Is it worth while using an SSD drive for the OS?

[jdbnsn]

Just wondering if any of you have tried this as a way to beef up boot times, seems like it would help. I saw this video somewhere (probably here actually) and would love to do it, but raided SSD's is a bit out of my price range.

96dWOEa4Djs

[d_stilgar]

From what I've been looking at, you will usually cut your boot time in half by using an SSD. I love that video though. 30 256gb drives in raid. That's so cool. I can't wait for the price to come down to less than $1 per gb.

[Kayin]

I run a single 32GB SSD as my boot, and it's amazing. I love it.

Benchmarks do too.

[billygoat333]

do ssds benefit from having only the OS on the drive and the rest empty space? or does it matter if you fill the whole thing up? just curious since there is no mechanism to wait for...

[Zephik]

do ssds benefit from having only the OS on the drive and the rest empty space? or does it matter if you fill the whole thing up? just curious since there is no mechanism to wait for...

That's a great question. Also, does it depend on which SSD you use? Are there ones you should avoid? I'd certainly like to improve my computers performance, especially in the boot time area.

[d_stilgar]

There were some issues with the last gen SSDs. If you buy from any retailer now, you should be fine. If you are shopping around on amazon, do your research. You can fill the SSD up all you want. There are some issues that info will stick when it is erased after the drive gets old. This is a drawback, so don't plan on installing and uninstalling tons of stuff from the drive all the time. They are ideal for OS, games, Adobe everything, microsoft office. They are bad for media you edit often or as a landing place for your photos. Plan to keep whatever you put on there drive there.

[KiLLERMAN21]

There were some issues with the last gen SSDs. If you buy from any retailer now, you should be fine. If you are shopping around on amazon, do your research. You can fill the SSD up all you want. There are some issues that info will stick when it is erased after the drive gets old. This is a drawback, so don't plan on installing and uninstalling tons of stuff from the drive all the time. They are ideal for OS, games, Adobe everything, microsoft office. They are bad for media you edit often or as a landing place for your photos. Plan to keep whatever you put on there drive there.

Hence why they are good for OS's then

[x88x]

I run two 60GB OCZ Vertez SSDs in a RAID-0, and while I haven't seen much boot-time performance increase, once you're booted (imo, the far, far more important time, since I only reboot about once every few months..if that) it's a huge improvement over platter HDDs. I'm running pretty close to capacity (9.60 GB free right now), and I can say I haven't seen any performance decrease as it filled up.

[mDust]

There are some issues that info will stick when it is erased after the drive gets old.Yes, this is a fact for almost all SSDs (even the newest ones) but Windows 7 and it's TRIM function have taken care of this. All new OSs should have this function, so if you have an SSD, switch OSs. The current SSDs are pretty awesome right now and they're only getting better from here!

I run two 60GB OCZ Vertez SSDs in a RAID-0...Make sure you back that array up! I can't tell you how much data I've lost from raid 0s due to not backing up every night...:(

As for boot times, they really aren't all that limited by the loading of drivers and software modules. Most of the boot process is spent by the OS waiting for hardware components to respond so it knows what it's dealing with. For this reason, there will never be any instantaneous boots, but SSDs in raid 0 can provide a hell of a performance boost to games and all other software that is constantly loading stuff from it's installation location.:up:

[x88x]

Make sure you back that array up! I can't tell you how much data I've lost from raid 0s due to not backing up every night...:(

Haha, yup; nightly backups...well, they were going while my fileserver was up...I really should get that thing back up and running... :whistler:

[artoodeeto]

In answer to your original question ... I paid $350 for an OCZ Vertex 120GB drive back in April, after doing a lot of research on the different brands. The first one I got died after exactly 30 days. OCZ was terrific, replaced it right away, and I don't regret one penny of the $$ I spent on it. It's my only internal drive, replaced a Maxtor 500GB (now my external). 2nd drive's been perfect since April.

To give you an idea, under Vista x64 Far Cry 2 used to take 3-5 minutes to get into a level from the time I hit the shortcut button to start the game. With the SSD...heheheeee....it now takes (no joke!!!) 25 seconds flat. Click shortcut, skip thru intro animations, click a couple times in the menu, which takes about 10-15 seconds. Then it's only about 10 seconds to load the level, WITH every detail setting set to the highest possible. :D Only downside to SSD is small capacity, but just keep a backup standard drive as an external, and no worries at all. Looking forward to putting Win7 on it this weekend.

Oh yeah, and Vista x64 boots in about 40-ish seconds.

[x88x]

Heheh, yeah; if it weren't for the crazy fast load times, it would probably bug me way more that Fallout 3 crashes so much...I've never had the level loading circle thingy do more than half a rotation :D