But Nuno Lourenço is claiming 29 secs hdd and 27 secs ssd I'm getting 100 secs ssd so it's not the same for every one.
These conversations about SSD drives always makes me chuckle. If you are wanting high speed read and write drives as your main OS drive then you will need equally fast or faster read and write storage drives as well. It is pointless to have a sdd as your main drive then have a standard disc drive as storage, as the os is running and trying to read and write faster then your storage drive can handle. If you are wanting high performance from a ssd in read and write then I would suggest the following... Maximum performance PCI SSD (As OS drive) twin raided Sata SSD (As storage) (no disc drive at all) or Twin raided sata SSD (As OS drive) twin raided sata SSD (As storage) (no disc drives at all) Medium performance Single sata SSD (As OS drive) twin raided sata SSD (As storage) (no disc drives at all) Average Twin Disc drives raided (As OS drive) single sata SSD (As storage) Its like the network between 10/100/1000 your only as fast as your slowest/smallest connection. To run your main OS on a SSD then have a disc drive as storage is kind of defying the point of using an ssd as it will only be as fast as the disc drive can read and write. Edit (the above statement is based on that people install the OS on ssd and then install program files on storage drives) I run... AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3.71 Ghz Asus Formula V motherboard Asus HD6990 GPU 16GB Corsair 1600hz Ram 2 X Sata III 6Gb's Western Digital 320 drives raided as one 640 Loading times.. Everything maxed 16x Anisotropic and at 5760 x 1080 vsync on video. Megane at Lime rock loaded first time 27.43 sec, second time 25.71 sec. C6RGT2 at Nords loaded first time 1.22.11 sec, second time 59.80 sec.
Not HDD, the first one is SSD and the second is RAMDisk. In HDD i'm pretty sure that its more than 29 seconds.
Yes I miss read that but there is still a difference of 60 seconds between my SSD and His and mine, I do have an older version so I'd expect some difference but not that much.
Adrian Britton What are you talking about no idea? People here say that rF2 loads slow even if both system and rf2 are on SSD. There is some difference compared to non SSD but it's far smaller than in most other games/applications. Rf2 load times are a bit slow no matter what you do.
...files on the SSD will be "fast". Files on a normal HDD will be "slow". Pretty easy to figure out...they aren't "tied together" in any way. I have a 256gb Samsung 840 pro. I put Windows, general programs and a couple of choice games on it (rf2, Rise of Flight, Skyrim, etc). The games that aren't rF2 load super quick, like I would expect them to. The rest of the game library on the normal disk HDD load like they always have, much slower...the two aren't tied together in some weird bond, which is what you seem to imply... It doesn't really defy the point either, running an SSD for the OS. Some people can only afford a small SSD, and the biggest benefit they would probably see is from running the OS on it, and not games. A much "snappier" computer doing day to day things is nicer IMO than loading a level in a game quicker.
I cant even afford one ssd but what I was trying to say is.. To just buy one ssd and run alongside a hdd is a waste of money, as it will only save you a couple of seconds. The only benefit is to run ssd all round, which is a lot of money. Which is why it makes me chuckle, spending a couple of hundred pounds on a ssd to save a few seconds. (edit and this is running trial fraps as it loads, so you could take a few seconds away from the load time)
Whut. No. What matters is what you want to put on it to get the speed benefit. The drives don't work in tandem/work against each other. If I have a 1TB media storage drive full of movies and music, and an SSD with the OS and a few games on it, the HDD in no way affects the speed of the stuff on the SSD.
Hmm... but whatever you have on your SSD will read/write at SSD speed. If that's your OS then all its reads and writes will be at SSD speed, even if the game/program you're running is on a slower drive (and will therefore load/read/write slower). If you put your game on the SSD then it will also read/write more quickly, whether or not there's a slower drive sitting there as well. Unless I'm missing something.
An SSD for the OS is NOT a waist of money. Sure you only save a second here and there but a second here and there adds up. If you have first hand experience with a SSD you will understand how the total experience is improved. Who needs stuff like music and videos on an SSD when even a 10 year old rotating drive is capable of streaming the files realtime. The major benefit comes from random access. For example a large SQL database, Exchange server DB or a large Outlook OST/PST file. BTW, on my machine with rF1 in a ram drive I can direct connect to a server via CMD line and the total time it takes to load rF1, connect to server and load track is 12 secs. This same process from dual 7200.12s in RAID0 takes about 25 secs. Sure this isn't a ton of time but it adds up. It is super nice when you are in a warm up session and realize you need to restart rF for some reason. You know you can be back on the server in minimal time and not miss the start. rF2 seems to bottle neck somewhere else though.
What you were describing sounds a lot like an IDE channel running at the speed of the lowest drive connected to it; maybe that's what you were thinking? Personally I haven't gone and bought SSD because 1. I'm cheap and 2. I'm paranoid and don't like the idea of a limited number of writes, especially when the drive is most beneficial for small files that are likely to be written/changed more often (because as Noel point out, a lot of the 'data' we might think about accessing faster only has a limited demand rate anyway, so apart from a negligible startup difference there's no point), and 3. I'm really, really, cheap. Still, people get SSD and are happy with them, so good on them
Maybe its just me but it sounds more fun running four sata disc drives as one then it would be to run one ssd. And at half the price
A lot of people worry about reliability and longevity. I've seen two long term tests done on a large array of SSD's. They were used flat out, 24/7, being constantly written to, read, wiped clean, etc etc. Huge amounts of data going through each drive each day. I remember seeing some starting to drop off noticably in capacity after 150-200TB had been written. When they compared the amount of data that had passed through them to normal usage, it was equivalent to 20 odd years lifespan. Depends on what you are doing with the drive of course, but for a normal person, putting programs on, running their OS, etc, it is ample. You would need to be working the drive all the time, and really hard to cripple the drive. If you really wore it hard enough to notice any drop off, by that time, I bet you would be looking at new tech anyway. Plus you then have to wonder about average HDD lifespans too. It's also not a negligible difference ai...you just have to try it XD Yeah, I get that. I do like the mechanical drives as there is something cool about them, especially if you are rich enough to run multiple Raptor drives. Still, they just aren't as fast, they are hot, make noise, are fragile, etc.
please don't get me wrong I am not "anti-ssd" I just think that if your going to run them and use them as a OS drive, then totally remove your disc drives from the mother board and run them externally in a usb case or a nas drives as external storage. An don't just run one on its own, raid two together and have it as the sole drive in your machine with a usb 3 stick dedicated for windows "Ready Boost". Then the benefits of ssd will be worth while and program times will be dramatically reduced. Anything that's a combination of OS on ssd and hdd on the same motherboard is a waste of money, either make your computer run as one or the other. Making them both run at different speeds can cause dropped packets, bad clusters and failed read/write resulting in slower performance.
Yeah the speed difference isn't negligible at all. We are talking 500MB/Sec vs 130MB/Sec on a 2 drive RAID0. The SSD life span thing isn't an issue. The life span of an SSD far exceeds that of a rotating drive. The more rotating drives you put in a RAID0 the higher the odds get of having a failure get. Even 4 10k drives in RAID0 will not touch a single SSD. If your cheap (like me) then get a drive just large enough for the OS and your most used programs then symlink the Users folder off to a rotating drive. As Lazza points out, SATA isn't like IDE where the speed is capped at the least fastest drive. You can mix rotating and SSDs on the same mobo without creating a bottleneck. I certainly would move my disks to an external array on USB (not even USB3) or on the network. If you did that you would definitely be creating a bottleneck.
Yes SSD's are majorly beneficial speed and latency wise. My windows boots in under 20secs after post (actually causes a problem that my keyboard isn't ready for a few seconds after the login screen appears), then once in windows everything (saved on SSD) is very snappy, browser/office/other most used programs load almost instantly, and the best thing is you get none of that grinding and few second delay after clicking the start menu. Games wise, they differ, I haven't tried many games on mine as it is only 120GB but when I had GTA4 installed it was literally twice as fast, granted with rF2 the benefit is negligible. You pretty much cannot be without an SSD if your PC is anywhere near half decent, that is unless you want those split second moments of un-responsiveness that come with HDDs.
This is nonsense. Large video files, movies, TV series make no sense to put on SSD. The only difference is that doubleclicking video file from SSD will open media player 0.05 seconds faster than from normal HDD. The playback itself as well skipping is just as fast from 10 years old PATA drive. Same with music and many other files. The most important thing is to have OS on SSD, rest is much less important. On the other hand, OS and applications always run much faster from SSD than from any raid configuration, also I think single 240GB SSD is nowadays cheaper per GB than RAID field of 10k rpm hdd
