Hi Folks,
With SSDs (Solid State Drives) beginning to come down in price I was wondering if anyone had swapped out their system disc for one.
I have a DELL Dimension 9200, Core2 Duo 2.4GHz with 4GB RAM (3 used on Win XP), reasonably fast memory and motherboard and my current bottle-neck, especially when loading large photo and video programs, is without doubt the HDD.
So I was thinking about swapping it for an SSD.
They seem to be extremely fast and obviously have vitually no seek time so I was wondering if anyone already with experience could tell me what kind of improvement I could expect.
Regards.

I am not ready to use one for my system disk. Hard drives have a history of lasting easily 5 years and beyond. SSDs are too new. System disks are pretty heavily used - constantly being written to for temp files, the page file, etc.

But if your complaint is large photos and videos, then it would make sense to me to add an SSD as an extra drive and move your photos and video to it.

Hi Digerati,
Thanks for your quick reply but you're obviously not a photo or video man.
It's the loading and running of the photo and video programs, not the loading of the files themselves.
It wouldn't make sense to buy SSDs for storage as they are still much too expensive, especially since I have well over 1TB of videos and photos.
What is really needed, especially for high definition video editing and complex Photoshop operations with large RAW files, is about 16GB of RAM so that everything can be done in memory.
However, since as you say, the system disc is being constantly read/written with page files etc. etc. it would make sense to replace it with an SSD to give a speed at least similar to RAM and hence boost the whole process.
Regarding the new-ness of SSDs, the technology has been around for years and is vitually the same as can be found in solid state devices such as Compact Flash, so there's no worries on that side.
It's the fact that 64GB and 128GB devices have come available at a reasonable price which has changed the game.
Thanks again,
Doug.

I have thousands of photos. But you are right, not videos, I am not interested in watching videos on my computer, and for movies, I have a home theater to watch DVDs and BluRays.

I am fully aware the technology has been around for years, but not as hard drive replacements which is what we are talking about. In theory, and with "wear leveling", they should last longer than hard drives, but as a technician for nearly 40 years, I know by experience that theory and real world often don't see eye-to-eye. I'm a show me type of guy. When I see SSDs lasting as long as hard drives, then I will consider using one for my system disk - and using SSDs specifically for the system disk is what you asked about in your opening post.

And note just because I suggested a SSD as a secondary drive for your photos and videos, that in no way suggests you cannot run your video programs from the SSD as well. The "system" drive simply means it is your boot drive and it contains the operating system. You can have and "run" programs from a SSD that is a secondary drive just fine - that does not mean, and I in no way implied it is for "storage" only.

Will you see improved performance with an SSD as your system drive? Yes, provisionally. That is, SSDs only impact reads and writes. Once loaded into RAM, then it is all up to bus speeds, the CPU, RAM, and the graphics solution, and the drive is out of the picture if those are adequate. And I also note that today's drives, with 32mb of on-board buffers, are no slouches either - especially if managed by Windows 7.

Hi Digerati,
I agree with you on the theory versus practice having been an engineer myself for 35 years.
As I said before it wouldn't be sensible to use an SSD for both either storage or storage+programs because the cost would be prohibitive.
I still don't think you have quite understood my usage requirement; I don't watch videos on my PC, I'm a photographer and videographer so I use Photoshop to manipulate large RAW files and I make films by editing high-definition video files.
I read an article recently, but the source escapes me for the moment, that stated that one of the major HDD manufacturers, I think it was Seagate, was considering producing a conventional hard drive with the 8MB cache replaced by an 8GB SSD, so I think we are definitely heading that way.
Just hope the prices start to come down soon.
Regards,
Doug.

i agree with you on the theory versus practice having been an engineer myself for 35 years.

Ha! I laugh because I am reminded of all the times being on the phone talking to the engineers who designed some piece of new communications equipment we got in and telling them how we fixed their design flaws and them complaining that "it should have worked" their way.

But to your comment about costs, if cost is a concern, you would not be using SSDs anyway. I mean when you can get 2Tb HD for $.055 per Gb compared to $1.56 per Gb for Newegg's cheapest 128Gb SSD, that's a no brainer. 5 and 1/2 cents!!!!

I think it was Seagate, was considering producing a conventional hard drive with the 8MB cache replaced by an 8GB SSD, so I think we are definitely heading that way.

I don't know. For one, with hard drives today 32Mb buffers are standard with 64Mb becoming more common. And note these buffers use high speed RAM so replacing that with an SSD, not sure that makes sense. I mean RAM already is super fast solid state memory. Additionally, the buffer is there to compensate for the "relatively" slow times it takes for the drive to seek then read the data, so it could "read ahead" a little bit. Since the whole point of SSDs is to eliminate those delays in seek and read/write times, I don't see a reason to have a buffer at all. So I think there's some confusion there.

Just hope the prices start to come down soon.

They have, and they will much more, but it will take some time considering right now, the cheapest 1Tb SSD drive is still over $3000!