🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 19 Mar 2015 06:54:14 -0400, DMP <nom...@nodomain.com> wrote:

>On 3/18/2015 7:40 PM, Ross Ridge wrote:
>> Justisaur  <just...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Seriously, get an SSD.  It's amazing.  If you use Intel Smart Response you
>>> don't need to worry about what you're putting where, and seems to be nearly
>>> fast for most things.  It's not just for booting.  It's every time you load
>>> anything.  It's not just a little improvement, it's like night and day.
>>> I'd skimp on anything else to get an SSD.
>> I wouldn't necessarily skimp on everything else, but yah an SSD makes a
>> big difference in the overall performance of the PC.  Nothing else make
>> your PC seem faster.  You can get an hard disk as well to keep the price
>> down while still giving you a lot of storage for bulk things like photos
>> and videos.
>>
>> 						Ross Ridge
>>
>Rin mentioned that the SSD's get slower with time due to "the number of 
>writes that slowly damage the memory over time". I didn't want to get in 
>a situation like I had three computers ago. I got a custom built job 
>that came with two IBM "Deathstars" both of which failed. My bad for not 
>doing the research then. I do hold on to my systems for a goodly amount 
>of time, so reliability and longevity are important. The only thing I've 
>ever had failed were disk drives, two IBM's and a Seagate

Yes, it's the slowing over time is why I mentioned the larger HDD.
There are a number of reasons why I made that particular
recommendation for gaming:

1.  The speed advantage of a huge HDD
2.  The longer-term speed disadvantage of SSDs on smaller drives due
to write-damaging
3.  The rather neglible impact on gaming of either
4.  The current cost proposition of large SSDs

The problem is that in a year or two, a smaller SSD can be
significantly slower than when you bought it because it.  Technically
a larger SSD should fare better for a longer period of time, but I've
seen reports of issues with even those slowing down.

Does slowing down mean they will be slow in a year or two?  Slow is a
relative term.  Slower than when you got them?  Yes.  Slower than a
HDD?  Perhaps not, but by having a huge HDD using less than half it's
total capacity, you're getting ongoing (never slowing) performance
that's probably not going to be noticable.  Using only a fraction of a
HDD's capacity is the trick to getting great ongoing performance, that
will largely be indistinguishable from an SSD for anything except
reboots.

I have two systems here, one is a new X99 gaming rig with 2TB and 3TB
HDDs, neither using close to half capacity, and another one with a
slightly older but fast core i7, with a brand new 1TB SSD.  In overall
usage, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two
except on the reboot.  The system with the HDDs is quiet, load times
are almost instantaneous, and feels SSD-like.  The key there, however,
is the capacity of the HDDs.  If I bought smaller HDDs and they were
halfway to their storage capacity, the performance situation would
change.

>I am not familiar with Intel Smart Response, but will familiarize myself 
>with it before any ordering takes place.
>
>I have confidence in the builder and they will tell me what their 
>experience has been with SSD v. mechanical particularly with their 
>gaming towers. There isn't much difference in the cost of an  250 gb SSD 
>and 1TB WD Black. There also must be a reason why most of the gaming 
>computer builders are adding SSD's to their configurations. The smaller 
>SSD's are getting to be close in price to the larger mechs.

SSD's are great to have.  PC vendors love them because at present they
are adding huge amounts of profit markup.  It also lowers their cost
of troubleshooting if they have to support over the phone, because
each reboot after a config change is much faster.  Customers love them
because they are very fast at first, and of course quiet and cool.

They just still cost too much to deal with 1-2TB sizes, and with games
coming out that are dozens of gigs in size, going ALL SSD is not a
cost effective option for a gaming rig.

The system I put an SSD in is very read-intensive and loads huge
amounts of audio data (both large files and lots of little files), and
it also gets reboot a lot.  Going SSD was a no-brainer there.  For a
gaming system, I think it's more of a luxury item to have 1TB SSDs
(especially with builder margins tacked on), one that diminishes in
value as it's written to.

In terms of reliability, though, SSDs should be less prone to failure
(no moving parts).  They are a nobrainer for laptops as well of
course.