i wasnt trying to be a smart ass but if all you gained was a faster boot time thats NOT performance since its boot time. also you should realize that i was referring to performance with caching, the more ram you have the less the drive has to be accessed. it takes my 500gb sata II drive ~50 secs to load vista, which doesnt matter b/c its not like im trying to save the world when booting my rig. even if you do gain some performance its probably not gonna be worth the cost, if you have cash to blow then ya knock urself out but for those of us who cant blow 5k on a hard drive its not practical.

Oh also on another note ... yeah thats cool if you can't buy em ... i know everyone can't get a SSD but um ... this entire thread is ABOUT them ... so ... um ... yeah me telling people about them and why i think its worth it ..

Is ..

Kinda the point ...

Or ..

So i thought?

I was reading some posts in this thread regarding opinions on SSD vs HDD.

Hands down SSD.  Let me explain a couple of reasons why SSD should be considered your next upgrade before anything else.  For gamers as long as you have a decent 2.6 Ghz or better Dual Core, 2 gigs RAM, A current Video Card with 512mb Ram, and Sata 3.0 Gb/s.  For non-gamers any system with at least a SATA port, does not even need to be SATAII or SATA 3.0 Gb/s.

Now for some explanations as to why SSD is the better choice.  Currently the X-25 Intel and the OCZ Vertex SSD drives are very fast and very reliable.  Just to be clear the OCZ Vertex are the best SSD's you can get on the market at this time.  With Reads of 230~260 MB/s and Writes of 130~170 MB/s and latency of 0.1 they can easily out perform 3~5 HDD's in a RAID0 configuration.  Yes 1 OCZ Vertex SSD is like having 3 or more Raptors in RAID0 ready to smoak you some data!

SSD's not only have the ability to hit the ceiling of the SATA bus with just 1 drive their access times are easily 100 times faster than desktop HDD.  Even the fastest Serial Attached SCSI's can rank in at 3.x ms access which is at least 30 times slower than SSD.

Also, since windows likes to use a virtual paging file on your disk it is like having a large amount of RAM in your system.  Yes that Virtual RAM is not as fast as your System RAM, but when you see windows perform several Hard Page Memory Faults in a row you will know that an SSD will deliver that Page Fault at 100 times the speed of and HDD.  This dramtically improves performance for your PC in ways that are very noticable.  It's not just boot times, its game loading, application launching, constant reading back and forth to the drive and System RAM.  In short a memory page fault is where the system did not find needed data in memory and had to refer to the drive for that data.  This happens several times a second on computers.  Yes increasing system RAM will minimize this but it will never go away completely.

This all translates into a user experience that is equal to the first time they surfed the internet with broadband instead of dial-up.  Anyone with an SSD already knows how fluid and responsive their systems are with SSD.

Now yes, the first Generation SSD's were not worth the rush and expense of getting SSD unless you did not mind spending insane $$$.  But the Second Generation SSD's that OCZ has produced has squarely placed SSD within reach of the average consumer.  You can pickup a 30gig for aprox $139 on newegg.  Yes Capacity is a little low, but use this drive for your system/gaming drive and use your spining platter HDD for your data storage.  Right now the sweet spot for SSD is the 120gig version of the OCZ Vertex for around $375 on newegg.

No matter how old your computer is, so long as it has a SATA connector, you WILL see a dramatic improvement in your computers performance.

Finally, it will cost around $200 or more to peg 8 gigs of RAM in your machine if not easily more depending upon your mobo config.  You can get 1 SSD for $150 and it will feel like your system has 30 gigs of RAM.

My H/W Setup for those who wish to inquire.

Q9650 Intel @ 3Ghz (Quad)

8 Gigs of XMS Corsair 1600Mhz XMP memory.

Radeon HD 4850

OCZ Vertex 30 gig SSD (system drive) + Generic 200gig HDD (data).

I understand your enthousiasm about SSD disks but now you are just throwing numbers around like crazy without backing them up. Let me do that for you, however you might be disappointed by the result.

First off, access times. Yes, SSD is pretty much unbeatable with this, but no where near 100x. Even my several years old Raptor can do 8.x ms which is less, but newer disks will probably beat that. I will quote a site later, but it shows Raptors being at 7.2 ms. Raptors are readily available consumer desktop hard drives.

Then, performance, which you apparantly equal to read/write speeds. That is by no means a benchmark for performance. The site I refer to is www.tweakers.net which is a, or quite possible the leading dutch technology site. They have upward of 3 million hits a day, so they are pretty experienced with networking and (server) disk access. They wanted to do something with that knowledge so they made a professional benchmark database. They use several benchmark tools (IO meter, HD Tach) and even invented their own. Also they split up results so you can easily check several stats (write speed, access time, etc).

You say a Vertex SSD beats 3 or more Raptors in Raid0. Lets look at some benchmarks of write speeds.

Drive - #of drives - RAID Controller - Score (MB/s)   

OCZ Vertex 30GB 1275 (run 1)  2  RAID 0  Intel ICH10R  ***269,66  - is the highest Vertex score, 2 disk, Raid0

WD VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS  4  RAID 0  Intel ICH10R  *****471,70 - is the highest Raptor score, 4 disks, Raid0

As you can see the Raptors still beat the Vertex by almost a factor of 2. And that's even with 2 Vertex disks, you claim one can even beat 3+ Raptors. Not gonna happen. So those are the real numbers. I still agree that SSD are awesomely fast, but nowhere near as fast as you say, and I got the numbers to back me up. Also, those disks cost shitloads of money. €185 for one 300gb Velociraptor, €115 for one 30gb Vertex. With the above raid setup, the Vertexes will only cost you €230. The Raptors will cost you €740, 3.2 times as much, but they will give you almost twice the performance and 20 times as much disk space as the Vertexes.  Mentioned prices are cheapest online registered prices in my country, which is the Netherlands.

[edit] More numbers, this time disk-to-disk file copy (large file):

Drive  - #of drives - RAID Controller - Score (IOps) 

 WD Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB  4  RAID 0  Areca ARC-1680 2GB  ****6.667

OCZ Vertex 30GB (run 3)  2  RAID 0  Areca ARC-1280ML 2GB  ***5.882

Also on just another note ... HDDs can be fast but im sorry drop some money on a really good SSD and you will notice a huge performance jump. When i switched i noticed it more than most updates to my PC.... and im speaking from experience ... not people just trying to compare everything and "think" they know how it is.

I wasn't talking about you as you can see from the quote in my post. I was responding to sir astral, who starts throwing numbers around which completely random. I know SSDs are fast, but atleast post some realistic numbers when you do instead of saying, and I quote: "Yes 1 OCZ Vertex SSD is like having 3 or more Raptors in RAID0 ready to smoak you some data!"

Also, atm hard drives are about speed, space and price. Normal harddrives are at the left, with normal speed, cheap price and heaps of space, Raptors in between with normal price, good speed and good space, and SSDs are on the right with low space, high price but also very high speed. What you want and what is best all depends on the goal you are trying to achieve. I have two Raptors in my system and it works a lot faster than systems with normal drives. It's heaven when you first get such a fast drive to work with, but in the end it's just a bit faster boottime and software/games loading a few % faster, which is great, but I'm not going to pay loads of money for just a couple of % more in that area.

I've found that High speed traditional Gaming HDD's are still faster than even the best SSD. Cheaper too.

Boot time comparisons, I don't know, My Older clinker running on a 7200rpm Haitachi HDD boots from Power on to Ready to Go in a little under a minute. It is Windows XP tho.

Generally, I wouldn't get a SSD, the technology is still fairly unproven, new and expensive. Given maybe 2 or 3 years I'm sure they will take out standard HDD, but until then, I'll stick with my choice 10,000RPM WD's for builds.

NO we don't. Those that think they do are probably overcompensating for a small body part.

Aw personal attackz and 3rd grade insults.

Someone is jealous .

How do you figure it was a personal attack? I didn't point out anyone and it was more of a joke...

Sounds like you don't quite understand humor or net ediquette...

In all seriousness the statement was meant to point out that you really do not need all the latest and greaest and the most of something to get a job done.

Not everybody has a need to do video editing. Most people just want a internet and email machine with the every now and then game.

just going to say....

sorry for trolling... but wtf