edit: lol @ guy thinking it's an extra 5 seconds to load stuff up with an HDD. Try 30+. Every. Single. Time. You. Turn. On. The. Computer.
I know that that once-a-month ritual had left me wanting to slit my wrists. That was 15-20 seconds I could not afford to spend! Forget the time length double that every time I go through an individual title in my game library, it's staring at the "Welcome to Windows" screen that's killing me inside!
More seriously, since we're still on this topic--how much is a "good" one with a minimum 200 GB space? That's really as low as I would personally go without the speed benefits outweighing the time spent moving games back and forth and pushing off games entirely. If NewEgg is any source, the prices are still really disappointing. $530 for 240 GB? No thanks. I got two ridiculously over-the-top GPUs for the same cost, and the difference between them and a 4 year old GPU is pretty night and day as well.
Get a smaller one, you don't need 240 GB to hold all your word documents and porn. 80 GB would serve someone well if they had windows + a few applications rather than an 80 game library on steam. Everything else, use a normal hard drive for.
For instance, you can buy another SATA cable + power cable and plug it into a 2nd drive.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
edit: lol @ guy thinking it's an extra 5 seconds to load stuff up with an HDD. Try 30+. Every. Single. Time. You. Turn. On. The. Computer.
I know that that once-a-month ritual had left me wanting to slit my wrists. That was 15-20 seconds I could not afford to spend! Forget the time length double that every time I go through an individual title in my game library, it's staring at the "Welcome to Windows" screen that's killing me inside!
More seriously, since we're still on this topic--how much is a "good" one with a minimum 200 GB space? That's really as low as I would personally go without the speed benefits outweighing the time spent moving games back and forth and pushing off games entirely. If NewEgg is any source, the prices are still really disappointing. $530 for 240 GB? No thanks. I got two ridiculously over-the-top GPUs for the same cost, and the difference between them and a 4 year old GPU is pretty night and day as well.
A. you are a blight on the planet for leaving your computer on sucking up all that power for so long. turn it off when you're not using it. plus it needs to be reset far more often if you're keeping things up to date.
B. I said 30+ seconds. Most people do turn their computers off and on more often than you. That adds up. It also factors into launching any number of programs from idle. The difference is sharp.
C. Why do you need a minimum 200GB space? TB drives are stupid cheap these days. You realise that unless on a laptop (and you're not), you can and should have more than a single drive?
D. Moving games back and forth? Do you really need more than a dozen modern full size games installed to the computer?
Are you NOT using Steam? Do you realize how easy it is to move game install data back and forth with Steam?
E. A $250 GPU is not over the top, not when they go up to $700.
edit: lol @ guy thinking it's an extra 5 seconds to load stuff up with an HDD. Try 30+. Every. Single. Time. You. Turn. On. The. Computer.
I know that that once-a-month ritual had left me wanting to slit my wrists. That was 15-20 seconds I could not afford to spend! Forget the time length double that every time I go through an individual title in my game library, it's staring at the "Welcome to Windows" screen that's killing me inside!
More seriously, since we're still on this topic--how much is a "good" one with a minimum 200 GB space? That's really as low as I would personally go without the speed benefits outweighing the time spent moving games back and forth and pushing off games entirely. If NewEgg is any source, the prices are still really disappointing. $530 for 240 GB? No thanks. I got two ridiculously over-the-top GPUs for the same cost, and the difference between them and a 4 year old GPU is pretty night and day as well.
A. you are a blight on the planet for leaving your computer on sucking up all that power for so long. turn it off when you're not using it. plus it needs to be reset far more often if you're keeping things up to date.
B. I said 30+ seconds. Most people do turn their computers off and on more often than you. That adds up. It also factors into launching any number of programs from idle. The difference is sharp.
C. Why do you need a minimum 200GB space? TB drives are stupid cheap these days. You realise that unless on a laptop (and you're not), you can and should have more than a single drive?
D. Moving games back and forth? Do you really need more than a dozen modern full size games installed to the computer?
Are you NOT using Steam? Do you realize how easy it is to move game install data back and forth with Steam?
E. A $250 GPU is not over the top, not when they go up to $700.
$150? That's a steal! Or get a smaller one or slightly less faster one for even cheaper!
Keep painting them as out of reach and you'll keep them out of reach. Or suck it up and get one and change your life.
I have had Jehovah's Witnesses show up on my doorstep who were less pushy about their message, and much more polite, and in their minds what they were telling me concerned the fate of my immortal soul. This is a discussion about subjective value estimations of computer hardware.
Final thought: if any computer component "changes your life," then you probably need to get one. A life, that is.
A. you are a blight on the planet for leaving your computer on sucking up all that power for so long. turn it off when you're not using it. plus it needs to be reset far more often if you're keeping things up to date.
Just like folks who own $700 video cards, right? Sucking up all that extra power for a few more frames per second.
If being a blight means I get access to any file on my PC from my phone, blight me up.
Gaslight, if I bought you an SSD drive and had it shipped straight to your house, would you install it in your computer and use it for your core OS and applications
A. you are a blight on the planet for leaving your computer on sucking up all that power for so long. turn it off when you're not using it. plus it needs to be reset far more often if you're keeping things up to date.
B. I said 30+ seconds. Most people do turn their computers off and on more often than you. That adds up. It also factors into launching any number of programs from idle. The difference is sharp.
C. Why do you need a minimum 200GB space? TB drives are stupid cheap these days. You realise that unless on a laptop (and you're not), you can and should have more than a single drive?
D. Moving games back and forth? Do you really need more than a dozen modern full size games installed to the computer?
Are you NOT using Steam? Do you realize how easy it is to move game install data back and forth with Steam?
E. A $250 GPU is not over the top, not when they go up to $700.
$150? That's a steal! Or get a smaller one or slightly less faster one for even cheaper!
Keep painting them as out of reach and you'll keep them out of reach. Or suck it up and get one and change your life.
I'm glad I checked this thread, because, like most people on the internet, I'm a horrible human being and am going to enjoy this.
A. Please analyze the following sentence: "I know that that once-a-month ritual had left me wanting to slit my wrists." This is written in the past tense. I'll happily acknowledge that, since it's my second language, my mastery of English made not have made this sufficiently clear, except that I actually, earlier in this thread, stated I no longer do this outright--in fact, I explicitly said that I shut down my computer once a night, and did not mind switching it on as soon as I woke up each day. Also, sounding like a self-righteous jerk does not help your case.
B. What can I say? That's unfortunate for you. We are each speaking from our own experience, I've never had to wait that long, even since I switched over to once a day.
C. Because, and I've already stated this, the only time slow loading times--which is almost the entire crux of the argument for getting an SSD--that bother me are within my game collection. Not within my OS (see above), and not within applications like Microsoft Word that literally load up in a fraction of a second anyway. I have filled up an easy 3/4 of a 1 TB drive purely with games (this is not including another drive I keep for family media, movies and shows I like, backups of my PMP, etc.). It's a shame I claimed this was the case for everyone...oh wait, I don't believe I did! 200 GB is the least I would be willing to go to actually pay the prices involved and not be annoyed by the need to shift between games or flat out stop playing ~70% of them (taking up space for backups and the OS, more like ~80%)
D. Yes, yes I do. I know, it's crazy, but I like playing a variety of games. Clearly, I have some sort of disease of the mind that needs to be cured with a drill. I already use Steam, except that only accounts for 5 (maybe 6, if I still play Defcon, maybe 3 if FO3/FNV are patched out of it). And the funny thing is, I've never been inconvenienced by the fact that the vast majority of games I use aren't on Steam in this regard.
E. That's pretty much your opinion, man. I actually wouldn't disagree (I bought two that each cost that much, for my first PC upgrade in more than 4 years), but there are plenty of people who would vehemently disagree and, crazy as it sounds, I respect their opinion (go to any of the GPU threads in this subsection if you don't believe me). That being said, using the fact that GPUs go up to $700 to make the case that a $250 isn't over the top? Really not that great an argument.
As for the OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2? I actually went on NewEgg to check this out, since it's only fair to give it a fair looking at. Since I've already why 200 GB is the bare minimum for me (I'd have to buy two of these things, in any case), I'll put that aside and say that the $220 it costs on NewEgg for 120 GB is highly unimpressive. I'm not terribly excited to go back to the days of a 1 GB costing 2 dollars US. As far as NCIX's apparently much cheaper deal, frankly, I'm not sure $150 is what a steal! to reduce the loading times for 4 to 6 games. I'm paying ~$30 US to reduce the loading time for a single game. That's very close to the price I pay for a lot of these games. I know! Why don't I buy a smaller one, pay less money up front, and pay ~$32 to run three games significantly faster! Wowza!
To quote Gaslight, I've been harassed by door-to-door Evangelical Christians who were less insistent and pushy. And I live in Georgia of all places. Particularly how you say "Keep painting them as out of reach and you'll keep them out of reach. Or suck it up and get one and change your life", as though "Expecting technology to continue falling in price" is some sort of alien concept in consumer entertainment computing. All those people who weren't laying down hundreds of dollars to buy 500 GB platters when they first came out? Clearly a bunch of pussies who didn't know what they're missing! Everyone needs this technology, not just people who want it for the sake of having it, not just people who are upset by loading times, and not just people who don't think the technology is for them at this moment--though they clear need it the most--everyone!
If I was so worried about being a blight on the ecosystem, I wouldn't play any games that used anything more energy consumptive than an abacus, a ruler, and a pencil.
Gaslight, if I bought you an SSD drive and had it shipped straight to your house, would you install it in your computer and use it for your core OS and applications
Hell, send it to me and I'll use it. I know I may have been too subtle about this, but I'm a little iffy on the cost of these things. Granted, I wouldn't put my OS on it because a lot of older SSDs are prone to spectacular failures, and I don't know if you'd be sending me a new "Much, much less likely to shit on me with a catastrophic failure" drives that are much more stable. I'd use it for...something. I'd get back to you on that in my thank you note. I'd definitely be sending you one, it'd only cost 1/60 of what the SSD cost, seems like the least I could do.
EDIT: Also, for a second time, I'd like to apologize to Magic Pink for the derailing of his thread so badly. He's already stated he wasn't getting an SSD (given he's buying from Dell, and this is is first PC upgrade in 15 years, I doubt anyone is surprised.) so this isn't even tenuously related to the topic.
Gaslight, if I bought you an SSD drive and had it shipped straight to your house, would you install it in your computer and use it for your core OS and applications
Depends on what SSD it is. At bare minimum, will it even have the capacity to hold my "core OS and applications"? If this is some little 40GB claw-machine prize you've got sitting around, I'll pass. If your largesse extends as far as shelling out to get me one of these bad boys, then you'll be getting a PM with my address presently.
In case I haven't managed to communicate this to all you Apostles of the Church of Solid State yet, I don't have any sort of moral opposition to SSDs. I just can't get a sufficiently large and capable one for the money I'm willing to spend yet. But if that concern is removed because I'm getting converted to the faith on your dime, then show me the way to the baptistry, Jack. I'll drink the Kool-Aid, but I can't afford champagne prices, so somebody else has to pick up the bar tab.
'Sokay, I'll take the claw-machine prize. I could use it to store between two and three backups of Oblivion and go on an insane modding spree. Replace all the horses with Ducati superbikes.
EDIT: Be careful with one of those badboys. Sure, it answers every single one of my real estate concerns (at this present time, who knows in two to three years), but apparently SSDs that huge tend to have catastrophic failures. All data lost, and the possible chance of your family being abducted by Central American Contras*.
*I may be lying about the Contras part.
EDIT: Have to go see a movie with my cousin and her girlfriend, Gaslight keep the apparent "faith".
Too lazy to read it all at 3am, but skimming it seems there was an SSD war here.
I'll just chime in as someone whose owned an Intel G2 80gb SSD since they came out:
Buying the SSD has been the biggest performance gain ever for me next to going from single to dual core CPU for the first time. The OS responsiveness is much greater. It obviously boots much faster -- 14 secs flat. And just in general, anything that requires loading data in games or productivity software runs about 3x faster. I know for WoW, at the time loading Dalaran would take 45secs, after moving WoW onto the SSD it took 12 secs. Loading TF2 went from like 60 secs to 15.
Mind you mine is 210MB/sec avg read speeds. The ones like the Vertex2 do 275MB/sec. And the new Vertex3 line does 500-550MB/sec. Although being brand new, those are fairly cost prohibitive atm .. like $275 for the 120gb model. The 285MB/sec ones are fairly reasonable atm though for $120-150 for 90-120gb in size.
In comparison, the average HDD does around 80MB/sec sustained. The other nifty thing is that an SSD has multiple i/o channels, so you can be doing I believe up to 10 read/writes at the same time, all at the full 210MB/sec. Whereas doing 2 operations at once on a regular HDD will halve the speeds or more.
In conclusion: Is an SSD necessary? No, not really. But if you ARE looking to improve performance of your PC, an SSD is without a doubt the greatest gain you could get. Far better than buying some fancy DDR3-2000 ram, or a slightly better video card (assuming your current one isn't super old). It significantly speeds up general OS usage, as well as anything that requires periodic loading, even mid-level. (Like FPS or MMOs)
90-120gb is plenty of space to store your OS, productivity apps, and whatever current games you are playing. HDD will still be your primary storage. The SSD is for the performance, period. Win7 install +freespace is about 25gb. The entire Adobe master collection is around 15gb. That still leaves 50-80gb free for games. Unless you plan to have like 3 MMOs installed on it + your entire Steam collection, it should be more than enough for what you are CURRENTLY playing. Not your archive. That goes on the HDD.
90-120gb is plenty of space to store your OS, productivity apps, and whatever current games you are playing. HDD will still be your primary storage. The SSD is for the performance, period.
Sorry, no. Truthfully, this statement should be "90-120gb is plenty of space to store your OS, productivity apps, and whatever current games I am playing." If you'd said that, I would not have objected. I'm not saying this to be rude, and I'm not accusing you of malice or anything, but 90 to 120 gb isn't quite enough for half the PC games I play on a daily basis while on vacation, much less the chunk of my library I regularly play.
The SSD is about performance, period. Unfortunately, a performance boost on a very, very small fraction of my library isn't really a boost so much as it's a real neat novelty. As always, it's entirely possible every game you own could be fit on a 60 GB hard disc drive. A few years ago this was true for me. It is no longer, so as usual, YMMV.
80 MB to 210 MB, while a big jump (almost three times), is not the dozen times jump that's been described sometimes in this thread (of course, there are different grades of SSD).
The absurdly powerful GPU setup I bought for my 4-year-old setup is easily the single most powerful performance gain I had for my system (that includes going from to a quadcore), bar none. Putting aside the decent amount I made back for selling the old GPU setup, the cost would have gotten me...a 240 GB SSD. Optimistically. Probably not one of the higher end ones either. Which, to be completely honest, would nearly cover every game in my current regular PC itinerary for 1 to 2 days, particularly if they were all unmodded.
You could probably cram OS+Warcraft on a 60GB drive (and it would be almost impossible to add anything else), but I probably wouldn't recommend something smaller than 80GB for the task.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
I'll just chime in with that while yes the SSD is still a luxury item it is the biggest performance increase I see on a day to day basis. It's truly the piece of hardware that makes my computer "feel" fast. applications open at the snap of a finger, I don't even see the load screens for levels. The difference in Microsoft flight simulator was immense.
Do I want a bigger one? yes I do. I have a 64gig and can only have the main 1-2 games I play installed at any given time. The ones I don't play that often get shunted to the old HDD.
If someone offered me a $300 dollar SSD and a $300 dollar video card, and I was looking to upgrade both, I would take the SSD. It makes the biggest improvement in everything I do computer wise.
Just my two cents though, your mileage may vary, etc etc.
I'll just chime in with that while yes the SSD is still a luxury item it is the biggest performance increase I see on a day to day basis. It's truly the piece of hardware that makes my computer "feel" fast. applications open at the snap of a finger, I don't even see the load screens for levels. The difference in Microsoft flight simulator was immense.
Do I want a bigger one? yes I do. I have a 64gig and can only have the main 1-2 games I play installed at any given time. The ones I don't play that often get shunted to the old HDD.
If someone offered me a $300 dollar SSD and a $300 dollar video card, and I was looking to upgrade both, I would take the SSD. It makes the biggest improvement in everything I do computer wise.
Just my two cents though, your mileage may vary, etc etc.
But when building a computer, if you could buy a $200 video card or a $100 video card and a $100 tiny SSD, what would you take? I guess to put it another way, if your computer actually has a budget (aka you're not about to blow $1,200 on it and you have to make real, hard choices), are you going to stick an SSD in there?
how much space would you need for the OS + WoW and it's addons?
Assuming this was directed at me (who knows if it is), the response is, "Can you imagine playing some game besides WoW?"
The hilarity of it is I actually have two installations of WoW on my HDD--one from when I played WOTLK, and used by my roommate, who plays Cataclysm, and one for playing on a server hosted by a friend of mine here in Taiwan (really hope this is not verboten to mention, I own the game legally).
Those two alone takes up just over sixty gigabytes. Six-Zero. And I don't even have that many interface mods installed (roomie has more). For two versions of one game. That would fill a not-inexpensive SSD half way, by itself.
WoW isn't even the biggest game I have. I've got a huge, high-quality aircraft library for FSX, amounting to literally eight years of aircraft rather large, HDD wise, aircraft. It's been a while since I checked, but it couldn't be less than 40 GB, including the huge ground maps I've got installed too.
I play FSX quite regularly. I play WoW less often, but it's not my only game.
Anyone who says, "No one could possibly need more than 90 GB for an OS, productivity applications, and all the games they play regularly..." either A) really, really lacks imagination or has no idea of the size of games now.
I'll just chime in with that while yes the SSD is still a luxury item it is the biggest performance increase I see on a day to day basis. It's truly the piece of hardware that makes my computer "feel" fast. applications open at the snap of a finger, I don't even see the load screens for levels. The difference in Microsoft flight simulator was immense.
Do I want a bigger one? yes I do. I have a 64gig and can only have the main 1-2 games I play installed at any given time. The ones I don't play that often get shunted to the old HDD.
If someone offered me a $300 dollar SSD and a $300 dollar video card, and I was looking to upgrade both, I would take the SSD. It makes the biggest improvement in everything I do computer wise.
Just my two cents though, your mileage may vary, etc etc.
But when building a computer, if you could buy a $200 video card or a $100 video card and a $100 tiny SSD, what would you take? I guess to put it another way, if your computer actually has a budget (aka you're not about to blow $1,200 on it and you have to make real, hard choices), are you going to stick an SSD in there?
See, put in this context--depending on what you're playing, and the rest of your setup, there's a huge difference between a $100 and a $200 GPU. I say "depending" because, truthfully, if you don't play any games that use 3D acceleration or are newer than 3 or 4 years old, it may not make all that much difference. If you weren't using this PC to play games, I can absolutely see the attraction of putting that $100 away for, let's face it, a really small, not exactly stellar (but decent enough) quality SSD--unless you were doing something like video editing or the like. For $100, unless you fold it into the rest of your HDD budget (which has its own drawbacks), you're not going to get much SSD wise. We're talking "claw-game machine" type space, just really fast.
In this context, if you were just using a machine that you needed to restart multiple times a day, and were just using for browsing and occasional productivity work, the SSD is a very attractive option. You hardly need a GPU that can do DirectX 11 or anything anyway.
Gaming? Very different story. A large variety of gaming? Even more so.
Holy crap dude, the whole world does not revolve around you.
It was a general question and someone answered it. you dont need to be defensive ALL the time. I was curious as to how big a drive I'd need to get the os +wow.
Actually, I think I've sufficiently acknowledged that I'm examining this from my perspective (apparently one a few other people share) repeatedly, which is not shared by everyone by any means.
That being said, I still thought it was worth addressing, since we've turned the discussion towards discussions of game sizes. Sorry if I came off as overzealous, though.
There should be a pissing contest website where you can compare hardware according to various metrics, and instead of representing results in bar graphs you represent them by the pissing range of streams of colored piss.
I think you can stop your "input" then Synthesis since you are obviously an outlier case, and don't need to keep derailing discussion with your special circumstances. IMHO just the performance gains for the OS and the productivity suite is worth the price. A couple of games is just icing on the cake.
The Vertex3s perform about 7-9x faster than a standard magnetic HDD.
SSD's are great, just too expensive to speed up loading times. Everything on my PC already moves fast, i would not notice things going any faster than this, other than maybe loading screens and booting up windows (Which already takes less than a minute.). I'm just not that anal about that kind of thing. Maybe I have to see it in person, but i just dont see SSD's as a viable options for the cost. I'd rather put that money elsewhere, like a better video card, faster processor or something that will give me gains across the board in what i do the most with my PC, which is gaming. I need space more than i need slightly faster loading screens.
I think this sums up Synth's view as well, in a nutshell.
I think this sums up Synth's view as well, in a nutshell.
Pretty much, except my exceedingly complex views on differentiating space used for general application, little, and games, lots and lots. Then again, I am an outlier.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
To respond to those above, if I absolutely had to pick I would take the video card. In reality I would just save up an extra couple months and get both.
I upgrade on a rotating schedule though. Motherboard ram processor one year, video card and misc. parts the next year. I budget $400-$500 a year for computer upgrades. This previous year I bought a 5770, SSD and a new case. Earlier this year I upgraded my processor and ram to the max my mobo supported.
Keep in mind the HDD manufactures are creating hybrid drives. Regular hdds that have I believe 16-32gb of solid state memory that stores the most used things. Apparently it works pretty decent.
I imagine such a thing would have a bit of an "ironing out" period (SSDs did too, to be fair), but I can appreciate the convenience--especially if you were someone who had a limited number of drives you can put in your desktop anyway, for whatever reason (six for me, though I have 3).
I think you can stop your "input" then Synthesis since you are obviously an outlier case, and don't need to keep derailing discussion with your special circumstances.
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
this thread went into weird places, jeeze guys
as a side note my desktop runs 24/7, that's the entire point of a desktop, I can't imagine not being able to remote into it from work anytime I want to do something, or to access stuff I have on it when I'm out of town on business, or to just go and walk over to it and move the mouse and quickly check my e-mail.
The fact that people turn their desktops off actually boggles my mind.
I think you can stop your "input" then Synthesis since you are obviously an outlier case, and don't need to keep derailing discussion with your special circumstances.
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
I'm thinking we need an Outlier club. We can have bowling jackets, with "Fuck the Centre" on the back. Someone else can come up with the colors, I'm no good with that.
as a side note my desktop runs 24/7, that's the entire point of a desktop, I can't imagine not being able to remote into it from work anytime I want to do something, or to access stuff I have on it when I'm out of town on business, or to just go and walk over to it and move the mouse and quickly check my e-mail.
The fact that people turn their desktops off actually boggles my mind.
For what I do, I'm in the same boat...though I don't need to access that much information on the go (I'm lazy--I just have my laptop on a shared network, and have most important to-go information, like students' grades, on that). My power bills were rising though, so it became more worthwhile to shut the thing down when I was certain I wouldn't be doing any work--namely, while I slept, unless I was downloading or formatting something.
The ACPI specification defines the following seven states (so-called global states) for an ACPI-compliant computer-system:
* G0 (S0): Working
* G1, Sleeping subdivides into the four states S1 through S4:
o S1: All processor caches are flushed, and the CPU(s) stop executing instructions. Power to the CPU(s) and RAM is maintained; devices that do not indicate they must remain on may be powered down.
o S2: CPU powered off
o S3: Commonly referred to as Standby, Sleep, or Suspend to RAM. RAM remains powered
o S4: Hibernation or Suspend to Disk. All content of main memory is saved to non-volatile memory such as a hard drive, and is powered down.
* G2 (S5), Soft Off: G2 is almost the same as G3 Mechanical Off, but some components remain powered so the computer can "wake" from input from the keyboard, clock, modem, LAN, or USB device.
* G3, Mechanical Off: The computer's power consumption approaches close to zero, to the point that the power cord can be removed and the system is safe for dis-assembly (typically, only the real-time clock is running off its own small battery).
Most common states are S3 and S4. Sleep and hibernation.
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I know that that once-a-month ritual had left me wanting to slit my wrists. That was 15-20 seconds I could not afford to spend! Forget the time length double that every time I go through an individual title in my game library, it's staring at the "Welcome to Windows" screen that's killing me inside!
More seriously, since we're still on this topic--how much is a "good" one with a minimum 200 GB space? That's really as low as I would personally go without the speed benefits outweighing the time spent moving games back and forth and pushing off games entirely. If NewEgg is any source, the prices are still really disappointing. $530 for 240 GB? No thanks. I got two ridiculously over-the-top GPUs for the same cost, and the difference between them and a 4 year old GPU is pretty night and day as well.
Hahahaha, even I didn't realize it was that bad. That's about 2/3rds the price of my entire PC including the OS.
Get a smaller one, you don't need 240 GB to hold all your word documents and porn. 80 GB would serve someone well if they had windows + a few applications rather than an 80 game library on steam. Everything else, use a normal hard drive for.
For instance, you can buy another SATA cable + power cable and plug it into a 2nd drive.
If you're debating whether or not to buy an i5-2500k & 40GB Vertex 2 bootdrive or an i7-2600k, there's certainly a compelling argument for the former.
But if you're debating between an i3-2100 & 40GB Vertex 2 or an i5-2500k, you'd be silly to hamstring your CPU power for the benefit of an SSD.
A. you are a blight on the planet for leaving your computer on sucking up all that power for so long. turn it off when you're not using it. plus it needs to be reset far more often if you're keeping things up to date.
B. I said 30+ seconds. Most people do turn their computers off and on more often than you. That adds up. It also factors into launching any number of programs from idle. The difference is sharp.
C. Why do you need a minimum 200GB space? TB drives are stupid cheap these days. You realise that unless on a laptop (and you're not), you can and should have more than a single drive?
D. Moving games back and forth? Do you really need more than a dozen modern full size games installed to the computer?
Are you NOT using Steam? Do you realize how easy it is to move game install data back and forth with Steam?
E. A $250 GPU is not over the top, not when they go up to $700.
http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=53309&vpn=OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G&manufacture=OCZ%20Technology&promoid=1322
$150? That's a steal! Or get a smaller one or slightly less faster one for even cheaper!
Keep painting them as out of reach and you'll keep them out of reach. Or suck it up and get one and change your life.
I have had Jehovah's Witnesses show up on my doorstep who were less pushy about their message, and much more polite, and in their minds what they were telling me concerned the fate of my immortal soul. This is a discussion about subjective value estimations of computer hardware.
Final thought: if any computer component "changes your life," then you probably need to get one. A life, that is.
Just like folks who own $700 video cards, right? Sucking up all that extra power for a few more frames per second.
If being a blight means I get access to any file on my PC from my phone, blight me up.
I'm glad I checked this thread, because, like most people on the internet, I'm a horrible human being and am going to enjoy this.
A. Please analyze the following sentence: "I know that that once-a-month ritual had left me wanting to slit my wrists." This is written in the past tense. I'll happily acknowledge that, since it's my second language, my mastery of English made not have made this sufficiently clear, except that I actually, earlier in this thread, stated I no longer do this outright--in fact, I explicitly said that I shut down my computer once a night, and did not mind switching it on as soon as I woke up each day. Also, sounding like a self-righteous jerk does not help your case.
B. What can I say? That's unfortunate for you. We are each speaking from our own experience, I've never had to wait that long, even since I switched over to once a day.
C. Because, and I've already stated this, the only time slow loading times--which is almost the entire crux of the argument for getting an SSD--that bother me are within my game collection. Not within my OS (see above), and not within applications like Microsoft Word that literally load up in a fraction of a second anyway. I have filled up an easy 3/4 of a 1 TB drive purely with games (this is not including another drive I keep for family media, movies and shows I like, backups of my PMP, etc.). It's a shame I claimed this was the case for everyone...oh wait, I don't believe I did! 200 GB is the least I would be willing to go to actually pay the prices involved and not be annoyed by the need to shift between games or flat out stop playing ~70% of them (taking up space for backups and the OS, more like ~80%)
D. Yes, yes I do. I know, it's crazy, but I like playing a variety of games. Clearly, I have some sort of disease of the mind that needs to be cured with a drill. I already use Steam, except that only accounts for 5 (maybe 6, if I still play Defcon, maybe 3 if FO3/FNV are patched out of it). And the funny thing is, I've never been inconvenienced by the fact that the vast majority of games I use aren't on Steam in this regard.
E. That's pretty much your opinion, man. I actually wouldn't disagree (I bought two that each cost that much, for my first PC upgrade in more than 4 years), but there are plenty of people who would vehemently disagree and, crazy as it sounds, I respect their opinion (go to any of the GPU threads in this subsection if you don't believe me). That being said, using the fact that GPUs go up to $700 to make the case that a $250 isn't over the top? Really not that great an argument.
As for the OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2? I actually went on NewEgg to check this out, since it's only fair to give it a fair looking at. Since I've already why 200 GB is the bare minimum for me (I'd have to buy two of these things, in any case), I'll put that aside and say that the $220 it costs on NewEgg for 120 GB is highly unimpressive. I'm not terribly excited to go back to the days of a 1 GB costing 2 dollars US. As far as NCIX's apparently much cheaper deal, frankly, I'm not sure $150 is what a steal! to reduce the loading times for 4 to 6 games. I'm paying ~$30 US to reduce the loading time for a single game. That's very close to the price I pay for a lot of these games. I know! Why don't I buy a smaller one, pay less money up front, and pay ~$32 to run three games significantly faster! Wowza!
To quote Gaslight, I've been harassed by door-to-door Evangelical Christians who were less insistent and pushy. And I live in Georgia of all places. Particularly how you say "Keep painting them as out of reach and you'll keep them out of reach. Or suck it up and get one and change your life", as though "Expecting technology to continue falling in price" is some sort of alien concept in consumer entertainment computing. All those people who weren't laying down hundreds of dollars to buy 500 GB platters when they first came out? Clearly a bunch of pussies who didn't know what they're missing! Everyone needs this technology, not just people who want it for the sake of having it, not just people who are upset by loading times, and not just people who don't think the technology is for them at this moment--though they clear need it the most--everyone!
If I was so worried about being a blight on the ecosystem, I wouldn't play any games that used anything more energy consumptive than an abacus, a ruler, and a pencil.
Hell, send it to me and I'll use it. I know I may have been too subtle about this, but I'm a little iffy on the cost of these things. Granted, I wouldn't put my OS on it because a lot of older SSDs are prone to spectacular failures, and I don't know if you'd be sending me a new "Much, much less likely to shit on me with a catastrophic failure" drives that are much more stable. I'd use it for...something. I'd get back to you on that in my thank you note. I'd definitely be sending you one, it'd only cost 1/60 of what the SSD cost, seems like the least I could do.
EDIT: Also, for a second time, I'd like to apologize to Magic Pink for the derailing of his thread so badly. He's already stated he wasn't getting an SSD (given he's buying from Dell, and this is is first PC upgrade in 15 years, I doubt anyone is surprised.) so this isn't even tenuously related to the topic.
Depends on what SSD it is. At bare minimum, will it even have the capacity to hold my "core OS and applications"? If this is some little 40GB claw-machine prize you've got sitting around, I'll pass. If your largesse extends as far as shelling out to get me one of these bad boys, then you'll be getting a PM with my address presently.
In case I haven't managed to communicate this to all you Apostles of the Church of Solid State yet, I don't have any sort of moral opposition to SSDs. I just can't get a sufficiently large and capable one for the money I'm willing to spend yet. But if that concern is removed because I'm getting converted to the faith on your dime, then show me the way to the baptistry, Jack. I'll drink the Kool-Aid, but I can't afford champagne prices, so somebody else has to pick up the bar tab.
EDIT: Be careful with one of those badboys. Sure, it answers every single one of my real estate concerns (at this present time, who knows in two to three years), but apparently SSDs that huge tend to have catastrophic failures. All data lost, and the possible chance of your family being abducted by Central American Contras*.
*I may be lying about the Contras part.
EDIT: Have to go see a movie with my cousin and her girlfriend, Gaslight keep the apparent "faith".
I'll just chime in as someone whose owned an Intel G2 80gb SSD since they came out:
Buying the SSD has been the biggest performance gain ever for me next to going from single to dual core CPU for the first time. The OS responsiveness is much greater. It obviously boots much faster -- 14 secs flat. And just in general, anything that requires loading data in games or productivity software runs about 3x faster. I know for WoW, at the time loading Dalaran would take 45secs, after moving WoW onto the SSD it took 12 secs. Loading TF2 went from like 60 secs to 15.
Mind you mine is 210MB/sec avg read speeds. The ones like the Vertex2 do 275MB/sec. And the new Vertex3 line does 500-550MB/sec. Although being brand new, those are fairly cost prohibitive atm .. like $275 for the 120gb model. The 285MB/sec ones are fairly reasonable atm though for $120-150 for 90-120gb in size.
In comparison, the average HDD does around 80MB/sec sustained. The other nifty thing is that an SSD has multiple i/o channels, so you can be doing I believe up to 10 read/writes at the same time, all at the full 210MB/sec. Whereas doing 2 operations at once on a regular HDD will halve the speeds or more.
In conclusion: Is an SSD necessary? No, not really. But if you ARE looking to improve performance of your PC, an SSD is without a doubt the greatest gain you could get. Far better than buying some fancy DDR3-2000 ram, or a slightly better video card (assuming your current one isn't super old). It significantly speeds up general OS usage, as well as anything that requires periodic loading, even mid-level. (Like FPS or MMOs)
90-120gb is plenty of space to store your OS, productivity apps, and whatever current games you are playing. HDD will still be your primary storage. The SSD is for the performance, period. Win7 install +freespace is about 25gb. The entire Adobe master collection is around 15gb. That still leaves 50-80gb free for games. Unless you plan to have like 3 MMOs installed on it + your entire Steam collection, it should be more than enough for what you are CURRENTLY playing. Not your archive. That goes on the HDD.
Sorry, no. Truthfully, this statement should be "90-120gb is plenty of space to store your OS, productivity apps, and whatever current games I am playing." If you'd said that, I would not have objected. I'm not saying this to be rude, and I'm not accusing you of malice or anything, but 90 to 120 gb isn't quite enough for half the PC games I play on a daily basis while on vacation, much less the chunk of my library I regularly play.
The SSD is about performance, period. Unfortunately, a performance boost on a very, very small fraction of my library isn't really a boost so much as it's a real neat novelty. As always, it's entirely possible every game you own could be fit on a 60 GB hard disc drive. A few years ago this was true for me. It is no longer, so as usual, YMMV.
80 MB to 210 MB, while a big jump (almost three times), is not the dozen times jump that's been described sometimes in this thread (of course, there are different grades of SSD).
The absurdly powerful GPU setup I bought for my 4-year-old setup is easily the single most powerful performance gain I had for my system (that includes going from to a quadcore), bar none. Putting aside the decent amount I made back for selling the old GPU setup, the cost would have gotten me...a 240 GB SSD. Optimistically. Probably not one of the higher end ones either. Which, to be completely honest, would nearly cover every game in my current regular PC itinerary for 1 to 2 days, particularly if they were all unmodded.
Do I want a bigger one? yes I do. I have a 64gig and can only have the main 1-2 games I play installed at any given time. The ones I don't play that often get shunted to the old HDD.
If someone offered me a $300 dollar SSD and a $300 dollar video card, and I was looking to upgrade both, I would take the SSD. It makes the biggest improvement in everything I do computer wise.
Just my two cents though, your mileage may vary, etc etc.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
But when building a computer, if you could buy a $200 video card or a $100 video card and a $100 tiny SSD, what would you take? I guess to put it another way, if your computer actually has a budget (aka you're not about to blow $1,200 on it and you have to make real, hard choices), are you going to stick an SSD in there?
Assuming this was directed at me (who knows if it is), the response is, "Can you imagine playing some game besides WoW?"
The hilarity of it is I actually have two installations of WoW on my HDD--one from when I played WOTLK, and used by my roommate, who plays Cataclysm, and one for playing on a server hosted by a friend of mine here in Taiwan (really hope this is not verboten to mention, I own the game legally).
Those two alone takes up just over sixty gigabytes. Six-Zero. And I don't even have that many interface mods installed (roomie has more). For two versions of one game. That would fill a not-inexpensive SSD half way, by itself.
WoW isn't even the biggest game I have. I've got a huge, high-quality aircraft library for FSX, amounting to literally eight years of aircraft rather large, HDD wise, aircraft. It's been a while since I checked, but it couldn't be less than 40 GB, including the huge ground maps I've got installed too.
I play FSX quite regularly. I play WoW less often, but it's not my only game.
Anyone who says, "No one could possibly need more than 90 GB for an OS, productivity applications, and all the games they play regularly..." either A) really, really lacks imagination or
See, put in this context--depending on what you're playing, and the rest of your setup, there's a huge difference between a $100 and a $200 GPU. I say "depending" because, truthfully, if you don't play any games that use 3D acceleration or are newer than 3 or 4 years old, it may not make all that much difference. If you weren't using this PC to play games, I can absolutely see the attraction of putting that $100 away for, let's face it, a really small, not exactly stellar (but decent enough) quality SSD--unless you were doing something like video editing or the like. For $100, unless you fold it into the rest of your HDD budget (which has its own drawbacks), you're not going to get much SSD wise. We're talking "claw-game machine" type space, just really fast.
In this context, if you were just using a machine that you needed to restart multiple times a day, and were just using for browsing and occasional productivity work, the SSD is a very attractive option. You hardly need a GPU that can do DirectX 11 or anything anyway.
Gaming? Very different story. A large variety of gaming? Even more so.
It was a general question and someone answered it. you dont need to be defensive ALL the time. I was curious as to how big a drive I'd need to get the os +wow.
That being said, I still thought it was worth addressing, since we've turned the discussion towards discussions of game sizes. Sorry if I came off as overzealous, though.
I want to see how my old school mac under windows compares to newer gaming machines to see if I should buy a new computer or not for gaming.
And to see how ssd compares to my current drive setup.
I use xbench on mac which is nice but not cross platform compatible.
I suspect Magic Pink is the leas interested in statistics at this point.
The Vertex3s perform about 7-9x faster than a standard magnetic HDD.
I think this sums up Synth's view as well, in a nutshell.
Pretty much, except my exceedingly complex views on differentiating space used for general application, little, and games, lots and lots. Then again, I am an outlier.
I upgrade on a rotating schedule though. Motherboard ram processor one year, video card and misc. parts the next year. I budget $400-$500 a year for computer upgrades. This previous year I bought a 5770, SSD and a new case. Earlier this year I upgraded my processor and ram to the max my mobo supported.
Keep in mind the HDD manufactures are creating hybrid drives. Regular hdds that have I believe 16-32gb of solid state memory that stores the most used things. Apparently it works pretty decent.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
So I guess I'm irrelevant too... ^^
as a side note my desktop runs 24/7, that's the entire point of a desktop, I can't imagine not being able to remote into it from work anytime I want to do something, or to access stuff I have on it when I'm out of town on business, or to just go and walk over to it and move the mouse and quickly check my e-mail.
The fact that people turn their desktops off actually boggles my mind.
I'm thinking we need an Outlier club. We can have bowling jackets, with "Fuck the Centre" on the back. Someone else can come up with the colors, I'm no good with that.
If you can pick four or five games you really, really like, and fork over a modest sum, you too can become relevant again!
For what I do, I'm in the same boat...though I don't need to access that much information on the go (I'm lazy--I just have my laptop on a shared network, and have most important to-go information, like students' grades, on that). My power bills were rising though, so it became more worthwhile to shut the thing down when I was certain I wouldn't be doing any work--namely, while I slept, unless I was downloading or formatting something.
same power usage, essentially
Sleep-mode is when the computer shuts down some stuff and has a state saved on to memory.
I thought it was slightly less on a desktop, but is it actually the same usage?
From Wikipedia:
Global states
The ACPI specification defines the following seven states (so-called global states) for an ACPI-compliant computer-system:
* G0 (S0): Working
* G1, Sleeping subdivides into the four states S1 through S4:
o S1: All processor caches are flushed, and the CPU(s) stop executing instructions. Power to the CPU(s) and RAM is maintained; devices that do not indicate they must remain on may be powered down.
o S2: CPU powered off
o S3: Commonly referred to as Standby, Sleep, or Suspend to RAM. RAM remains powered
o S4: Hibernation or Suspend to Disk. All content of main memory is saved to non-volatile memory such as a hard drive, and is powered down.
* G2 (S5), Soft Off: G2 is almost the same as G3 Mechanical Off, but some components remain powered so the computer can "wake" from input from the keyboard, clock, modem, LAN, or USB device.
* G3, Mechanical Off: The computer's power consumption approaches close to zero, to the point that the power cord can be removed and the system is safe for dis-assembly (typically, only the real-time clock is running off its own small battery).
Most common states are S3 and S4. Sleep and hibernation.