But of course this is completely different from the way people make informed purchases.
It’s like saying “I don’t know which car I want, but it will definitely be a Honda, and I’m going to let the salesman tell me which model I should buy, unseen”.
Could you maybe break that down into HomerSpeak?
An SSD will (theoretically) help gaming performance because of a game’s need to constantly load and unload various objects and textures. For example, when I’m playing World of Warcraft and traveling through the world, the terrain around me is constantly changing as I travel, creatures and objects appear in my line of sight and then disappear behind me as I pass them. Because the world in this game is so massive it would be impractical (and too big) to simply load everything into RAM at launch, and so these things are loaded from the hard drive “on demand”. When another player’s character comes within my line of sight, my computer learns via the network that character’s race, sex, facial features, and hairstyle, along with every piece of armor/clothing and weaponry that character has equipped, and then it has to look up each individual component on my hard drive and instantly render all of it for me. What this all means is that my hard drive is constantly chugging away trying to find and load all these different objects. This is a big reason that the major cities in the game tend to have so much “lag” - there can be literally hundreds of other players in one smallish area, each one uniquely equipped, and so people’s hard drives are working overtime, desperately trying to find and load thousands of different graphical objects.
Change that spinning hard drive to an SSD, removing all the moving parts, and those constant seek-and-loads become much much faster.
ETA: So I’ve been seriously considering adding a small SSD to my system, dedicated solely to holding my WoW folder.
Modern motherboards can have 12 GB (6x2) or 24 GB (6x4) or more of memory. You might find that cheaper or preferable or both.
Pre built systems tend to have better prices than custom built because they use the cheapest components they can get away with.
For example, a system might have a power supply that can deliver 350watts (very low power) to a system with a quad core cpu, 4 gigabytes of memory, a 5200rpm hard drive and gaming grade video card. But it is probably running at close to the maximum for those components (not sure if that’s actually true, but let’s say that it is). Now what happens if you decide to do an upgrade? Maybe you add another 4 gig of memory (dram) and get a more powerful (and power hungry) video card. Now you are drawing more than what the PSU is rated for (i.e., 350 watts). It’s peak power rating is probably 400-450watts. So it will still work - in the short run. But over some period of time, running the PSU at more than it’s specs will eventually burn it out.
When you build your own system, you can plan for future expansion. You also start to see that the difference between the el cheapo components and those that are semi-decent isn’t that much - but it adds up over all of the components in the system.
Overclocking is another reason people chose to build their own systems but that’s whole 'nother can of chili.
Oh, and a word about SSD’s. Make sure that you have automatic defragging turned off for SSD’s. Some people seem to think it helps and if you think so too, do it manually.
Also, and this is important, don’t put your paging file (windows virtual memory swap file) on your SSD. Put that on the system’s hard drive. The swap file can see a lot of activity if you tend to have several apps open at once or use numerous browser tabs. Having the swap file on a hard drive will slow things down a bit but your SSD will last longer.
Ah, I had no idea there was that much dynamic graphics access when gaming. That’s clearly a situation where it might be appropriate.
I’ve never heard such rubbish in my life. I have 4GB of RAm in my laptop, and my hard drive is constantly on the go when accessing various websites. The same is true of the many computers I maintain for various customers. Many people multi-task on their computers and windows still insists on using virtual memory. An SSD will definitely vastly speed up any computer that is used to any significant degree.
Alas, I’m on an iMac, already maxed at 4GB RAM.
I assume you’re using Windows. I’m certainly willing to be educated about the Windows network stack and its relation to disk storage. My thoughts are that the data comes in on the NIC, hits the bus to main memory, is then processed as required, then sent to the display, and finally sent to disk for cache purposes. If that’s incorrect, I’d appreciate having my ignorance remedied.
I’ll note that the hard drive being “constantly on the go” doesn’t mean performance is at stake (in fact, if my above thoughts are correct, it isn’t). I’ll also note that cached files (images, text, whatever) clearly would be faster with an SSD – I hadn’t thought of that, similar to how I hadn’t thought of the volume of textures and such for gamers. However, that only affects repeated displays.
Yes, Windows insists on heavy-handed memory management. That does not mean that the memory is managed well (honestly, I’ve heard that it is, but I don’t really know). I’d note that when closing the final window of an application in Windows (and linux, as I understand it, but not Macs), the application is removed from memory. So, you’re restarting an application after closing the last window, which would clearly be faster with an SSD (as I said).
I know that some people advocate for eliminating use of swap altogether (given adequate RAM, of course, of say 3+GB). To me, that’s living dangerously, and I have no desire to do so. But it’s also an indication that, for general usage, there’s simply no need for the disk access of which you speak. Multi-tasking simply isn’t an issue with modern OSes.
None of what you said necessarily leads to this conclusion. If you wouldn’t mind, could you please supply a technical justification? For my edification?
I think the biggest gain from an SSD is reading and manipulating the registry. But that’s just a guess since I don’t know to what extent the registry is accessed from the disk and to what extent it gets offloaded to the page file.
I haven’t done any benchmarks so this is purely subjective, but on the 2 machines with SSD’s I’ve moved the page files to one of the system hard drives and I can’t say I’ve noticed much of a difference - which isn’t to say there is none, just that if there is, I don’t seem to notice.
Interesting “shootout” demonstration here:
Note what, at ~15 seconds in, they’re demonstrating: “We’re going to see the difference…an SSD makes when: 1) Booting OS X and 2) loading [variety of Adobe apps]”. No doubt about it, an SSD is going to make a HUGE difference.
I was thinking about it some…another place an SSD would have a tremendous impact would be in “waking up” a system (from hibernation, where the memory state is written to disk so that most of the system can be turned off). Think similar to an iPad…near instant-on.
Funny thing about computers. What you think and what is, is sometimes at odds.
I had a MacBook Pro (Core Duo) that was up for replacement with 4 Gb RAM, it’s main problem (other than being hotter than the hubs of hell), was that running VM’s would tap it out. No big deal, I’ll spec the new MBP with 8 Gb of RAM! I’ll be GOLDEN!
Only to find that it’s blazing fast, until it’s not…then I look down and find that Safari (or Firefox, your pick) has managed to consume ALL 8 Gb…without ANY VM’s running. When the system needs to go to disk, it hits something that is 100 times slower than RAM, which has a ton of latency (especially in the slower, cooler, lower power drives they tend to put in laptops.
I’ve got a 2 Tb Green disk (5200 rpm?) I just installed with a 150 ms seek time… the 7200 rpm in my alienware is closer 50 ms…it’s a noticeable difference…but these don’t come CLOSE to keeping up with SSD on random reads. See here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/5
On a system with adequate RAM, I’m sure you won’t see much difference…the instant it’s gotta go to disk, SDD will crush spinny platters.
Okay, I would like to thank everyone for giving me a boner over SSD’s, since it occurred to me that much of my current bottleneck is actually I/O. But I do appreciate the comments on CPU too, because that feeds into it also.
It should be said at this point that there seems to be some contention whether you can ever even get Windows to stop thrashing the disk no matter how much RAM you throw at it, even if you reduce the pagefile to zero.
Also, an interesting observation while I was googling on SSD’s … “An SSD runs cooler than a hard drive, indirectly benefitting all other computer components by letting them also run cooler.” I know CPU’s definitely benefit from lower running temps, and I’ll have to take the man’s word on the rest of it.
Firefox IS notorious for leaking memory, but even I have never seen it take 8gig. It will normally start out at around 300meg and then over the period of a couple of days grow to about 1.2gig. Then I just close it, wait a few seconds for it to dislodge itself from memory and restart. But for it to be eating 8gig, that sounds very, very wrong. I don’t know about Safari - is that the mac equivalent of firefox?
Minor quibble - those seek time I think need to be divided by 10. 15ms is a little on the slow side even for a 5200rpm disk, but unless WD has switched to Abacus ™ technology for it’s hard drives, it had better not be anything even close to 150ms. 
Sorry. I’ve been saying 5200 when it should be 5400rpm. Drives come in 2 basic flavors, 5400rpm and 7200rpm - with most of the newer drives being of the latter flavor. Some high-end drives like the WD Velociraptors run at 10k rpms - but those suckers need heat sinks.
Unfortunately software is generally lagging behind. I don’t know about WoW in particular, but most games still don’t take advantage of more than about 2 gigs of RAM.
This isn’t true. Video cards aren’t involved in processing things like google maps and most video. Most video cards will have hardware decoding for stuff like DVDs and blu-ray but even basic cards will have this function and besides that it’s generally not necesary anyway. If you have no interest in gaming and you’re just concerned about web browsing type stuff, you’d get by with pretty much any video card.
Minor concern - hard drives don’t put out a significant amount of heat.
SSDs do improve performance significantly from what I understand. Windows is often waiting on little stuff - loading a dll to perform some OS function or retrieving cache to load a web page - and all of that stuff is just speedier with SSDs. I’ve always run very fast mechanical HDs (raptors, WD black editions, etc) and there’s a definite difference in general system performance over using slow drives.
Not all SSD performance is the same though. If you’re interested, do research - there can be a very large disparity in SSD performance of different types.