ask me if a ssd is worth it?depend on the game,for final fantasy 14?hell ya ssd is a must for world of warcraft?not needed,see it is all situational.on average your better off finding something else you need like more ram if you arent at 8 gb.

it is like processor:amd supposedly sucvk at processor,weird check the a8 3850 gpucpu (no expernal gpu)and comapre it to any gpucpu intel make and it crush intel offering in gaming!so like i say everything is relative

as for ssd speed if you are inclined on speed raid 10 ssd is probably your best bet

Originally posted by drbaltazar

ask me if a ssd is worth it?depend on the game,for final fantasy 14?hell ya ssd is a must for world of warcraft?not needed,see it is all situational.on average your better off finding something else you need like more ram if you arent at 8 gb.

it is like processor:amd supposedly sucvk at processor,weird check the a8 3850 gpucpu (no expernal gpu)and comapre it to any gpucpu intel make and it crush intel offering in gaming!so like i say everything is relative

as for ssd speed if you are inclined on speed raid 10 ssd is probably your best bet

The processor is not at all as important as the GPU today, CPU was more important in the days of 3DFX but now an average CPU and a great GPU beats the other way around easily, except in a few badly coded games.

Do you mean raid some SSDs with Raid 10 or to raid 10 SSDs with raid 5???

Anyways, even in Wow the shorter loading time is a benefit unless you have more time than money. It is a consideration everyone have to make by themselves.

In EQ2 I actually got a rather high increase in FPS in some zones like Neriak, but that is due to bad coding and because it kinda chokes the computer with loading lots of crap while you move.

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by Toxia

Maybe i'm not understanding something right, and i apologize if im sounding stupid lol!

What would a small SSd and my large HD do for me? Are you saying "Take your most played games, put THOSE on SSD with windows"  or is there a way for my games to swap out on the SSD?

EDIT: what im troubled over is installing/uninstalling whatever game i'm wanting to play at the time- uninstalling from the SSD deletes data, so my saves would be lost....Seems the'hassle-free' way of doing it is just to get a big enough one to put all my games on? am i mistaken in something?

The SSD is faster, silent, uses less power and generates no heat.

To run the OS, the swap file and the demanding game you play right now on it will increase the performance of your computer, it will boot faster and anytime you load something from the SSD it will be faster. It will not greatly increase the FPS while you play but it will lower loading time a lot.

Besides that, there is good reasons to have a few huge 1,5 TBs SATA drives or similar to run less demanding or rarely played games on as well as movies (or whatever) on.

I myself have a system drive based on 4 raided SSDs (I had too much money a few years ago), 2 x 1 TBs drives, an Icebox with about 2,5 TB in and a Deltaco USB device where I can slide in any old harddrive in without rebooting. Loads of space and great performance. :D

Thanks for clarifying again, i was stuck at the point of understanding i could swap out the actual game files instead of uninstalling it from SSD then reinstalling another one,therefore losing my game data/savedata. If swapping the files between HD and SSD does truly work, then i would do fine with just a small 200 gig one i think....much info to chew on! Thanks

For a desktop, an SSD as your boot drive is the only way to go. A 60 gig vertect 3 would be optimal considering they are less than 99$ at the moment. For storage I have two 1 TB 7200's striped. This gives you a decent amount of storage with access speeds much faster than a sinlge HD will attain. You can even use Win 7 software raid, amazingly its decent. Also have an external dock so that you can slap in an HD to use for the occasionaly backup. In my opinion this is the optimal set up if you are on a budget. This gives you very fast boot times, fast game load times, and a decent amount of storage space. If something goes awry, it is easy enough to reimage the boot drive without losing any important data, due to it being on the 2 storage drives and on your backup.

As for a laptop, if you instal an SSD you will sacrifice a large amount of storage space for speed. If you go this route I would recommend having a nice external drive, 7200 rpm, or a NAS that has a raid setup as to not sacrifice storage space. In the end it all depends on your budget. With 500$ to burn you could get a decent size SSD that you can also use as a data drive...

Pros:

• Much faster than laptop HDD's, whether 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM due to 2.5" platter size
• Not mechanical so banging your laptop will never cause the head to scratch the platter
• Contributes almost no heat to the system

Cons:

• Money

I would buy a 120GB SSD, make it your main OS drive with your MMO's on it, and keep your mechanical hard drive in there for mass storage with the power saving set to shut it down after 5 minutes of inactivity.

Hard drives in laptops are an even bigger bottleneck than in desktop systems because the physically smaller hard drives. The outer track of a hard drive is the fastest because it covers more surface area in one spin than the inner track. A laptop hard drive is missing 1" of outer track, and is tuned to run cooler (re: slower). Most laptops have the processor speed and memory capacity to be very snappy, but they aren't, because the hard drive chugs.

You will notice this speed in multitasking, streaming textures in game, boot time and game load time. The last two are usually not a big deal to people, and the multitasking speed depends on how you use your laptop, but the streaming texture speed is pretty noticeable in MMO's when you enter crowded areas or a new area.

Heat buildup is also a big issue in gaming laptops. My buddies have 3 gaming laptops and they all have to use those laptop stands with fans to stop their laptops from BSOD'ing. This is why I suggest never putting 2 HDD's in RAID in a laptop - there's almost no performance gain, and it doubles the heat output. I don't know if you've ever touched a HDD while it's been running but they can get VERY hot. SSD is the opposite - almost no heat output, and performance is great.

Majority of the people who own SSDs will tell you to get one. I got the Crucial M4 and I have absolutely no regrets in getting it. SSDs are simply amazing and totally worth the price for one (even if it's a 64gb one). As Quizzical said, if space is such an issue you can always copy/paste most game directories to and from the SSD to make such whatever game you're playing get the benefits. Each time you do it (depending on the game size) shouldn't take you longer than a few minutes.

A 1tb platter hard drive is around 180mb read/write with  slower seek times.

SSD come in a wide range of read/write times up to 900mb with way faster seek times. This what makes windows start up faster and other programs.

BUT SATA 2 max out  around 200-300mb read/write. SATA 3 is around 500-600mb.

Buying guide:

So, figure out if your motherboard supports SATA 2 or SATA 3.

If  SATA 2 you would have to buy 2 ssd with around 200mb read/write with great seek times and raid them. These are usually price around 100dollars with 64gb.

If SATA 3 buy one 500mb read/write SSD with capacity of 120gb but price around 200bucks. You can add another one later for raiding.

The price of 1tb platter drives around 150dollars because of short supply. If you have sata 2 It would be better to stick with HDD just make sure you are buying a 1tb platter. However, a sata 3 motherboard performance difference makes the SSD worth it!

Originally posted by Devalon

If SATA 3 buy one 500mb read/write SSD price around 200bucks. You can add another one later for raiding.

 

Just wanted to mention that the write speed isn't so important for SSD's, unless you're continually swapping programs between it and your storage drives. It's part of the reason the Crucial M4's are so popular right now, they have a lower write speed than a lot of other SSD's but the trade off is a good read speed for access and tend to be much more reliable and also don't degrade as fast as most of the other makes.

Maybe one day I'll get an SSD, but I'd rather spend the extra hundreds on a top of the line video card or CPU.

Originally posted by Kabaal

Originally posted by Devalon

If SATA 3 buy one 500mb read/write SSD price around 200bucks. You can add another one later for raiding.

 

Just wanted to mention that the write speed isn't so important for SSD's, unless you're continually swapping programs between it and your storage drives. It's part of the reason the Crucial M4's are so popular right now, they have a lower write speed than a lot of other SSD's but the trade off is a good read speed for access and tend to be much more reliable and also don't degrade as fast as most of the other makes.

Correct, I just want people to start looking at the stats of the SSD. There are a lot of crappy SSD out there!

Originally posted by Toxia

Thanks for clarifying again, i was stuck at the point of understanding i could swap out the actual game files instead of uninstalling it from SSD then reinstalling another one,therefore losing my game data/savedata. If swapping the files between HD and SSD does truly work, then i would do fine with just a small 200 gig one i think....much info to chew on! Thanks

That was not actually what I meant by swap file but yes, you can easily move the game between your drives, but if you plan to run the game from the other drive you either need to change the shortcut or start it by pressing the .exe file.

Swap file: A disk file used to temporarily save a program or part of a program running in memory.

SSDs are definitley worth it for OS and application loading speed.  For actual gaming, probably not.

Everything is fast at sequential transfer speeds.  What matters is random transfer speeds.  That's where hard drives are slow, and good SSDs are fast.  For example:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6

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Originally posted by travdoty
Do you really need to spend hundreds of dollars to get your computer to boot up an extra couple of seconds faster? To get your zones to load a few seconds faster? Didn't think so. Don't buy into the gimmick that the rest of these guys have bought into and just wait for the technology to get better and cheaper. -waits for flame for being rational-

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I think it's a better way to spend "hundreds of dollars" just so you can turn on another level of useless FSAA, or see an increase from 62 to 123 FPS. SSD's impact more than just gaming, unlike a video card. To be honest, I'd spend more on the SSD than the CPU - because the mass storage is the single biggest bottleneck in any system regardless of CPU/GPU make and model, and the more you can do to help that, the better off your entire system is.

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Originally posted by drbaltazar
if you trully need ssd i suggest a hybrid hhd most of the time they got regular hhd and on that there is also a 4 or 8 gb ssd
ps:ms make recommandation on how to select the microsd card for their smartphone it isnt directly related but still apply to ssd so i suggest you find an article about it and read it cause ms knoqw their stuff and they recommand to go at it differently to select microsd card then other corp like android this is why it took forever to get ms certified microsd card

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Hybrid drives are a decent compromise for laptops, where you would like SSD-type speeds but also need lots of storage space.

However, a Hybrid drive only gets about 30% of the performance that a full SSD will - if you have the physical room (such as in any desktop), and SSD + HDD combo nets you the best of both worlds for about the same price. The only drawback being that you need to manually copy data back and forth.

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Originally posted by drbaltazar
op:no necessary just lower paging file to 250 and your good i hear if you put it off there is still a paging file dont know how this work so just leave it at 250 and you ll be ok (make sure you got 4 gb of ram at least(i suggest 6 gb)and your good speedwise
it wont speed up the hhd speed tho so if you got a lot of file needed on you hhd it will take slightly longer

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This is not such a good idea.

Page file is used in a couple of different ways.

The first way is the common sense: You run out of physical RAM, so your system will use the hard drive as RAM. This is extremely slow, and your system, even with an SSD, will slow to a halt. The solution to this is simply to install more RAM or close programs you aren't using.

The second way isn't so obvious. When programs load they access a lot of various files (usually DLLs). They don't constantly use these files though. Windows is smart enough to know which are commonly used, and which are just rarely accessed. It will swap the rare ones out to the swap file to make room in your physical memory for more commonly used stuff. This effectively increases your amount of available RAM without seriously impacting performance. If you shrink the swap file too small, or disable it completely, you limit the capability of Windows to do this, and all of a sudden all of your programs will eat a lot more memory than they would otherwise.

I've got 3 SSDS in my PC now and I will only use a regular HDD for storage from this point forward.  It made a huge difference IMO in loading times for Vanguard, LOTRO and AOC as well as Windows and other programs. 

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Originally posted by Toxia

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Originally posted by Loke666

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Originally posted by Quizzical

I'd question why you need 500 GB of SSD capacity, rather than going the small SSD plus large hard drive route if you need a lot of capacity.

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Amen.
A 60 GB SSD amd a 1 TB SATA media drive is cheaper and works as well.
The only exception is if power consumption or heat needs to be kept really low, which is common in laptops. There the large SSD is still the best solution.

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Maybe i'm not understanding something right, and i apologize if im sounding stupid lol!
What would a small SSd and my large HD do for me? Are you saying "Take your most played games, put THOSE on SSD with windows"  or is there a way for my games to swap out on the SSD?
EDIT: what im troubled over is installing/uninstalling whatever game i'm wanting to play at the time- uninstalling from the SSD deletes data, so my saves would be lost....Seems the'hassle-free' way of doing it is just to get a big enough one to put all my games on? am i mistaken in something?

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a 120G SSD (one of the more popular sizes) can hold Windows 7 (about 40G), and still have about 60G left over for games. That's 3-5 extremely large AAA MMO's, around 35-50 F2P MMO's, around 10 AAA single player games, or for emulators a lot of emulated games (depending on the system, the files vary greatly in size).

Now if you play every single game on your computer every single day - it could be a lot of copying. Most people don't do that, they play 2-3 games at a time depending on their mood, and every couple of weeks one of those games gets swapped out for another as they beat it or get tired of it or something else new (or nostalgia old) comes along.

Most games just let you copy straight over - all you need to do is update the shortcut.
A more sophisticated way would be to use Symlinks, then you wouldn't even need to update your shortcuts, and would work even for programs would would require a reinstall. There is a guide here, which is meant for steam, but would work for anything:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/262456-32-guide-transfer-steam-games

There is a program that does this just for Symlinking Steam games over with one click and a nice lil GUI, I installed Steam on my HDD (the slower one), and let games install to there by default. WHen I want to seriously play a game on the SSD, it's just as easy as clicking a button and it copies over, and then Steam doesn't know any difference; it just runs off the SSD. I apologize I don't have the name of it as its on my other computer but can look it up if anyone is interested - it really only applies to steam though.

The way I look at the SSD thing is...

If you can afford an SSD then you'll likely be happy if you buy an SSD.

The only real con would by life but I upgrade so often I doubt any of the SSD's I currently have (three total .. 2 in desktop and 1 in laptop) will go bad or die before I upgrade them.

Using an SSD for your OS is not just about windows booting faster.   If you play on a spindle drive and the game is actually hitting the data files very often... try to multi task and watch what happens.    Your HD is already the slowest component (by far) in your hardware setup.   Why do you think people used to try and do away with the need for virtual memory...

An SSD will handle multi tasking with intensive applications (and games) in ways a spindle drive could only dream of.

The only problem you will have is that you definitely notice when the network is slow once you go to an SSD... because instead of data load times... you're waiting for the network.  

If you can't afford an SSD or just don't like the idea I can totally relate.. its not a bad thing and everyone has a right to use or not use what hardware they want.    Personally I can't wait or the tech to advance to the point we get capacity up and prices down enough... to do bulk storage on SSD's for a more easy to take price.   That said for gaming places like Newegg have sales quite often...

Only real advice I have.. if you are thinking about buying an SSD educate yourself.   Pretty much I always suggest anandtech's storage forum because they have a very nice SSD thread that is updated.. on what drives/controllers to buy and stay away from along with firmware alerts.

There are definitely SSD's you don't want to buy...