Do I really need an SSD?

[treetops]

It wont affect your fps at all in games. It will make programs load faster. Including your windows startup.

 

[Nero7]

My PC "only" has a 1TB 7200rpm HDD but I never felt the need to get an SSD.
My Laptop has a quite fast SSD and the difference is... nothing noteworthy but still some things that are nice to have like:

Windows booting up in like 3 seconds opposed to the 15 of my PC.

Some software like Paint.Net having a way faster initial launch but still within seconds.

Copying files around is faster. Not by much, but it is.

Do you know that slight delay in responsiveness that happens sometimes? With an SSD there's less of that.

Games run perfectly fine on my PC so... they would maybe start up quicker and have shorter loading times on an SSD???


The SSD is a luxury. In no way or form does the average user need it. It is however nice to have.
I base all this on my personal observation.

Oh but here's the thing:

You can drop a SSD on the ground and it will still work. Thats not the case with HDD. So its quite essential for laptops to have a SSD.

 

[Jibberish18]

You can drop a SSD on the ground and it will still work. Thats not the case with HDD. So its quite essential for laptops to have a SSD.

Remember, a laptop mechnical hard drive has 4x roughly the shock resistance of a desktop AND laptops should come with a mechanism that shuts down the hard drive momentarily if the laptop is dropped or is falling (sensors and all). Still an SSD kills it in both of these areas.

 

[Nero7]

Remember, a laptop mechnical hard drive has 4x roughly the shock resistance of a desktop AND laptops should come with a mechanism that shuts down the hard drive momentarily if the laptop is dropped or is falling (sensors and all). Still an SSD kills it in both of these areas.

Didn't know that, good to know thx!

 

[ddferrari]

Why WOULDN'T you? You can get a 250GB brand name SSD for $85, and a really nice one like the Samsung Evo is only $99. 250GB is more than enough for your OS and programs- then use an HDD for storage. If you game on Steam, download Steam Mover free and easily move your current game to the SSD and move it back to the HDD when finished. Everything will be way faster- even when browsing as pages load much faster, and your load times in most games will only take literally a few seconds.

I wouldn't bother with a hybrid unless your mobo has no extra Sata ports available. You'll want to use a Sata III port if you have it.

 

[JW0914]

An SSD will provide features a mechanical drive, or SSHD, could never achieve, such as dependability and data integrity (there's no moving parts), extremely fast file transfers of any file >100MB, utilization of RAM for file transfers (Samsung's RAPID mode, which does this at the binary level], but most of all, IOPS, which [non-SAS drives] will never exceed ~10 IOPS in a mechanical drive versus the 98,000 IOPS of say the Samsung 850 EVOs.

Anyone running a mid-range SSD on a SATA3 port will notice a significant bump in performance, however if it's a PCIe SSD (PCIe slot or M.2 using PCIe3 lanes with IOPS in the 300K range and transfer speeds of 1.5GB/s to ~2.5GB/s [RAM speeds]), one will see an astronomical bump in performance when performing every day tasks.

 

[captaincranky]

I turn my machine on and go away for 5 minutes to get my morning coffee. I use each program for at least 30 minutes at a time and usually load stuff in background (especially browser, Thunderbird and games) while I do other stuff. The only drag I really experience is in level change loading in Fallout 4 (sub-optimal as it is).

Since I do not really care about start up, is an SSD really worth it? Would a hybrid be optimal?

Thanks for your guidance!

Well, you haven't told us what your rig consists off, and in some cases you might get more of a performance bump than others.

I will tell you a funny story though. I had a copy of Win 7 64 bit Pro laying around. When I heard that the newest Intel Kaby Lake and 200 series boards "weren't going to be compatible with Windows 7", I said, "Screw you M$ & Natella", and decided to build a rig with the outgoing 100 series board, and a Skylake i5-6600K..

Anyway, I got a Gigabyte X170 4 RAM slot micro board for $65.00 in a combo with the 6600K Which was $180.00! (Old stock Microcenter was selling down). I bought "you can boot me with the CPU graphics" speed DDR-4, which is "only" 2133Mhz.

I had a Samsung 256MB 750 EVO laying around. So, the plan was to install Windows and all the programs I needed on an old, (read "very old") WD Blue SATA 2 (!) HDD, and then simply image the system over to the SSD, while stuffing the HDD in the closet in case I ever needed to reinstall Windows to the SSD.. And so I installed to the steel spinney thing. When I got done, every app I tried to launch would hang up. Naturally, because of internet chatter about troubles installing Win 7 to the new boards, I thought the Windows install was hosed. So, I did it again, and came up with the same sh!t, programs wouldn't launch.

At that point, I just said the hell with it, and imaged the system to the SSD, hoping for the best. Now, the machine boots in about 10 seconds, and Photoshop Elements launches in about the same time. It does however, still take quite a bit of time to load the catalog, which resides on a 2TB HDD.

The moral of the story is, (at least by my assessment), an old fashioned HDD simply can't supply information fast enough to the newest systems to make them work properly. As soon as I installed the SSD, all the hanging apps disappeared, period.

Since the X170 board has a slot for an M2 PCIE 3.0 board, I'm likely going to buy a Samsung 256GB 960 EVO for the system, and hand me down the 850 EVO to my Ivy Bridge rig, which only has SATA 3 ports for drives. (No PCIE drive slot)..

Furthermore, since I don't have my desktops running 24/7, I can buy standard Seagate "Barracuda" HDDs for storage. I've gotten 2 TB as low as $60.00, and I think a 3TB cost me $70.00. (BTW, the Seagate 3TB is 7200 RPM, but only 5400 RPM for its WD counterpart).

For comparison's sake: I bought a 120 GB Sandisk SSD for 40 bucks, Black Friday, two years past. That was installed in a dual core Pentium E-6300 (2.8Ghz), over a G41 Gigabyte board. The system is DDR-2 (800 Mhz), and SATA 2 drive slots. The performance is definitely a noticeable improvement to an HDD, but nowhere near as spectacular as the gains I got on the 6600K system. (Which BTW is running at stock speed 3.5Ghz).

 

[Cycloid Torus]

@captaincranky "Well, you haven't told us what your rig consists of"... Dell Xeon w3550 workstation - elderly, but still functional quad-core (8 thread, 3.07 Ghz w/ WD black 500GB 7200 & Windows 10 Pro).

So I guess not quite hot enough to take full advantage of SSD. Is there a way to test / predict degree of "saturation" for HDD?

 

[harm9963]

www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_world_gaming_performance. This will help you.

 

[captaincranky]

@captaincranky "Well, you haven't told us what your rig consists of"... Dell Xeon w3550 workstation - elderly, but still functional quad-core (8 thread, 3.07 Ghz w/ WD black 500GB 7200 & Windows 10 Pro).

So I guess not quite hot enough to take full advantage of SSD. Is there a way to test / predict degree of "saturation" for HDD?

OK, and not that it matters a whole hell of a lot, but your 500GB Black, really isn't that fast. The higher capacity models are somewhat faster, I think simply because the heads don't have to move as far to encounter blocks of data.

With that said, your rig is likely to benefit more from an SSD that my Pentium rig, but most likely not as much as my 6600K rig. That's semi-educated guessing, based on the fact you're quad has a lot more throughput than my Pentium, and likely faster DDR3 as well. The DDR4 associated with the newest CPUs, has huge amounts of bandwidth, supplying more data faster to the SSD. You have your 8 threads working, while my Pentium has but a lowly 2.

So, screw benchmarks, I only manage to absorb the Cliff's Notes versions anyway. I think you'd be happy with the performance bump you'd get from an SSD.

What I am curious about is your rig's configuration. I'm into HT and imaging, thus requiring fairly substantial amounts of storage. I couldn't "have any fun", with 500GBs of HD space. Nonetheless, if you sprung for an SSD as small as 240GB, you'd still need the WD for backup and storage. Some guys load scenery from a mechanical HD anyway. I'm not a gamer, nor am I trying to pretend to know anything about it.

I have noticed however, that mechanical drives being fed from an SSD, easily approach their maximum data transfer rates, and that it's generally quicker than HDD to HDD.

EDIT: Before I forget, Intel G-41 chipset only has SATA 2 (3 Gbs) ports. That's only half the speed of SATA 3, and most current SSDs will come close to saturating SATA 3. So, if your Dell is SATA 3, by all means, SSD will be a huge improvement.

 

[harm9963]

Save up your money, that's what I am doing ,if it's busted that one thing, , if you want to burn a hole on your pocket.

 

[JW0914]

...mechanical drives being fed from an SSD, easily approach their maximum data transfer rates, and that it's generally quicker than HDD to HDD.

...most current SSDs will come close to saturating SATA 3. So, if your Dell is SATA 3, by all means, SSD will be a huge improvement.

While data transfer rates are important for large file transfers, IOPS matters more for day to day noticeable improvement in speed and performance. Non-SAS HDDs have IOPS in the teen range if one is lucky (usually around 10)... even a low grade SSD will have IOPS in the tens of thousands.

• For example, the screenshot shows two separate 850 EVO mSATA performance benchmarks, with the top drive utilizing RAPID mode (of which utilizes a portion of RAM at the raw data level to massively increase file transfers), similar to one creating a RAM drive (I can copy a 4GB ISO in just under 2s for example)

Even though a SATA 2 will prevent one from fully saturating r/w speeds, most performance benefits come not from r/w speeds, but from the IOPS and low seek times for data, as one will only gain top r/w speeds when transferring large files in excess of a few hundred MBytes.