Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

[Bubba1235]

My "main" computer is a quad core machine with a boat load of RAM (12 gig). Normally I run with two hard drives, one smaller very fast (10K RPM) for the OS and a 1.5 Terabyte slower drive for data storage. About six months ago the fast drive gave up the ghost and had to be replaced and I decided to give a SSD (Solid state drive) a try and it's been the best upgrade I've ever made to any PC bar none!

Boot times went from 30 seconds or so to 2 or 3 seconds at most. Firing off an application (all apps are on the SSD) happens about a 1/10 of a second after I click on it. The machine is so responsive it feels like I'm swiming under water when I move to any other PC.

For anyone considering a hard drive replacement I'd give the SSD a full thunbs up without any reservations. There simply isn't any other upgrade that makes as much difference in performance.

 

[Augoose]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

What size SSD did you get and what are the typical costs? I've been wanting to pull the trigger in that direction but have been hesitant.

 

[MTboatguy]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

I will upgrade in the future, but I am still waiting for the cost vs. gig price to come down some more, compared to getting a 2 TB 10K drive for about $100 and a 500 gig for $350, I am still going to stick with the 10k drive. One area I will probably upgrade first will be my web servers.

 

[MTboatguy]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

Bubba, if I was actually working with CADD, I would not even be talking about this, there are certain instances that price don't matter, my wife would like to have one of the new drives, but she works with very large graphic files 8 hours a day, so I am sure it would pay off for her.

 

[F14CRAZY]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

I take it it's better than the SSD that came with the Acer Aspire One I bought a few years ago...so, so, so slow. Funny how my brother bought a Toshiba with the same hardware except with a conventional drive and it seemed like a normal PC.

 

[bruceb58]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

It's a 250 Gig drive (Samsung) and was around $350 but the prices have been falling like a rock the last few months. I've seen 500 gig drives for that same $350 figure in the last couple weeks.

240GB Corsair Force GS Series SATA III Internal Solid State Drive SSD (CSSD-F240GBGS-BK) $160 after $20 rebate + Free Shipping - Newegg Deals, Coupons and Promos

 

[rockyrude]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

While your performance numbers are impressive, most CAD and graphics programs load everything into RAM just for that reason. Most of these guys haven't woken up to how fast hardware has become.

 

[bruceb58]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

I have a mac book air with an SSD. I like the fact that it boots in seconds. That is the main advantage other than the fact that it may be more reliable.

 

[glenn property of pam]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

i have a alienware i7 as i considered that its proberly the last pc im going to be buying for many years. i added a 128gb ss about a year ago and was amazed at the diffrence the drive made. Another thing i noticed is how much quieter the pc tower is when im not using the storage drive. i grew up in the 3.1 windows 95 days so keeping a drive clean is standard practice but some youngsters might find this odd so a larger drive would be better for them.
i will never go back to a normal main drive and mine seems to stay around 80gb used even with the large games i play loaded on it.
To get the max bang for your buck you will need a sata III port on the pc.
All computers have a bottle neck so test your computer and see if the memory or drive are whats slowing the pc down.
Any one new to pc's and considering the ssd drive be aware that its made in a 3.5" and may require a additional braket kit to mount in a standard 5.5" pc slot also extra cables may be required if you plan to move the drive you have now to a second drive. most drives come with software that will make transfering the drive easy to understand but its not childs play especially if you wish to only transfer the operating system to the new drive. i recommend making a fresh install of windows on the new drive or getting a geek to help either way make a back up copy of the important stuff like your iboat password...lol

 

[bassman284]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

Wow. Anybody else remember when 40 megabytes was a huge hard drive?

 

[rockyrude]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

And 25ms access time was smokin'

 

[MTboatguy]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

Bassman,

I remember when 5 megabytes was huge and it cost me over a thousand dollars! It was contained on a card that you put in a ISA slot, because there was no HD interface on the mother board!

 

[NYBo]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

Bassman,

I remember when 5 megabytes was huge and it cost me over a thousand dollars! It was contained on a card that you put in a ISA slot, because there was no HD interface on the mother board!

Here is a picture of the first IBM hard drive, also a whopping 5 MB:

 

[Moody Blue]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

Wow. Anybody else remember when 40 megabytes was a huge hard drive?

At my first job, 1981, we had a "state of the art" Northstar computer system (pre-desktop era) that had a 16Mb hard drive that was the size of a LARGE suitcase. Platers were 16" diameter and there were 8 of them stacked. Huge linear power supply and massive fans to keep it cool.

Today there are the TeraByte drives that fit in the palm of you hand. Hard to believe. Wonder how long the conventional drives will be in existance?

Got my son an SSD for Christmas for his CAD workstation. He loves it.

 

[rockyrude]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

I'm not questioning the SSD is better, but if the software doesn't take advantage of it, it's lost performance. I earn my living with CAD, my main machine is an 8 cpu server with 24 gig of RAM, one of the tasks the software is required to do is processed on one cpu and in RAM. Needless to say performance tanks.

 

[glenn property of pam]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

I'm not questioning the SSD is better, but if the software doesn't take advantage of it, it's lost performance. I earn my living with CAD, my main machine is an 8 cpu server with 24 gig of RAM, one of the tasks the software is required to do is processed on one cpu and in RAM. Needless to say performance tanks.

i have to agree which is why my pc is proberly the last one i will require. years ago the hardware could not keep up with the software but now the software is lagging behind being able to use the hardware.
For cad i still think money spent on the graphics card is the best upgrade. If the new version of windows does what they promised then the amd bulldozer may be able to help with cad and 3D programs by reducing its number of cores so the software is tricked to run across more cores (this may not increase the speed as the calculations have to be split then combined after they cores so any speed gained may be lost at this point).
we have reached the max speed for the materials used in the cpu so chip manufactures have whimped out and just added cores which is great for muti-tasking but when a machine is being used for one main task this sucks. For fun i overclocked my machine to the limit of what the liquid cooling could handle and on tests it was faster but in real life use it didnt make any noticable diffrence. until the next big jump i think we will have to learn to live with the tech we have and as most research is going into pads and hand held devices it might be a while as the desk top pc is slowly heading to the bone yard.

 

[bassman284]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

IBM PC-XT Came with a 10 meg hard drive and was the top dog of it's day.

Ha ha! Yeah, I was there for that. I remember one of my professors at UIC talking about his new XT and wondering how he would ever fill 10 megabytes. It was a marvel. Most of us had not totally wrapped our heads around the concept of 640k of RAM. What are you going to do with all that?

I was talking about in 1989 when I was using an IBM AT with a 20 meg CMI drive that was giving up the ghost and I was trying to talk my boss into approving about $400 for a 40. He was leery, but I said I had to have it. I ordered it from Shamrock, remember them? Good folks.

I partitioned it 30-10 with the 10 being used for data and even then, I had to move programs on and off the 30 meg partition. I was kind of the "power user" in my company back then. I even had the first 386. It was a pretty much plain vanilla 25 mHz and within a year or so a lot of people in the plant had more powerful computers, which annoyed me.

Things changed pretty rapidly for a while there.

 

[bruceb58]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

For me, the only place a SSD is actually needed is in a portable device like a laptop or when you want a fast bootup time.

 

[bruceb58]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

Buy.com has a good buy on these on ebay
New SanDisk Extreme 240GB 2 5" SATA III Solid State Drive SSD 619659073435 | eBay

240GB for $149.99

 

[bruceb58]

Re: Best PC upgrade ever! 6 months later...

I can't imagine ever trying to bang out lines of code on one,

Considerring the top software guy at my last company used a laptop and half of the software guys at my present company use a laptop, I may disagree with that.

The percentage of software that uses multithreading for one program to actually use multiple CPUs is an extremely small percentage.