Upgrade PC now or wait..?

[Askarus]

An SSD makes working with a pc way smoother

No way. The only way it helps is when reading/writing large amounts of data. When do you do that? Unless you have some specialized use cases (like video editing, because videos are huge) only when starting programs, booting up, manually doing file operations. For the latter you just put it in the background. The other you only do seldom.

All the GUI, windows, etc. is in RAM anyway.

Booting is faster.

Also if Garret might use his PC for gaming.

Here loading is a lot faster as well.

My advice is to get a big HDD and an SSD where the 10 games fit into you play at the moment.

 

[Granitehead]

Booting is faster.

Also if Garret might use his PC for gaming.

Here loading is a lot faster as well.

My advice is to get a big HDD and an SSD where the 10 games fit into you play at the moment.

I mentioned booting, but if that takes 7 seconds with a hard drive and what, 4 with an SSD, and you do it once every few days or so, then what does it matter? Even if you did it more often...

Ah, gaming, I guess maybe, I usually don't play the kind of game which needs big amounts of data.

 

[ghostpatch]

No way. The only way it helps is when reading/writing large amounts of data. When do you do that? Unless you have some specialized use cases (like video editing, because videos are huge) only when starting programs, booting up, manually doing file operations. For the latter you just put it in the background. The other you only do seldom. All the GUI, windows, etc. is in RAM anyway.

additionally to the already mentioned improvemnets:

power consumption is far less

no noise or vibations, shock proof

response time is faster

klicking your way through large folders/folder structures is way faster - content is loaded and displayed quicker, etc.

I'm using both, a 128GB SDD for the system, some games with otherwise looooOOng loading times and a 2TB HDD for photographs, videos, backups, etc.

 

[Granitehead]

Oh well. So I guess there can after all be some benefits to using an SSD if you are not me.

(I don't care much about the noise, I don't tend to throw my computer around, and when browsing folders everything is fast enough for me - usually I know where to go anyway and just do cd first few letters tab next few letters tab first letter tab tab next letter tab enter or whatever and this is blazingly fast, usually)

 

[TrashyMG]

Boot up time isn't the only thing improved with SSD, anything that requires a large amount of data being accessed from the drive can benefit from SSD.. Games like MMORPG with huge amounts of textures to load up at once, video editing isn't too uncommon in a household situation anymore. I have a hard time going back to a computer that doesn't have a SSD, opening up programs even if they're not really intensive seem to pop up on the screen faster.. many can argue that this isn't really necessary, but I find it worth the price.

 

[Granitehead]

So you want to be able to start a tab (over) loaded Firefox within less than 0.2s or what? Why would you need this?

I'm using a (slow) hard drive as my main drive at the moment, and there are only a few programs which take more than split seconds to open. Firefox, Thunderbird, Steam, Eclipse - they don't start within less than a second. But why would I need them to? I start them once at the beginning of a session and then leave them open. That increases the time from start of boot up to production ready by maybe 10 seconds top. Imagine some crazy worst case scenario where it's 30s. That would be 30s every few days when for some reason you rebooted. Even if it was once or twice a day, would 30s or 60s per day really be worth that kind of money?

I stick to it, unless you have special needs (video editing, some games, probably other stuff I can't think of right now) then it's an absolutely useless investment unless you have too much money in which case it's fine.

 

[levi]

Having an SSD is never a necessity - it's just a (rather expensive) nice to have.


I'd disagree that they're good for handling large amounts of data - that's what HDDs were built for. SSDs are good for fragmented data, since seek times are HDDs achilles heel in comparison to SSDs. That's why they're good for skipping through videos, booting, loading thousands of tiny textures, that sort of things. More serial big-data stuff like transcoding videos is likely just as good on a similarly specced HDD as an SSD.

 

[TrashyMG]

I'd disagree that they're good for handling large amounts of data

Well I exactly said "accessing" large amounts of data, I meant it in more of the fragmented way you're describing it. like MMORPGs they have a ton of small data files that need to be loaded to memory all the time.

So you want to be able to start a tab (over) loaded Firefox within less than 0.2s or what? Why would you need this?

I stick to it, unless you have special needs (video editing, some games, probably other stuff I can't think of right now) then it's an absolutely useless investment unless you have too much money in which case it's fine.

Well seeing how I do spend money on expensive toys like 3D printers and OpenPandora Handhelds I do seem to have money to throw around.. I just know going back to a similarly specced desktop with standard HDDs seems like slow motion to me. It's not necessary sure, but neither is many things in current PCs. If I just needed something for web browsing and writing documents I could use my AMD K6-III with 256MBs of RAM and a light weight linux distro. 
 

 

[Granitehead]

I would like to see you browsing the web with 256MB of RAM.

It's just a question of what you get for the money, and for my usage it's just /really/ not worth it.

Edit: But by the way I /do/ use a very light weight system. Why would I need all those fancy graphics and animations when I click something and this kind of bullshit? Probably a few firefox tabs use more memory than the whole window manager (i3).

 

[TrashyMG]

I would like to see you browsing the web with 256MB of RAM.

It's just a question of what you get for the money, and for my usage it's just /really/ not worth it.

Edit: But by the way I /do/ use a very light weight system. Why would I need all those fancy graphics and animations when I click something and this kind of bullshit? Probably a few firefox tabs use more memory than the whole window manager (i3).

Ask and shall receive, what's funny is that browsing on this seems faster than my work computer (8-core I7).. Behold my AMD k6-III 256MBs of ram Windows 98 machine that is hitched to my 36" CRT Monitor/TV.. It's setup to play old 3DFX games as it has a Voodoo 3.. I've been debating to switch it over to Linux.. 

Spoiler

Edit: To be fair I disable javascript for the most part on this setup..

 

[Granitehead]

Ask and shall receive, what's funny is that browsing on this seems faster than my work computer (8-core I7).

And the latter has an SSD and the the former not? :-D


But that's not what I meant, of course in principle you can do with 256MB of RAM, but it won't do for lots of tabs (unless you have a very fast SSD as swap :-D ) or a lot of multi tasking. For me, lots of RAM pays off (though the 16GB I got are overkill - 8GB would do for most of even my lazy multi tasking needs), an SSD would not.

Edit: It's also kind of a balance - if I had, say, 6GB of RAM an SSD would probably be useful because I'm pretty sure I'd get the system to start swapping when switching from one virtual monitor to an other.

 

[TrashyMG]

And the latter has an SSD and the the former not? :-D

Neither have an SSD, My work laptop also suffers with a 5400RPM HDD, which is still faster than what the 98 machine has.. The only computer I own that has SSDs is my home desktop. 

 

[elwing]

SSD also helps a lot when compiling big project... just saying.. it's not just to play game and boot faster...

edit: that said I choosed a small SSD and a big HDD, cause in my opinion big SSD are overpriced and not needed for most case...

 

[FaeMinx]

I only have a 60gb ssd. Admittedly, I would like it to be a bit larger.

 

[levi]

My main computer of the moment (my old netbook) only has 68GB of disc space in total (4GB NAND, 64GB SSD). My Pandora actually has more storage space than it, but that works for me since the Pandora is a media consumption device, with gigs of music and the odd video on it, wheras my netbook can offload that stuff to DVD once it's created it.