[watsisname]

Thermite wins the thread!

So yeah, I'm waiting for the $/GB to go down, too.  And I've also heard that for regular write/rewrite it will still wear and slow down, so those are my biggest concerns at this point.

My current desky is getting prety ancient (7 years!) and had to replace the GPU once, and I think the disk and or ram may be slowly starting to go as well.  Dad wants to put in an SSD, which would be pretty awesome, but I think at this point it'd be more economical to just get a brand new compy instead and leave this one as a backup. :V

[rhettro]

I'm certainly going to get a solid state drive this year, although it is likely to be a small one. From what I've read an SSD drive under fairly hard use would last for 10 years. That's longer than I have ever kept a regular HD.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

most of the datasheets for flash ram ive used (these are smaller lower end units as well, probibly not what gets used in ssds) say about 10k cycles. but ive hered thats a very conservative estimate. some chips have been seen to perform about 100k cycles before breaking. also consider the fact that most of your data will be essentially static data. things on my hard drive that take up memory are things like movie files, music files, and code libraries (they eat space because large allocation unit in modern drives + large number of small files == a lot of wasted space), and installed games and other software. most of that data doesn't change once created. it just sits there.

Yep. With the newest memory controllers, the degradation in performance over time has been pretty drastically decreased from when SSHDs first started popping up for home PCs. This is why most people use them as a system drive. Besides updates every so often, there's not a whole lot of writing or overwriting going on once you've installed your most important programs on it.

I think having a SSHD is one of those things that you sorta have to just do. And then you'll probably understand why they're getting really popular. It's like how most people don't realize how much of their life they waste sitting at traffic lights.

[Scourge of Ages]

Isn't there some trouble with the Windows page file and SSDs? As in keep them away from each other or you burn out your drive? Or has that been resolved somehow?

[The E]

According to the Windows Team, having the pagefile on the SSD is a good idea. The cautions against doing that come from the first few generations of SSDs, where average cell life was low and wear-levelling algorithms not as widespread.

[newman]

I have a 240GB SSD as a system drive and couldn't be happier with it, or at least I started to be once I figured out that my drive and intel's rapid storage drivers hate each other. No intel driver, no BSODs, works fast and reliable the way an SSD should.

After reading a lot of arguments for and against keeping the page file on the SSD, I decided to keep mine on the drive. Since an SSD is still a relatively expensive piece of equipment (at least compared to regular HDDs), a good assumption is that it's not being put in a low end, no RAM system. Having more RAM doesn't mean the system won't use the page file, but it will mean a smaller one that is used less. The kinds of reads and writes Windows performs on it are exactly the kind of operation the SSD is good for. So maybe it'll wear down and slow down in 4 years instead of 7. By that time the drive I have will be worth about zilch anyway and I'll be able to pick up a much better one for less money. So in the mean time, I'm using it in a way that will speed up the system by having Windows run faster - exactly what I bought it for.

[Nuke]

According to the Windows Team, having the pagefile on the SSD is a good idea. The cautions against doing that come from the first few generations of SSDs, where average cell life was low and wear-levelling algorithms not as widespread.

if you have an insane amount of ram, you could always cheat and put the page file on a ramdisk

[Mongoose]

Someone on another forum I visit made a detailed write-up about SSDs and the practicalities of using them.  According to his own data how often individual memory units were being rewritten, it would have taken his drive about 275 years of normal usage for most of the units to hit their stated rewrite limit.

[Bob-san]

The issue at hand, Mongoose, is even now--not all SSDs are rated for many Petabytes of writes. Assuming you could do a constant 300 MB/s write, that's 17.578 GB/minute. 1.03 TB/hour. 24.72 TB/day. If you held that rate up for 180 days, you'd have written roughly 4,449.46 TB or 4.345 PB. That point is beyond the endurance of most drives--which are rated for 10,000 cycles of their memory cells (and thus is directly associated with the amount of memory in use). If a 10K rated 256GB drive was used, then the assumed endurance would be roughly 2,500 TB (2.44 PB). That's assuming that write leveling is working correctly and that the cells can actually withstand their ratings. They do degrade over time--the average cell may be rated for 10K write cycles, but that means that cells will go bad both before and after that 10K cycle rating hits. And the matter isn't so much when the cells go bad but rather how many bad cells the controller can handle without data loss or performance loss.

Under normal use, things should be just peachy. But normal use isn't sufficient for enthusiasts or professional applications. Even recent enterprise SSDs have failure rates several times higher than the 15K RPM disks they replaced. (And those 1.2M hour MTBF drives DID fail pretty often.)

[Stealth]

Think it would boost FS performance to have it on the SSD as well?

Just want to add - if you're worried about having to boost FS performance, then a SSD is more than likely not your bottleneck  

[General Battuta]

Think it would boost FS performance to have it on the SSD as well?

Just want to add - if you're worried about having to boost FS performance, then a SSD is more than likely not your bottleneck

While you're right about SSDs not likely being the bottleneck, I don't know how recently you've played FSO or whether you're aware of how much eyecandy and (especially) mission density has been added. Collision detection can strain mid-range CPUs pretty bad.

[Mongoose]

Under normal use, things should be just peachy. But normal use isn't sufficient for enthusiasts or professional applications. Even recent enterprise SSDs have failure rates several times higher than the 15K RPM disks they replaced. (And those 1.2M hour MTBF drives DID fail pretty often.)

I'm certainly not suggesting that SSDs are currently suitable for every application, but the fact of the matter is that home desktop users probably aren't engaging in activities that would involve terabytes' worth of rewrites per day.  And indeed, activities that require that usage aren't the applications that SSDs are recommended for in the first place.  The general wisdom I've seen is that the stuff you want on an SSD is your OS, your programs, and maybe a few frequently-played games...basically all the stuff you use on a daily basis and want to load as quickly as possible.  You then couple this with a big traditional HDD, where you put all your assorted media: music, videos, documents, etc.  Items in that category are generally loaded into memory linearly anyway, which partially mitigates the main data-access issue of HDDs.

[Nuke]

Think it would boost FS performance to have it on the SSD as well?

Just want to add - if you're worried about having to boost FS performance, then a SSD is more than likely not your bottleneck

While you're right about SSDs not likely being the bottleneck, I don't know how recently you've played FSO or whether you're aware of how much eyecandy and (especially) mission density has been added. Collision detection can strain mid-range CPUs pretty bad.

i read fs as file system. idk. but as far as the game is concerned it might affect load times but once loaded everything runs from memory. you will get faster load times, not that load times are very long even with a mechanical hard drive. freespace (even with full mediavp assets) and its mods are actually quite small compared to other more modern games/mods. but i doubt it will do anything for your framerate.

[Luis Dias]

It won't do anything for your framerate. Collision detection is irrelevant to this issue. Personally speaking, I'd only have SSDs for my work computers, which are continuously reading 15 GB sized libraries of object data for my projects. It used to be a pain in the ass when the office people thought it was okay to have those libraries in the server (and then take 25 minutes to load any project), but even after I set up a synchronized net where you have these things on the local disks, it still takes 3 to 4 minutes to load everything we want in any given file.

[General Battuta]

I'm not saying SSDs would ever help your FSO performance, just noting that 'I'm having trouble running FSO' isn't automatically a flag for 'I have a terrible obsolete computer' any more

[Stealth]

But he said FS, not FSO, yes?

If you have trouble running any 15 year old game, your problem is not your hard drive, and I will stand by that.

Running FSO may be a different story

[Nuke]

its my experience that your video card will **** you more often than your hard drive when it comes to running games on old machines. worst thing a hard drive will do to a game is make loading times really long. a 10 year old machine will easily run fso if it has a decent video card and enough ram. also if you use appropriate graphics settings for your hardware (dont max everything and expect it to run on a geforce < 7).

[General Battuta]

its my experience that your video card will **** you more often than your hard drive when it comes to running games on old machines. worst thing a hard drive will do to a game is make loading times really long. a 10 year old machine will easily run fso if it has a decent video card and enough ram. also if you use appropriate graphics settings for your hardware (dont max everything and expect it to run on a geforce < 7).

Nah, the FSO stuff that will **** a ten year old machine is mostly out of the player's control in terms of graphics settings - collision detection in big missions like in Diaspora for example

[Nuke]

theres not a whole lot you can do hardware wise to fix that bottleneck aside from a cpu upgrade. if it comes to that then its just better to get a new machine. because that sometimes involves replacing other things like the mobo and memory, and sometimes the psu (this not so much given the declining power requirements in cpus). for what an 128gb ssd costs you can do a core components upgrade (cpu/mobo/ram) to something that can run freespace. wont be a top of the line rig but it will get the job done if you have a decent video card.

maybe 10 years was a little to far. for machines that are around 5 years old, single core performance wont be that much different from a top of the line rig, as single core performance hasnt really improved that much since the start of the multicore era. it is also likely that single core performance will not improve much in the future and may even have reduced performance in favor of moar cores.

[Dragon]

Actually, the problem with single core performance seems to be caused by the chips reaching physical performance limits. I don't think it'll drop, but it certainly isn't gonna get much higher in the coming years. And yeah, 10 years is much too long. On a computer from 2002 you'd most likely do better just playing retail at max settings.