[Loobster]

Originally Posted by Gormond

No not just the SATA 2, in my experience a 4 year old machine wouldnt get much advantage from a SSD and a good fast HDD would be just as good.

You're 100% wrong.

My 5-year old laptop tripled in general speed with a second-gen SSD installed.

[Loobster]

Originally Posted by Orbitalzone

So guys is it worth me bothering with an SSD inside my 4 year old Dell Vostro desktop? it's got a core2duo 3GHz, 4GB ram and Windows 7, it performs really well for an older machine.

Yes. I would get a second generation model since you only have SATA II ports in there (just to avoid the possibility of compatibility issues with a 3rd-gen SSD unit). Of course you could get a 3rd-gen one since the price is about the same and you could use it in your next build which will have SATA 6Gbps ports.

But either way an SSD will make a huge difference even in a 4-year old rig.

[Loobster]

Originally Posted by noise747

i am thinking of getting another SSD drive and putting it in raid, not sure if it will be worth it mind you. would it really work any faster?

It would be worth it if the controller can handle the throughput of both drives.

But a lot of SSDs aren't supported in a RAID configuration anyway, so check before buying.

[Loobster]

Originally Posted by Gormond

Yeah you make a valid point, I was just trying to point out that modern HDDs have also got alot faster on the last 4 years. Not only huge capacity but write speed of 200MB/s and are fairly cheap in comparison.

This thread is not about cheapness. It's about speed.

The fastest of the fastest spinny HDDs (in other words the ones that are as expensive or more expensive than an SSD) can burst at approaching 200MB/sec, but that's still less than half the speed of a 3rd-gen SSD.

So if it's speed you're after, there is no spinny drive that can hold a candle to SSD.

[Gormond]

Originally Posted by Loobster

This thread is not about cheapness. It's about speed.

The fastest of the fastest spinny HDDs (in other words the ones that are as expensive or more expensive than an SSD) can burst at approaching 200MB/sec, but that's still less than half the speed of a 3rd-gen SSD.

So if it's speed you're after, there is no spinny drive that can hold a candle to SSD.

I was replying to a post about upgrading an old machine to make it faster, ofcoarse it's about cost otherwise you would just buy a new PC.

It isn't less than half the speed if your using SATA2. Also a laptop is a different story as they can't use the best of HDDs due to size/heat/power constraints.

Also you aren't approaching anything like SSD costs per GB on fast harddrives as a Seagate Barracuda 64MB cache 1TB can be had for around £60 which gets average write speeds of over 150MB/s.

The point I was making that any upgrade be it modern HDD or SSD will be faster than a 4 year old drive. The advantage of an HDD is you don't have to sacrifice capacity for speed.

[flagpole]

Originally Posted by Loobster

You're 100% wrong.

My 5-year old laptop tripled in general speed with a second-gen SSD installed.

you're going to have to add a little more to that. by what metric?

[Loobster]

I don't do metric anymore, I live in the USA, strictly feet and inches only.

But bootup times, application launches, pretty much everything is about three times faster than it was with a spinny drive.

[pocatello]

Originally Posted by flagpole

you're going to have to add a little more to that. by what metric?

Laptops are stop and go, so it would make far more difference...even with suspend the laptop harddrive is a chore to wait on..http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/a...nch-reviewed/4 Older review of core 2 units since those are comparable to most old laptops...if not slower.

[The_One]

Ive been using only SSD's for the last 4 years now.
My newest one ive been using for over 2 years now, its just awesome with no problems at all so far.
160GB with everything on it, with 31GB spare.

In about 15 months time i'll be building a new PC, i'll probably get 2 smaller SSD's for it, 1 for games and 1 for everything else, i have no need for big capacity im done with saving music and movies years ago.

[bean999]

Originally Posted by Loobster

I don't do metric anymore, I live in the USA, strictly feet and inches only.

But bootup times, application launches, pretty much everything is about three times faster than it was with a spinny drive.

Metric as in 'unit of measure' or 'measurement' I think. I don't have slowness issues with W7 or (especially) ubuntu except maybe large databases/text files. W7 search is also v slow, but that's about it. My cpu seems to feel the strain though. Anyway 3 times as fast in some cases would have things done before I thought of doing them .

Are there other benefits of SSD like power-saving/cpu saving/low heat?

Also, have you or anyone had experience of dual-booting with them?

[pocatello]

Harddrives only use a few watts to begin with, so the power savings are minimal for most uses..

[archiver]

I dual boot with SSDs. Have done for a few years. The devices simply appear as standard SATA drives, so no concerns at all. Except; one regularly used OS needs to have TRIM capabilities to keep erased blocks on the device in sync with the file system (presuming that's still necessary with the latest ones?). It's also best practice to let an SSD aware OS partition the drive, as partitions need to be aligned in a particular way, for best results.

[noise747]

Originally Posted by Loobster

It would be worth it if the controller can handle the throughput of both drives.

But a lot of SSDs aren't supported in a RAID configuration anyway, so check before buying.

Thanks, I will do that. Saying that most motherboards raid are not that great anyway, so maybe not a good idea.

[noise747]

Originally Posted by pocatello

Harddrives only use a few watts to begin with, so the power savings are minimal for most uses..

Heat is the problem and noise with spinny drives.

I built a small Pc for a friend of a friend a few months back, we stuck a normal seagate in and it got pretty warm in there and was pretty noisy.


We got a quiet PSU, a passive CPU cooler that would be cooled by the case fan if needed and forgot about the HDD. He got himself a 500Gb seagate Hybrid drive like mine, I wished him luck as mine is not that good, but it works fine on his, being 2.5 inch it is quiet and runs cool.

The 3.5 is now used in a caddy as a back up drive.

[alanwarwic]

Originally Posted by noise747

Heat is the problem and noise with spinny drives.

Depends.

3.5 watts is the maximum startup on many laptop spinny drives yet an 8 watts requirement is/was not uncommon on SSD ones.

[neo_wales]

Heat should be no problem with a good case and fans, I'm running 3x2TB drives (internal) with no heat problems or noise to be honest.

[DeelyBopper]

Whats a spinny drive, one that's been left by it's spouse?

[dodgygeeza]

It refers to a traditional magnetic hard drive with rotating platters, compared with the newer solid state drives (or SSD) that use electronic flash memory with no moving parts.

[GetFrodo]

Originally Posted by DeelyBopper

Whats a spinny drive, one that's been left by it's spouse?

Traditional hard drives are called spinny because they use spintronics to store data. True story.