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Replacing a Hard Drive: Bow to the new Solid State, or reliable whirly discs?
Marauder
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, for about the past 2 months, I have been having hard lockups on my system. At first it was just freezes, now it is accompanied by BSOD and random reboots, even when nothing more than an internet browser is running.
Drivers and self test on MOBO and Graphics card appear to be good, what leads me to suspect HDD is that its about 5 years old now and is intermittently refusing to boot to the drive.
I currently have a separate drive for a data core of 470gigs that I store everything on, as well as serves as the storage for the backup image of my system.
My current MOBO is this :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130275
I have SATA 3, so can definitely take advantage of the higher speed. Question I pose is, is it worth it for SSD yet? I installed a 20 gig build of Win7 for about 8 network desktops on a Intel SSD about 2 years ago, and while faster and less heat than HDD, I didnt think it was worth the money at the time (about 160$ for a 32gig). But it was company money so I didnt care.
Now I'm on a much more reduced income then I was then, trying to justify my costs on a new HDD.
This is the SSD that im currently looking at, 99$ plus 10$ off with a promo, which will cover shipping.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227791&name=Internal-SSD
Or we have old reliable whirling storage platters:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136769&name=Internal-Hard-Drives
30$ less, a little slower but still on SATA 3, but also louder and more heat.
Drive will primarily be for my Win7 build and my steam folder/planetside, which take up about 50 gigs.
Thoughts? Worth the extra 30$?
Drivers and self test on MOBO and Graphics card appear to be good, what leads me to suspect HDD is that its about 5 years old now and is intermittently refusing to boot to the drive.
I currently have a separate drive for a data core of 470gigs that I store everything on, as well as serves as the storage for the backup image of my system.
My current MOBO is this :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130275
I have SATA 3, so can definitely take advantage of the higher speed. Question I pose is, is it worth it for SSD yet? I installed a 20 gig build of Win7 for about 8 network desktops on a Intel SSD about 2 years ago, and while faster and less heat than HDD, I didnt think it was worth the money at the time (about 160$ for a 32gig). But it was company money so I didnt care.
Now I'm on a much more reduced income then I was then, trying to justify my costs on a new HDD.
This is the SSD that im currently looking at, 99$ plus 10$ off with a promo, which will cover shipping.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227791&name=Internal-SSD
Or we have old reliable whirling storage platters:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136769&name=Internal-Hard-Drives
30$ less, a little slower but still on SATA 3, but also louder and more heat.
Drive will primarily be for my Win7 build and my steam folder/planetside, which take up about 50 gigs.
Thoughts? Worth the extra 30$?
Marauder on
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A synthetic test like Passmark, while of limited utility, speaks volumes more than the data bus being rated for SATA-3.
A more worrying aspect of your setup is that you are using that other drive for both storage and backup.
Thanks for the link to the numbers, youre right its not even a close race. Not even same zip code.
Seriously.
I mean, I've had portal media devices that size, so I can't imagine using 128 GB for a base drive--period. I'd fill it up obscenely fast and the added cost would be lost on the remaining 90% of what I have.
If that's not a problem, you've got it set for that small a price hike. I'm using a 512 GB SSD that I only got because....it was $400 off.
EDIT: I'd also add that the heat and sound from a WD (i.e. quality) drive are pretty much entirely irrelevant. And their reliability is still excellent, though technically inferior. You're paying for speed (and that's not a bad thing to pay for) and taking a severe penalty in real estate that you don't care about. Pull the trigger.
There is no reason you need the speed of SSD for the music and movies, but every single app/game you own will benefit drastically.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Only so much as a load times count--which they do. But it's probably the least efficient way to improve frames per second, for example, tied with literally sticking said money in your computer case.
And of course, it has to be running OFF the SSD to make a difference. Stupid, I know, but you can easily forget that when you fill up.
That's why I said it was still a way. Just not a very effective way across contemporary games in various engines.
Skyrim is a great example of this: huge areas that cache very awkwardly in the overworld, but switching over to a Crucial 512GB M4 has a pretty small benefit overall. Good for loading times though.
edit: Synthesis does make a key point, the cost of the bus-pass to magic land is having the applications you want greased up residing on the SSD.
Yeah, I was just making an observation. It can definitely help a few select games beyond load times. But the benefit for the rest of the system as a whole is alone, IMO, worth it. After putting Win7 on an SSD, I started shutting my PC down every night before sleep. And leaving it off while I'm at work. My power bill dropped a healthy chunk of cash, the damn SSD has almost payed for itself already. Also, rebooting for updates or upgrades is just so quick.
And GTAIV and SR2&3 games run sooooooooooooooo much better.
I'm not disagreeing with you, BTW, just rambling about how much I love SSDs.
That's fine. I'm just reminding OP that, yeah, don't expect much of an improvement everywhere else outside of loading times. Especially considering what other bottlenecks one might encounter.
Of course, going from 17 seconds to 2 seconds for Windows 7 to boot up....really doesn't matter in the scheme of things. That's why I had to go with the 512, minimum, to be useful to myself.
It was expensive (even $300 off), and it doesn't even compare to the two GTX470 video cards I bought to replace my two 8800GT (roughly the same cost after rebate). Not even in the same continent. I don't regret it in the least but, hey, no surprise there.
I've been meaning to get an SSD but kinda hesitant because I'd want to upgrade to a Z77 board from my current P67.
Other SSD manufactures have their own problems as well though.
holy shit
was it worth every fucking penny.
I turn on my computer, turn around for 20 seconds, and my desktop is ready to go.
The only downside to it is that you have to take some extra steps to insure that the stuff you're installing/downloading is going to your storage drive (if you're using a storage drive).
Battle.net
This must be why I wasn't that enamored by my SSD. Don't get me wrong, I don't regret it at all, but it wasn't life changing at all.
On a WD 1 TB, my PC start up took about ~6 seconds in BIOS and I would say a little under 20 to bring up Windows.
With my Crucial M4 512, my PC takes....~6 seconds in BIOS and about 2 seconds in Windows.
Whoop-de-fucking-do. My startup went from 26 seconds to 8 seconds. My life is complete now that I got that 18 seconds back! If I restarted my computer 20 times a day, that would make a difference, but in the mean time...
Obviously, its worth is derived from the games I can run off the rest of that 512 GB drive. My Windows 7 Pro installation is lean enough that the booting time for applications was minimal (for example, Word 2010 took 6 seconds, now it takes 2), and while the faster file transfers are awesome, the truth is I do a lot fewer of them because I am constantly trying to keep my SSD clear (so I store and move things around between the other drives). Now, loading up Total War: Shogun 2 WAY faster? THAT'S what I fucking bought this thing for. Fuck yeah.
The point of this? When you buy one, if you want to appreciate it fully, make sure it's big enough for your needs. And since prices are no longer obscenely ridiculous like they were for years, that's more possible than ever.
Now it takes 30 seconds overall to boot and reach desktop and be usable.
No, it actually sounds like you've got either a broken stopwatch or a definition of "lived in" is "extremely slow read/write speeds or with a services list two clicks long". Seriously, two fucking minutes? What are you booting, an ATM or a Mac from 1995? Also, guess what--you're computing taking "a minute or two" after booting to the desktop to be responsive? That doesn't seem normal on platter drives at all. Holy shit, one or two minutes? How did you brush that aside? "Well, computer/Windows installation is 18 months old. Looks like I need to wait 90 seconds after boot up before I can move the cursor around, or reformat."
Seriously, unless you're exaggerating, that's fucked up. Doesn't sound it has anything to do with me having some sort of magical "mad" of unicorn bones, so much as not dipping my Western Digitals in Kentucky Fried Chicken or buying hard disc drives manufactured by Hasbro.
EDIT: Running some tests again, I'd say SSD boot after BIOS is more like 4 seconds. That being said, one or two minutes without responding? I have a $400 HP Pavilion that boots up faster from a cold start--certainly doesn't take two minutes before I can do things!
Every upgrade on my computer is a huge 'Whoop-Dee-Fucking-Doo' when taken at face value.
But when people use my computer, I always get comments of 'Holy shit this is fast.' or 'Holy shit, this game looks good!'. It's painful watching my friends play Skyrim on the Xbox, cause it loads just so damn slow and looks ugly in comparison.
Exactly. Because you started from a much higher standard. Without your last upgrade, chances are Skyrim would still blow their minds. As it should. And quite frankly, if I didn't have my GT470 SLI, that SSD would be like...well, some metaphor involving breasts, bulls, lipstick, pigs, whatever. That's absolutely I'd recommend a GPU upgrade over an SSD personally (unless they had a good GPU...then again, if they had a decent SSD already....). You've got to know if the SSD is big enough, and you've got to know what'll work well for you. A new SSD is no more a solution for every problem than any other single upgrade.
Though I wouldn't use Skyrim as an example...I've played it for 380 hours (actually more, if Steam is to believed) and haven't completed it. And not on purpose. My neighbors own the game on console, and they don't have this problem. At least some of that is modding though.
I gave up on spending time trying to make the PC super tuned and efficient, because, fuck, it's meant to actually run programs and do things like syncing files and notes and Steam and torrents.
Maybe it's those Creative drivers for the X-Fi, who knows? And my previous OS disk was an older 120GB 7200rpm HDD, on SATA 1 or whatever.
Of course, it's around 30 seconds boot, now, overall, so it's good enough.
My work-designated desktop Core2Duo actually takes close to 15 minutes before outlook 2007 is useable, but that's thanks to the shitty XP install they shoved on it. It should take very little time to boot, there is almost nothing installed in it at all.
Given that, by your own admission, you gave up on that (and that you moved from 2 minutes to 30 seconds from what I understand), that sounds a lot more believable than "See, with this HDD, I had to wait x minutes and that's totally normal." Having Windows 7 64-bit boot up in 20 seconds is certainly doable on a WD Caviar Black, it just helps not to have loads of shit in the way--though I should add, for specificity, it might take between 5 to 10 seconds after Windows finished booting for everything to become active (two desktop gadgets primarily). On a separate note, it takes up to a minute for volume control on my Microsoft Wireless Desktop 5000 to work, but I blame that on my old USB ports, and I'm perfectly capable of running anything else in the mean time.
If you don't think it's worth it, that's perfectly reasonable. I only open Steam when I'm about to use it (and that's not quite fast, though not quite slow, to start up), so I barely have anything running when I start. I'm used to my PC being active immediately after my wallpaper comes up, it must just carefulness and effort. That doesn't change that a ~20 second boot up for Windows 7 on a good WD drive isn't some unicorn-powered miracle.
But, anyway, SDDs make boot times shorters, yes?
A hybrid setup where you are using a mechanical drive mainly, but a small SSD as a cache drive will also give you quick boots after the first few boots.
If you can fit everything on the SSD then everything has lower latency opening.
Some have reported issues with their SSDs (in this thread even), but there are some methods of failure that are just no longer relevant for SSD. There is no head to physically crash into a high speed spinning platter, since there are no heads and no platters. In my experience SSDs are much less prone to failure than mechs.
As a side note, if you're trying to recover data from a failed drive I've found photo-rec able to pull stuff when Recuva and TestDisk said no dice.
Edit: also seeing boundary cases (probably loss leaders) where 2 and 3 GB discs are available at pre-flood pricing, but these are usually externals where you have to crack the chassis to pull the drive if you want to use internally.
Yes, provided you do it properly. When I first installed my Crucial M4, I was getting serious delays because my older motherboard personally did not like identifying 4 internal HDD--including the one SSD. When I removed the old Samsung, it sped up dramatically. As it happened, it had something to do with confusion over the proper boot drive that was causing separate BIOS errors glitches previously--that happens with 4-5 year old motherboards like the 780i SLI I guess. It was much slower than booting from my WD Caviar Black, even if performance was much improved once I finished boot. In my case, it was as easy as removing any one of the drives (I naturally went with the small Samsung).
tl;dr--don't just go "Oh, guess it's just slow, too bad." Try and fix it, it's very possible something is wrong.
Also, "cheap" HDD cradles seem to be unreliable frequently. I ended up taping my M4 to the bottom of the hard drive encasement with electrical tape >.>
Probably better than two strips of electrical tape.
I have one 128 gb ssd with windows and a couple of games, another 128 GB ssd with more games (I couldn't resist getting a second one, i had some extra cash in hand), one 2TB drive for games, including steam.
I had one 1.5TB drive for all the other data (user folder, pics and video files and documents and books), but it went bad (so soon...), so I had to reinstall 2 500GB HDDs I had around.
Once prices get less horrible (it's taking a bit longer over here), I'll get a new 3 or 4 TB drive, move games over to it, and move all data to the 2TB, so I'll have "only" 2 ssds and 2 Hdds.
I wish NAS solutions were cheaper (in brazil), then I'd just move all media over to one of them.