Does your SSD Improve your productivity?

Status
Not open for further replies.

compdata

Posts: 527   +8
I am interested in hearing for anyone with an SSD to know if they think it improves their productivity significantly and if they have done (or know of any) studies or calculations to this effect?

Basically i would love to have an SSD and definitely think the future of storage technology is going in that direction, however i question the value/cost trade off at this point between quick boot & load times and having to shell out an arm and a leg for a large SSD or having to deal with backup/transfers between multiple disks. Booting my computer once a day and loading several programs each time doesn't bother me much, and my 7200RPM drive/Core 2 Duo lets me work through my 28MB Raw files pretty quickly, where most of the delay is running filters on them, not loading or saving the files. Again i would love to get an SSD, but i can think of other things that seem like a better use of money at this point.

Thanks in advance for lending me your perspective.
 
Enhancing productivity? I think that'd be going a bit too far for the regular user, unless you relied on specific workstation-type applications that thrashed your hard drive heavily and you could cut loading times significantly as a result of the upgrade.

For normal multitasking usage, it just means a snappier performance across the OS and all-around app usage. However, I don't believe shaving a few seconds off on a daily basis can qualify as a productivity improvement.
 
Julio- maybe i should clarify that my question has a personal implication as a semi-pro photographer as well as an implication on my purchasing decisions for all staff computers at my church where i am the IT person.

I think you clearly answered the this as a no, but i am basically wondering if "snappier performance across the OS and all-around app usage" translates to being able to get more done while working on large photos or general office applications.
 
A few seconds off of each task will quickly add up in the course of a week or even a month. What seems like a small performance gain does really make a difference (sometimes). I would say that tasks that require a lot of hard drive access (such as database queries) would significantly speed up, others such as graphics rendering (games) would not benefit.
 
I think there is no doubt that a SSD would be faster.

But the real question; Is saving a few seconds worth the price? And considering your are talking about media/

For example a Patriot 128GB SSD found \Here
Is 3.00 per GB

Whereas a 1TB Seagate found Here
Is 0.09 per GB

Plus the long term reliability of SSD is questionable.
 
I would recommend a WD Caviar Black (a very good drive) and some more RAM. It would help you more than a SSD (especially the RAM: upgrade 2GB to 4Gb, or 4GB to 8GB). a SSD is good with program loading times but it will not help with programs that require a lot of RAM and CPU(or GPU) like photo editors (photoshop for example). Also the more space you have on you hdd the better.
I also work in photoshop/coreldraw on a PC with 2GB RAM, 9400GT and E5200 and when the source file is large (25-100 MB) and i want to save it like an optimized jpg file, i sometimes receive an "not enough RAM" error.
 
I think Puiu put it in good terms, for that kind of Photoshop work processing power and RAM are going to be the two most relevant factors to speed up your work.

Perhaps you could still look around some specialized Photoshop forums, but I'm pretty certain we are correct. Try upgrading to a 64-bit OS with lots of RAM and a Core i7 CPU, that should bring more improvement than a SSD, which should also some improvement but only second to the CPU/RAM combo upgrade.
 
Thanks for the thoughts everyone. I think i am going to wait on the SSDs for now, but will certainly look forward to the day in a couple years when they are more mainstream and the cost has come down substantially.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back