranoya and "not worth it" against ssds. each of you should just have one for a month, and then have to truthfully return it stating "not worth it"..

none would be able to.. none


espencially not K-TRON, who still doesn't get how different the performance gain of ssd is against ANY form of raided hdds, no matter how fast. they're still orders of magnitude below any simple ssd that has no heat, no noise, and does not really consume much power. efficiency is key, and k-tron should understand that. but somehow, he prefers raw bruteforce-power, even while it's spent on the wrong end completely.

 

davepermen,

sorry, but with the Samsung 128GB SSD and the Intel 160GB G2 (and the respective systems I've used them in), not only would I have returned them - I would be wondering how many people can be duped into buying them just because someone else said 'wow'.

I'm not saying you've been duped, just saying that yes, for you they are worth it. For me (and what I've seen), they are simply bragging rights to the 'latest & greatest' but unfortunately, without any substance.

Don't get me wrong, when they are behaving like they're advertised - they are without peer - but I have yet to see one transform a computer so completely that 'I can't live without one'.

The computer basics of maximizing the CPU/RAM/Video card more directly affects the productivity performance I'm interested in - not the 'snap' factor that SSD's offer (but in exchange for a whole lot of other headaches).

Would I accept an SSD to test for my systems? Yes!

But trust me that I would be the first to take it out if it performs like the handful of SSD's I've had the opportunity to play with.

 

I would return it if it means not having to eat instant noodles every day! :S
Also, it's no longer efficient if your data spills over into a mechanical hard drive, requiring both SSD and HDD to be powered. Not to mention inconvenient.

 

tiller: we all know you completely failed at getting them to work for you the way they should. but have you tested them now in your system, that is fast? because last time, you where taking a porsche for a ride in the 30kmh zone.

octagonalman: well, all my data is on the ssd. all big data on the home server. efficient, and convenient. (wanna watch a movie on the laptop? \\server\Videos (i'm german talking). on the pc? \\server\Videos.. on the media center? on my gfs netbook? you get the idea)

 

davepermen, I see the point you're trying to get at but that's really just externalising the power consumption. Instead of say 3W for a single 2.5" HDD, it's now 40W for a home server, possibly operating 24/7, plus a watt or so for the SSD. I already do have that kind of setup and I acknowledge its convenience but it's more about program, game installations and virtual machines which can take up a lot of space on the system HDD.

 

programs don't take much space. i'm trough with installing most of my apps (ableton live suite has a big sound library with it, visual studio isn't small at all), and i have around 20gb filled. office will come later this week (office 2010 beta2 hopefully directly for the fun of it), some adobe software could still fit (which i won't install) and i would be maybe at 30gb filled.

virtual machines, i so got rid of them after years of thinking "this is it". nowadays, i just think "meh, thanks, no" and use the main os for everything. works well. but they would eat up much storage of course.

games are another topic.

still, on an 80gb intel ssd, i would still have 50-60gb free, that would be enough for the most actual 2-3 games to have them stored locally to play. not that convenient, but actually forcing you into more fun. if you restrict your games, so that you have to play them trough before changing, you get more fun out of it in the long run

i'm no gamer, though, so i know they're ... different.


and i don't care at all about power consumption. it's natural energy here (water) so i don't harm anyone.

 

ok guys/girls. lots of good stuff going on here. the runaway data size is an addiction. 80gb is enough for any os plus reasonable progs, plus couple of games, and 'some' music and movies. for me, i need a bit more as i always have several os's on the go but my data and some progs and games is common. but hey, i will have 500gb in the dvd bay and another 250gb on usb as extra backup.
the intel 160GB is still looking like the best compromise for now (£360)
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/160GB-Intel-MLC-Flash-25-SSD-SATA-3Gb-s-Read-250MB-s-Write-70MB-s-OEM

 

is that uk pounds? as i have it for 295 uk pounds here. but you might have different pounds in abu dhabi?

 

no, same UK pounds (my home country)
where can you see for 295 pounds?
searching this morning i found some cheaper ones but they were out of stock, (or looked suspicious)

 

a week ago i got 80 gb intel X25-M SSD.
guys, you should have it . it is awesome fast.
see this

 

have it here in switzerland.. it's .. here and the mainpage is digitec.ch

as you can see, 499, which is, according to google conversion, around 295 pounds..

and it's a good shop btw, so far i bought about half of my stuff from them, never an issue..

 

@daveperman: so close, yet so far away.
it was in sock,it was in the cart, then i had toregister. cannot set my country to UK (or Abu Dhabi) and delivery says only to Switzerland
thanks anyway, i will look again....

 

i could buy it and send it over.. no clue how much that would cost, though.. if there's nothing close to that price around for you.

 

davepermen,

LOL, how do you know I completely failed? These SSD's don't impress me and it's my fault?

The Samsung SSD is on a Dell M6400 that is not even 2 months old (with all firmware, driver and software updates - Win 7 x64) and the AMD desktop is running the 160GB Intel G2 (clean install of Win 7 x64).

WEI scores the Dell/Samsung as 5.4 for the HD score and 7.9 on the AMD desktop for the Intel G2.

I was just using these same computers again this weekend and right clicking on the Dell/Samsung's desktop would 'freeze' the system. The desktop still takes 2+ minutes to simply open an AutoCAD file that the Dell takes all of 2 seconds to do.

You're right I haven't tried these yet on one of my systems to know for sure, but, I have taken a Porsche down a 30 KM/h zone and it was still impressive***.

Wish I could say the same for SSD's.


***(okay, so maybe I was doing 140 in the Porsche )

 

mesarmath,

please don't take this the wrong way, but benchmarks? Yawn.

Congrats! But, what I want to know is how much more productive you are with your new SSD compared to your mech. HD.

Do you actually see an hour or two of sunlight more each day because of the upgrade (because you finish your work so much faster...), or is the system simply snappy?

What do you use the computer for? And how did the SSD benefit you directly?

 

A biased, but good question nonetheless..

 

yes you are right , i can see less sunlight now. because with mech. HD , when i was waiting to copy my hd movies or to load game files or to move some files to another hd , i was able to do something such as going to bathroom or looking outside at the window or talking with somebody in order to let computer to finish its works.
but now i can not do those things because it does not take so much and while those things are going on , i can do some other heavy things with computer. it does not freeze with intel ssd. i dowload almost 30-50 gb each day.

i think you are right. without ssd i was able to see more sunlight.

 

Rachel,

If you were replying to my questions, thank you.

However, from your quoted post all I get is that it made the notebooks feel speedy - but that increase in speed did not carry over to making you more productive. Is this right?

I have no qualm that SSD's making the O/S more responsive (overall), but how did they directly benefit you by getting work done faster?

 

what do you mean by productivity?
which part of the computer is productive in the sense of ssd is not productive?
well then , CPU upgrade is not productive, right? and Ram upgrade is not productive, right?
okay i got it. GPU is productive to play game, right?
hence in what way could ssd be productive? hmm , it may talk with me? . that is the productivity you want, i guess.
well, ssd is useless for you. dont think about it for a decade.

 

tilleroftheearth, what i posted was meant for another thread and i deleted it. I mixed up a thread, my error. I see that you've already quoted me though so i will answer your question.

In some notebooks i would argue that the SSD have made for an overall better system which will probably lead to an increase in productivity. I'm talking about the older ultraportables here. For example i put an SSD in a family members older ultraportable and before they were complaining about the performance and was using their notebook less, after i upgraded it was more acceptable to them.

In regards to my two current laptops, it probably does not make me more productive. However, it does lead for me to an all round better user experience which is something that i appreciate.

 

Rachel,

Thank you for your response - even when you didn't have to. This is exactly the kind of answers I'm looking for.

Not only because your answer matches my experiences also (with much larger and more heavy duty computers), but because you are so forthright and can honestly say the truth that I have glimpsed at of these SSD's.

I too may eventually decide that, if only for the 'user experience' I may buy one, but right now, I have to make a much more hard-nosed business decision that must take real and measurable productivity into account.

Thanks again.

 

mesarmath,

Productivity is getting a set amount of work done in a set amount of time.

I edit, convert and 'develop' RAW images for a living. I use the computer to do this work and can have a mechanical HD do it or an SSD.

What sort of productivity gains will I see by switching? (I am looking to get an SSD to test in my systems, hopefully soon).

The gains I've seen from SSD's would impact me minimally - from my direct experience with them (over a week's worth (40+ Hrs) of using two SSD equipped systems).

In my case, not only do I have to consider the hard cost of the drive (about $600 for an Intel 160GB G2), but also the week or so of rebuilding my computer and all the software, photoshop plugins and all the other little utilities I need/use to run my business.

I do not game (I never have) and I do not like your attitude of 'don't think about it for a decade'; I am here to gather information and if you have any to offer, please do.

 

From what I understand, software RAID's are outperformed by single SSD drives in many "real world" benchmarks. I hope someone can correct me if I am wrong but I have been reading extensively, not as much as you about storage solutions but I have seen software RAID'ed SSD's show huge performance benchmarks in throughput "low level" benchmarks like HD Tune and Crystaldiskmark but fall short of single SSD's in real world testing.

One example is PCMarkVantage, single drives routinely outperform software RAID'ed SSD's yet hardware RAID'ed SSD's are at the top of the rankings.

 

me too, i did not like your attitude in this message .

but i like your attitude in this post.so let us continue in a kind way for all of us.

well, obviously ssd may not be useful for you. e.g. if you are a movie editor instead of image, ssd would be great for you, right?
i wonder if those images you are interested in have big size or not. i guess they do not have so much big size, right?
anyway, i guess you already have experience and you already have seen the performance by ssd, right?

so many "right" , right ?
sorry for my english, i am not native.

 

sgilmore62,

I too have read that and although I have played with RAID 0/5/10 many times - the benefits they offer me have always been outweighed by their drawbacks.

Even my current system when in RAID 0 shows at most 1 or 2 % increase in 'real' performance (not benchmarks) and that was with a 3 drive Raptor setup. The downsides include boot up in the minutes range, actually slower performance when using 3 or 4 RAW converters simultaneously (without RAID, each software has it's own Raptor as 'scratch space') and much more needlessly complicated install/setup procedures for ultimately a 1 or 2% gain.

But, comparing my once RAIDed desktop to the Intel G2 AMD system I've used - in sequential writes the 2x or 3x RAID0 Raptors annihilate the G2, easily - and that is the main use of RAID - sequential transfer rates! Actually, in real world use (comparing to the AMD system I'm familiar with), a single Raptor or VRaptor dominates the G2 for sequential transfers.

 

That's the equivalent (in automobile speak) of asking does your Bentley get you to point A any quicker than my Toyota? Considering the legal "limit" to speed, most likely no--but which would you rather have?

Well that's what it comes down to isn't it? Not that I didn't mention that way back at the beginning. But if you have no use for the extra speed etc., then the upgrade won't do you do you much good, or be that impressive.

 

mesarmath,

Okay, cool - let's talk.

Like I've mentioned, I still need to test an SSD in my systems, so I really don't know how they may impact me. From what I have seen though, it doesn't look too hopeful.

The size of the images I'm processing can be web-sized (a few kb's) all the way to a couple of GB's. Most are in the 80-200MB range. These are from RAW files which can be 12 MPixels or 24MPixel image files.

From what I've seen, a 'movie editor' would not want an SSD based system (unless its someone like George Lucas who can afford a million dollar workstation ), because of the small size and relatively small write transfer rates of SSD's. (You can, of course RAID them, but that's where the $$$$$ comes in).

Don't worry about your English (I'm not native either), its the attitude that counts.