Re: Solid State Drives

[NeutralX2]

For general computing use it makes a pretty huge difference. Windows startup times are incredible, and applications like Photoshop that used to take a while to start are now instant. I keep all of my programs on my SSD, and the OS just feels a lot more responsive.

The impact on gaming is a lot less. For games that have long loading times, such as Battlefield 3 or Natural Selection 2 it makes a noticeable difference as you can join matches faster. However in most games, once you have loaded the level you are not accessing the hard drive much. So it doesn’t really help you with in-game performance other then load times.

Check out this video from Toms Hardware where they compare a high end hard drive to a mid range SSD:

Quote:

We created a script that simultaneously launches multiple applications in a repeatable fashion, and documented the differences in a short video. The script starts as soon as Windows loads up, but then waits for 30 seconds for all processes to load and the processor to idle. The script launches Internet Explorer 9 (an offline version of tomshardware.de), Microsoft Outlook with the same PST mailbox folder that SYSmark 2012 uses, PowerPoint with a large presentation, and Adobe Photoshop with a large picture file.

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izwZWOY4_60[/embed]

From: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-hdd-performance,3023.html

HDD Storage is one of the biggest bottlenecks in PCs right now. Going from any HDD to any SSD should give you a pretty noticeable performance upgrade, as even the low end SSDs outperform HDDs by a pretty big margin.