SSD Experiences on speed

[stustunz]

As the tittle says
1.How fast are they in the real world ?
2.Is boot time really that much faster ?
3.Do Things seem to respond faster ?
4.If in a Laptop does the battery seem to run longer ?

The price has come down to a point where I am interested

Anyone had good or bad experiences with one ?

[gEd]

1. very
2. yes
3. yes
d. yes

basically, the difference between a standard HD and even a cheapo SSD is :-O in everyday use.

I have had a Crucial C300 64GB SSD in my Lenovo W510 for well over a year and it's great (as long as you don't want to store too much info).
I am seriously thinking of getting a vertex 4 256GB for my gaming pc (for OS, apps and key games) but I see not benefit to getting one for a HTPC and (of course) I wouldn't actively consider using one as a recording drive.

I read that they won't get cheaper anytime soon (at least in the UK)
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthr...t=18426886

[pcostanza]

I have a number of friends who've made SSD's their boot drive and love it. I'm not sure when I build again but you can bet it's going to have one in it. I may even buy one for my current desktop.

[smajor]

Everything gEd says. I have one in a PC and a Mac notebook and I find any computer without one intolerable now.

Interestingly, I have a gaming PC that is a few years old. It's got a nice on-board RAID controller and I have two fast SATA drives in a striped RAID. It's really fast. One test I did before putting my Crucial 256 SSD in the notebook was to try it in this rig. I was surprised to note not too much of a difference compared to the RAIDed drives - at least in this particular PC. Boot time was slightly faster with the SSD, but loading up games on Steam were pretty even.

[pBS]

for even faster speeds use a sata3 [6gb/s] ssd on a 6gb/s port...usually double the speed of even a maxed out 3gb/s class drive
[close to 500mb/s transfer rates, compared to ~250 for sata2]

[stustunz]

This will sound like a stupid question
Is sata3 backward compatible with sata1&2 ?

ie can I plug a sata3 drive into sata1 or sata2 (laptop 2.5 hdd)

[pBS]

yep...it'll max out the interface but it'll run nice n speedy..
i only have one 6gb port on any of my motherboards so i have to run it on a 3gb port myself now..
[they're only slightly speedier than a sata2 ssd on a sata2 port]

[imilne]

It's not so much the headline MB/s sequential speeds that make the difference, so much as the random 4k stuff - ie, lots and lots of little read/writes. That's when you can really feel the difference.

For life in an HTPC, there's not much argument for having one though. Yes, boot times will be a bit quicker (or a lot depending on your setup), but once NPVR is up and running it doesn't really have anything to do. I've tried having the live TV buffer both on and off an SSD, and it doesn't make the slightest difference to channel change times for instance.

Iain

[martint123]

I went for one as the system drive of the PVR system for noise and mechanical reliability. Image backups from it seem a lot faster as well.
Bit of a pain getting the damn thing running and bootable though.

[stustunz]

*Update*
Got a intel120GB
removed old drive from netbook
Man windows Install was quick
old boot time 68secs(best i could manage with all the tweaks)
new boot time 32 secs(no tweaks)
(This is to open google and be able to do a search)
will be interesting in a week once I have loaded all my normal crap.