Upgrade to SSD?

-God-

-God-

He is Planet
Jun 22, 2009
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Today I took delivery of my new MBP with a Solid State Drive. If there's one thing you MUST buy for your Mac or PC, it's one of these. Seriously, it's fucking superb. From opening programs to shutting down, shit is seriously quick.

Anyone else ponied up?
 


I havn't gone full SSD yet, but upgraded to a hybrid about a week ago, and you notice a huge difference even with it, so I would imagine that full SSD is sick.
 
They are good if you boot up/run programs a lot.

Myself, once my pc is booted, apps loaded, it stays on. My last reboot was about 3 months ago and that was only to put more ram in. I simply dont shut down nor close apps. My HDD simply isnt a bottle neck for me.

I'd buy one if I did a lot of video/audio work, or played games, they come into their own then. But as I dont do any of those things very often, I'll stick to the hard stuff :D
 
BNR34 said:
They are good if you boot up/run programs a lot.

Myself, once my pc is booted, apps loaded, it stays on. My last reboot was about 3 months ago and that was only to put more ram in. I simply dont shut down nor close apps. My HDD simply isnt a bottle neck for me.

I'd buy one if I did a lot of video/audio work, or played games, they come into their own then. But as I dont do any of those things very often, I'll stick to the hard stuff :D
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This is what people said to me before I got one and I agreed. After owning one for all but a few hours I don't agree on any level.

If we weren't obsessed with speed why upgrade a processor? Why be on a quest to have stuff work quicker? Upgrading to SSD is easily the most dramatic change in a computer I've ever seen.

A normal HD is such a huge bottle neck, even with stuff running. It's almost like you've released your system to now do it's thing. It's not just opening and closing and turning on and off. Think how often you open and save files for instance. You notice it constantly in absolutely everything.
 
Best investment I've made for my Mac was my SSD. Even if you load up all your apps your OS is still hitting that disk... it caches a lot to disk, and often.
 
-God- said:
This is what people said to me before I got one and I agreed. After owning one for all but a few hours I don't agree on any level.

If we weren't obsessed with speed why upgrade a processor? Why be on a quest to have stuff work quicker? Upgrading to SSD is easily the most dramatic change in a computer I've ever seen.

A normal HD is such a huge bottle neck, even with stuff running. It's almost like you've released your system to now do it's thing. It's not just opening and closing and turning on and off. Think how often you open and save files for instance. You notice it constantly in absolutely everything.
Click to expand...

I know what you're saying, but really, my HDD is not a bottle neck, for me.

Save a file? Unless the file is large (>50MB) you arent really going to see a difference. My HDD's avg read speed is aroudn 40MB/s, peaks out at 80MB/s, so 1-2 seconds to write 50MB. Chopping this down isnt really a priority, for me :D

p.s. I dont upgrade CPU's all that often, Infact my C2D is about 3 or 4 year old, it's just oc'd to 2.8GHz. In reality though it is a fine performer for what I use it for.

Dont get me wrong, SSD is a good upgrade for most people. Hell, if I wanted to throw £100 at my PC it's probably what I'd buy next.

However if you have the choice, between an SSD upgrade and a RAM upgrade, I'd be choosing RAM. 8GB+ is a massive difference over 4, if you use your PC like I do (6 month sessions with a gazillion browser tabs open(too lazy to clos), photoshop, XP VM's, word/excel, 4 diff browser, irc client etc. They all stay open, and having enough ram is important, to me :D
 
I just sold my 3.4GHz i7 iMac and now just have my i5 1.7GHz Macbook Air. Why? The air actually feels faster for most tasks because of the SSD. I'm not an idiot, I know that the iMac was a shitload faster for processor intensive stuff, but I don't run things that take advantage of that as much as I do things that take advantage of the speed of the SSD in the Air.

That said, the GPU in the air is kind of weak but it doesn't bother me enough to justify keeping the ~$2500 iMac. I do miss the 16GB of memory though :-\
 
BNR34 said:
I know what you're saying, but really, my HDD is not a bottle neck, for me.

Save a file? Unless the file is large (>50MB) you arent really going to see a difference. My HDD's avg read speed is aroudn 40MB/s, peaks out at 80MB/s, so 1-2 seconds to write 50MB. Chopping this down isnt really a priority, for me :D

p.s. I dont upgrade CPU's all that often, Infact my C2D is about 3 or 4 year old, it's just oc'd to 2.8GHz. In reality though it is a fine performer for what I use it for.

Dont get me wrong, SSD is a good upgrade for most people. Hell, if I wanted to throw £100 at my PC it's probably what I'd buy next.

However if you have the choice, between an SSD upgrade and a RAM upgrade, I'd be choosing RAM. 8GB+ is a massive difference over 4, if you use your PC like I do (6 month sessions with a gazillion browser tabs open(too lazy to clos), photoshop, XP VM's, word/excel, 4 diff browser, irc client etc. They all stay open, and having enough ram is important, to me :D
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This is exactly what I thought to a T. Yes saving a file is only a fraction of a second, but it's just the way it reacts, you do notice it. Simply opening folders and browsing the HDD is instant. Put it this way, you wouldn't need to leave your computer on all the time and leave shit loads of stuff open to negate the fact it takes a long time to boot and set up. ;)

Also, the increase in performance is far, far, far more obvious than 4GB to 8GB of Ram. I'd even be willing to bet, if it wasn't for the fact you want to run everything at once (to save waiting for it to boot?) you wouldn't be touching the sides in normal use on 8GB of ram.

Surely having all that RAM is only helping by allowing you to run loads of shit at once (to save you loading it) therefore you're not making shit quicker, just buying your way out of the HDD access bottle neck by caching everything in the RAM. I'd bet you could halve your RAM, use an SSD and be a shit load quicker.

There's no discernible delay for anything - within normal use. I expect you'd notice massive gains due to the page file as well. If you have 8GB of ram, I'd imagine (unless W7 doesn't have a page file) that you'd have a 12GB page file. If this was on an SSD I suspect this would impact performance hugely.

To give you an idea of the difference, download linux puppy (50mb), run it from a cd and see how instant shit is (it runs only from ram) that's almost what an SSD is like.
 
I really would like to upgrade to one of these, but my main hard drive is larger than the SSD that I want to load my OS and apps onto. This creates the necessity to juggle everything around so that the Apps and OS are on the SSD and the Home folder is on a secondary.

I just upgraded 4 GB ram in my mac pro and that has sped things up quite a bit, but I'm sure I'll be investing in one of these soon from everyone's reviews.
 
I know this is an old video, but whenever a friend who doesn't know jack shit about computers asks me about SSD, I always show them videos like this

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elujjdo_8XU][M] SSD vs HDD - OCZ Vertex in Dell D630, Windows 7 Startup - YouTube[/ame]
 
-God- said:
Today I took delivery of my new MBP with a Solid State Drive. If there's one thing you MUST buy for your Mac or PC, it's one of these. Seriously, it's fucking superb. From opening programs to shutting down, shit is seriously quick.

Anyone else ponied up?
Click to expand...

I have no idea why all laptops do not have these already. The difference is insane.
 
These are so badass. Going to get one of the smaller ones and put it in my macbook. Not really wanting to drop 300 on the 160gb+ ones.
 
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