I may regret it later, but....

[axeman]

I took the the SSD plunge, and my cheapskate nature got the best of me. I got an OCZ Petrol 64gb and put it into my old D630 laptop. The previous mechanical drive was old, but was a 7200rpm unit. And hot damn does this make a difference. Since all of my data is on a server sporting several TB of redundant drives, I don't really care about reliability, just price, and I don't need much storage. Most of what I do on the laptop is basic emailing, surfing, and other derping around. Fresh install of Win7 SP1. Launching any MS Office app takes probably a second and a half on the *first* launch, if that, and Firefox only slightly longer.

So if you, like me, are sitting on the fence about a SSD purchase because you can't make up your mind, just buy one. Sure SandForce drives may perform better, but we're really talking about incremental performance versus other SSDs in most cases, versus massive performance difference over mechanical drives.

Sure, the write performance especially is probably weak versus 120/128GB SSDs, but it's pretty hard to notice. And the sequential transfer rates I measured don't seem spectacular, on the order of 125/75 or so read/write. I'm guessing it's the microscopic random access times that make the seat-of-your-pants difference. Now the only thing that makes this old C2D laptop seem slow is stupid flash websites bogging down the aging T7500 processor. I could be perfectly happy with this level of performance at a lower price per gigabyte, assuming the drives are half-way reliable. Not that it takes too much anymore, my purely anecdotal experience says that mechanical drives these days aren't nearly as reliable as they were a few years ago anyhow - I'm guessing with the large increases in areal density comes increased sensitivity to media problems.

[Crayon Shin Chan]

Yay, another one sees the light!

The random read/write performance is where the seat of the pants experience is... and random performance hasn't really gone up each SSD generation, only sequential performance. Random performance also doesn't vary as much with SSD capacity. So you're not missing much by going for a cheaper/smaller model...

[Madman]

Yay, another one sees the light!

+1

It's painful to boot into Windows which is on a regular HDD drive after using Ubuntu + SSD for few months. Half an hour while it boots, half an hour while it does something in the background, half an hour while Firefox with open tabs starts, ugly. With SSD it's just GO!

And it doesn't matter, you can have 16 gigs of RAM on the PC, the SSD will still amaze you.

The only downside is that SSD failure mode sucks. Silently corrupting data till it's gone is awful. By the time you notice, the backups you're rotating will contain crap already.

[EsotericLord]

Yay, another one sees the light!

+1

It's painful to boot into Windows which is on a regular HDD drive after using Ubuntu + SSD for few months. Half an hour while it boots, half an hour while it does something in the background, half an hour while Firefox with open tabs starts, ugly. With SSD it's just GO!

And it doesn't matter, you can have 16 gigs of RAM on the PC, the SSD will still amaze you.

The only downside is that SSD failure mode sucks. Silently corrupting data till it's gone is awful. By the time you notice, the backups you're rotating will contain crap already.

Wait, what? Your Windows machine takes 1/2 an HOUR to boot? I don't think that's a hardware issue...

[DPete27]

I'm guessing it was a figure of speech, cause that's what it feels like after you've used an SSD for the same task. Even on SATA II my Vertex 3 loads everything at least twice as fast as my hdd. I was like a giddy little kid when I was installing it. I couldn't keep up with software installs, I had like 3-4 installs going at a time and it was just plowing through them without breaking a sweat. Can't wait till my Ivy Bridge upgrade in a couple/few months to really let this thing stretch its legs on SATA III.

[destroy.all.monsters]

Currently looking at a Momentus XT but curious. Anybody tried that vs. a full SSD?

[computron9000]

I think a sort of quasi-placebo effect might revolve around people putting clean installs on SSDs (rather than mirror some existing install or whatever from some old mechanical drive with millions of programs, etc). With the new drive and new OS install it's "FAST!"

Has TR benchmarked Firefox vs Firefox loading time/memory use with same addons used normally/ on Ubuntu vs Windows 7, and grouped by mechanical drive vs SSD? That would be fascinating to me.

I'd be stunned if after the computer booted up and one of any of the relevant applications was loaded up that it'd really be bogged down some sort of significant, since it would obviously be accelerated by RAM and preloaded given ubiquitous cheap RAM versus long-term storage.

Thoughts? (I don't mind being wrong).

[Crayon Shin Chan]

I think a sort of quasi-placebo effect might revolve around people putting clean installs on SSDs (rather than mirror some existing install or whatever from some old mechanical drive with millions of programs, etc). With the new drive and new OS install it's "FAST!"

Has TR benchmarked Firefox vs Firefox loading time on Ubuntu vs Windows 7, and grouped by mechanical drive vs SSD? That would be fascinating to me.

I'd be stunned if after the computer booted up and one of any of the relevant applications was loaded up that it'd really be bogged down some sort of significant, since it would obviously be accelerated by RAM and preloaded given ubiquitous cheap RAM versus long-term storage.

Thoughts? (I don't mind being wrong).

I copied my Windows partition from a 1TB hard drive to my SSD and the difference was astounding. It sounds like you've never tried an SSD before, nor do you want to.

[computron9000]

I would and have had experience with SSDs, just not enough (15 yrs+ mechanical vs just a couple yrs SSD). What I was asking was for benchmarks. Certainly loading Windows or *nix would be faster. That's obvious. I'm talking about performance after the OS is on and things in memory and optimized. What would the marginal differences be, between different OS (or even same OS), between SSD or mechanical once stuff was booted up and in RAM? Obviously OSs handle RAM differently too, and then you have to deal with longevity and reliability of thing.

All I'm asking about is benchmarks to see what is what. RAM is practically unlimited for the average user now. The question is how it is used to ignore the hard-drive (SSD, mechanical, or otherwise, since it doesn't matter once things get loaded up, if you ignore cost).

[ludi]

I have no benchmarks for you, all I know is I can load large image files off the SSD with an application installed on the SSD and they just pop open like they would on a fast phone or tablet.

[Omniman]

I've been using SSD's for going on 2 years and I cannot go back to mechanicals. I just put an Intel 520 in my brand new laptop because the 5400 was so slow! I've only used the Intel SSD's and the 520 is so much faster then the 510 that's in my desktop.

[DPete27]

I don't have the low down on Windows 7 RAM caching, but I would venture to say that its not as effective as you're making it out to be. The storage subsystem still plays a large part in performance even after specific programs have been cached in the RAM. My experience with Windows 7 makes me feel like it only caches the last program you opened, so if you continually open the same program over and over all day long, the benefits of a SSD may be diminished (not eliminated). But if you're like most people where you open/use 2 or more programs in a particular "session" then the benefits of an SSD far outweigh RAM caching.

Here's a good comparison. Read any article related to Seagate's Momentus XT. These reviews require repeated runs of applications in order for the XT to benefit from its onboard NAND cache. Oftentimes they will compare to a "plain" hdd and SSD as well. You will usually see the hdd benefit slightly from repeated runs likely because of Windows 7 caching, but the XT will have a larger benefit (Windows 7 RAM caching + NAND caching), and the SSD oftentimes lies on a flat line below all of them. This tells me that SSD's already load applications so fast that Windows 7 memory caching has little/no effect for SSD's.

Although I politely disagree with computron's opinions, I do agree that it would be interesting to see benchmarks comparing caching techniques in Windows 7 between: HDD w/ Windows 7, Momentus XT, SSD Caching, and SSD only. Not only that, but how many applications each caching technique can hold/accelerate. The later might be more difficult with SSD caching since the SSD size can vary, but nonetheless...

[Flatland_Spider]

I don't have the low down on Windows 7 RAM caching, but I would venture to say that its not as effective as you're making it out to be. ...if you continually open the same program over and over all day long, the benefits of a SSD may be diminished (not eliminated). But if you're like most people where you open/use 2 or more programs in a particular "session" then the benefits of an SSD far outweigh RAM caching.

Windows 7 turns off caching if it detects an SSD for the exact reason you're concerned about.

I usually tweak Prefetch and Superfetch to only cache the boot files for mechanical hard drives. The cache just seems to get in the way for applications, and after a while of accumulating cruft, it slows down boot times. It would be better if the user had more control over what they cached.

I think a sort of quasi-placebo effect might revolve around people putting clean installs on SSDs (rather than mirror some existing install or whatever from some old mechanical drive with millions of programs, etc).

Has TR benchmarked Firefox vs Firefox loading time/memory use with same addons used normally/ on Ubuntu vs Windows 7, and grouped by mechanical drive vs SSD? That would be fascinating to me.

I'd be stunned if after the computer booted up and one of any of the relevant applications was loaded up that it'd really be bogged down some sort of significant, since it would obviously be accelerated by RAM and preloaded given ubiquitous cheap RAM versus long-term storage.

I've gotten to play with brand new Win7 SSD laptops and mechanical laptops side by side (these were brand Dell 6520 laptops for work), and the lag from the mechanical disk is noticeable. A clean install of Windows always helps things, but the lack of latency and the bandwidth available is something no caching program can over come.

The Firefox comparison would be really hard to do. Windows and Linux handle memory and virtual memory very differently.

Yeah, as long as stuff doesn't start to swap out of RAM the times would be very similar. Once things start to swap out, the SSD would have an advantage.