I’ve finally put together most of the computer that I’ve always wanted and I’ve found that at today’s prices I’m getting tons of bang for my buck. However, I’m hesitant on the final piece, the SSD.
At the current cost per gigabyte I’m not going to be able to get something in the 500GB range, which is what my current HDD is. I’m looking at something between 128-256GB depending on sales, rebates, etc.
Now my current HDD is holding 280GB of stuff. That includes a huge Steam cache of 151GB and an Origin (EA’s version of Steam) cache of 43GB. So minus the 194GB of games, I am using approximately 86GB for Windows and a few programs. I could probably cut this down further by moving some stuff out of my Downloads folder. But 86 out of 128GB used leaves me with very little breathing room. Does an SSD suffer from the same thing as an HDD, in which the less space you have the more randomly your computer will behave? I believe this is due to swap file shenanigans but with 8GB of RAM and an SSD do I even need a swap file?
Also, since I’d be moving everything over from C:\Program Files (the SSD) to D:\Program Files (the HDD), am I going to see any appreciable gain? In other words, the SSD will just have Windows on it but the programs will have to be on a conventional drive. That being the case, would I be better off to stick to a regular HDD?
Last but not least, does anyone know of any Canadian sellers who might be able to offer the best deal? Any particular brands to avoid or things to watch out for?
I put a 256 gig Samsung Pro SSD in my notebook. Boot ups are noticeably faster but generally tasks really don’t feel all that much quicker. I think people overestimate how many tasks are really disk bound. With 4-8 gigs of RAM and modern OSes most stuff you access with everyday apps is loaded in RAM memory making the perceived real world performance difference between SSD and platter based drives less than you might think.
I built mine with a new 128 GB SSD and whatever old HDD I had from my old machine (640 GB, I think). Current SSD is 74.4 GB used, 37.2 GB free. I haven’t been really strict on putting all programs on the HDD, most are but some are on the SSD. I haven’t noticed any decrease in performance though. If you are worried just get a 256GB SSD.
The SSD has two advantages that I have noticed. First, installing the OS (Windows 7 in my case) was fast. I think it took a bit over 10 minutes. My previous experience with installing an OS was with XP on a HDD, and that took about 45 minutes to an hour, but I don’t know if the fast install time for my current machine was due to the SSD or if Windows 7 installs that much faster than XP. At any rate, it was nice.
The second and most important is the fast boot times. If you ever need to reboot the machine, it’s really not a huge hassle as it takes under 15 seconds. I like that.
edit: A downside is that the time for hitting F2 or F8 or whatever key to get into the BIOS during booting is pretty fast. You have to be quick.
In terms of space use, SSDs generally do not suffer the same problems as HDDs. HDDs become increasing inefficient at storing data as they near capacity and end up spending a great deal of time thrashing which slows the whole system down which can lead to other problems. Whille SSDs do become somewhat less efficient as they near capacity, the effect is not on the scale of HDDs and thrashing is a complete non-issue.
As for the swap or pagefile, you will get different opinions, but I would certainly recommend keeping a token page file (say 1MB) regardless of how much memory you have. Although Windows can run without it, the OS was designed expecting that file to be there–think of it as a safety valve if nothing else.
ETA: Just wanted to note that it is the file system, not the drive that determines where data is stored. The difference in efficiency between SSDs and HDDs is the same, though, regardless.
Depending on your habits and the amount of RAM you have, you may want to consider turning off hibernation. My desktop has 18GB of RAM, which means 18 GB of precious, untouchable space on my system SSD.
From what I understand, hiberfil.sys is automatically and unchangeably tied to the amount of RAM you have, and because of the way Windows loads, it must be locate on your boot drive.
You do not need a SSD. Yes it will make your boot times shorter, but how often do you boot your PC? You might consider a hybrid drive instead or a plain old HDD.
An SSD has been the best PC upgrade possible for the last 3 years or so. I wouldn’t worry about getting the biggest one ever… I used a 120GB Kingston for a long time (now a 180 Intel). My Steam files are on a standard 1TB drive that’s admittedly slower, but with the OS calls being handled super-fast, it’s never mattered to me.
I just make sure to download to my spinning disks, and put any music / videos there too.
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As for the swap or pagefile, you will get different opinions, but I would certainly recommend keeping a token page file (say 1GB) regardless of how much memory you have.
You were probably more right the first time. Windows up to Vista - i am not sure about 7 - needed a 2MB page file on the boot partition to save crash info.
Anyway, in general, the main page file should be on the least used drive.
For me, I use SSDs for my programs and my data is on a 2TB RAID 1 NAS. That way I can access my data regardless of which PC I use and I actually have all three of my computers mapped to the same NAS. That way, wherever I login I have the same info.
The only difference per machine is what apps are installed. One is a laptop, one is an all-in-one, and the last is my gaming rig. Either way, for my school work I can use any machine and pick up where I left off and not have to worry about transferring or backing up info.
That’s the way I would do it. I have had both HDD and SDD fail on me over the years. It sucks.
I considered a SSD for my Music laptop, as performance is pretty key. I could not jusify the cost, though, so I purchased a 32Gb USB flash drive (in the smallest physical package I could find), formatted it as NTFS and set the whole thing as ReadyBoost in a USB3 slot. I think it really helps, I’m not tied to an expensive device like an SSD/hybrid, and if the Flash does start to degrade in the future, I can swap it for a new one.
Be very careful with using a USB drive as a boot disk. We have discovered this the hard way. Proper flash drives have much more robust wear levelling than USB drives, and can cope with many many more write cycles than a USB drive typically can. We found that a USB drive with significant write activity dies, and you lose the system. Typically you find this on reboot.
When you go to systems with significant sustained write activity, standard SSDs are not good enough either, and you need to step up to “enterprise” level SSDs (at a significant price premium) in order to get enough write cycles. SSDs are very bad about this, as the large real block size means that false sharing of data between files results in much worse real block writing activity than the logical file system is doing. This multiplication factor can be quite nasty.
Need? No. But an SSD has been the biggest single increase in perceivable speed on computers for a couple years now (vastly more than adding memory or a few hundred Mhz of CPU), and the advantages aren’t just at boot time. Assuming you put the system on it, apps will load faster, documents will load and save faster, and the entire system will just generally seem “snappier.” I’ve got two OS partitions on my machine at home; one’s on an SSD, the other on a hard drive, and the different is night and day (on what’s otherwise the same hardware and software).
I work for…well, a large software company that’s fairly data driven in it’s purchases, and for dev machines here SSDs are nearly mandatory because of the increased throughput, at least in the groups I’ve worked in.
I’ve been working in computers for most of a lifetime now, and while I might sneak by with a 2.4 Ghz CPU or 8GB of memory on a new machine, I’ll never again buy one that doesn’t boot off an SSD.
Since you’re a gamer what I would do is pay attention to what games give your hard drive a workout now, and move them to the SSD. So far I’ve moved Battlefield 4 and Planetside 2 to to my 128GB SSD. There is a program called SteamMover that will move folders to another drive and create links from the old location to the new so you don’t need to uninstall/reinstall. It’s a little tricky initially but it works great.
Is there still really no Windows solution that will automatically spread your data out both on the SSD and HDD to maximize performance gains? I’m pretty sure it exists in Linux. It works by caching some HDD data to the SSD.
And, no, Windows’s ReadyBoost technology doesn’t do the same thing–it caches memory, not HDD data. But I figured someone would have filled in the obvious gap by now.
This link seems to indicate that you can do it on certain Intel chipsets. Only 64 GB will be used for caching, so the rest can be your actual Windows drive, I guess.
No - ReadyBoost - Wikipedia. Readyboost is a Dynamic disk cache that can cache data from the entire disk, not just the page file or system files. It is optimised for short reads where access time is the critical factor, and long sequential reads are delivered from spinning disk as that is the sort of operation that flash memory is slower at.
Readyboost is entirely disabled if you have an SSD as the primary drive. I’m not sure about hybrids.
swapcache is a Dragonfly BSD feature that lets you use flash/SSDs to cache filesystem data. flashcache is the Linux kernel solution (developed and released by Facebook). There are other similar approaches that use SSDs to cache normal hard disks.