RichVR
21
Not a fan of Seagate. I never had problems with a Hitachi drive. WD is my usual purchase though.
Seagate was great until several years ago when they went to cheaper fab and dropped their excellent warranties. I’ve been a fan of Western Digital Caviar Black’s for gaming and primary HD use, and the “Green’s” for mass data storage and backup.
Yep.
I bought this Dell computer 3.5 years ago, and the first thing I did was add a WD 2TB Black for all my storage ($189 at the time). It’s still perfect.
On the other hand, the Seagate 1.5 TB 7200 rpm drive that came with the machine is still running great as well.
Never a problem with either of them.
When faced with this kind of stability and reliability, it’s been difficult for me to justify upgrading to SSD, much as I’d like to. If it ain’t broke and all that.
Of course, I’ve to this day never personally experienced the speed of an SSD. I’m sure if I had, I’d likely switch in a minute.
My next computer will have nothing but SSDs I’m sure, if this one ever dies, but the damn thing still runs like new, and still plays every game I install on it (after 3 video card upgrades). Old tech FTW!
You really, really would. You should switch right now.
It would be smart to go to an SSD for the operating system drive (and I probably will for my next system), but for everything else I’d just rather have the space. I never want to go back to the bad old days of having to skimp on storage space.
RichVR
26
The improvement of an SSD is so amazing you’ll wonder why you waited to make the switch.
Oh, I know first hand, because a nearly 4-year old HP Windows 7 laptop I bequeathed to my dad a couple of months ago was quite sprightly with a 160GB SSD. It’s just not nearly enough storage though for a main rig, and I’m not a bazillionaire to be able to afford a couple of terabytes of SSD storage.
Ssds are hugely overrated.
It does speed up boot time a lot if you put your OS on one, and i do recommend getting a small SSD for your OS.
However the effect on gaming is a mixed bag. Some games will get some boost out of it (mainly in loading speed), but for most games i was unable to notice much, if any, difference between an ssd and my black drive.
If you have the money, small ssd for OS and a 500gb/1tb ssd for games (benefit isn’t huge, but it is there). Everything else on blacks.
RickH
29
Yeah, it feels mandatory once you get used to how well Windows performs on an SSD.
RickH
30
That said, the OS on SSD / games on the platter drives combo makes the most economic sense. I use a 256gb SSD for my OS & non-game software and there’s plenty of room. The only game that stays on the SSD is WoW, which experiences huge benefits in loading times. Media, Steam & other stuff lives happily on the big multi-TB drives.
I’ll say that as a guy who only ever shuts down his PC before long vacations or doing major storms, and also never closes his primary browser or media player windows except at those times, that an SSD feels a little overrated. Sure, Word opens a little faster when it’s time to work on my Pathfinder campaign GMing notes, but I almost never experience its primary benefits. And honestly, when I originally clocked it, it knocked me down from a total of a 2:30 from “power button” to “all startup programs/tasks completely loaded” to something like 1:30. Which, you know, is faster, but it’s still a “walk away and go piss” sort of experience.
You are literally the only person I’ve ever seen saying that.
For me, personally, in terms of a noticeable speed increase for everyday tasks, the SSD was the largest computer upgrade I’ve ever made. That includes going from a 286 to a Pentium.
That sounds to me like you’ve got an old windows install with loads of cruft. Fresh install time!
Hang on, his time is from power switch to ALL PROGRAMS LOADED, not to the login screen. He might have a ton of stuff loaded. (Oracle database, WebLogic server…hang on, this isn’t my work machine…)
pg1
35
I think SSDs are hugely over rated as well. The main benefit I get is when I start up my PC but if you only do that infrequently it’s not a big deal. The only other major changes I’ve seen in my use is when I had to double install Win7 (trial->full) with an upgrade disk and when I once rolled back a huge amount of Windows updates. In those cases the SSD was much faster. For games the difference is slight to nothing which is my main use of the SSD.
That’s real slow still. I’m not sure exactly what my old HDD was but probably 3mins or so (2006 320gb with a 7 year Win7 install). After a fresh install of Win7 and the SSD it’s about 10-15s of which about 5s is spent searching for AHCI drives apparently (pretty annoying).
Yeah, I’ve got a very long BIOS loading screen, AHCI loading, bootloader (a quick Enter through GRUB to bypass the Ubuntu dual-boot), then Windows loading screen, then programs load. It’s a decent amount of stuff–FBackup, Pidgin, PeerBlock, WhatPulse, Dropbox, Google Drive, DisplayFusion, TeamViewer, flux, AutoHotKey, and your standard raft of Motherboard-cruft.
Don’t get me wrong, having Word open almost as fast as I can click it is neat, and any of it is leaps and bounds better than the 45-60 second load time for Office programs on my shitty, shitty, shitty work PC, but the improvement I witnessed on my home PC wasn’t probably worth the expense, in the end. I’m sure if I rebooted more often or closed Firefox with any regularity, I’d feel differently.
Heh - I need to close and reopen Firefox every few days. The memory usage drops by like 60%…
(Also my PC resumes from hibernate as quick as HDD-based PC’s does from sleep, sooo)
kedaha
38
I’m with Stusser, been messing around with PCs since the mid 90’s and an SSD was the biggest ever improvement/upgrade during that time. It truly felt like a giant leap rather than the slow evolution of processors, GPUs and hard drives (and I bought a 74GB Raptor when it came out).
Ditto, SSD’s for OS drives are mandatory in my opinion. I even switched in an SSD on my work laptop and it transformed the day to day user experience, which is pretty task-worker oriented.
Aleck
40
I’ve also been building PCs since the mid 90s. SSDs are right up there with the introduction of 3D graphics cards (we still love you, 3Dfx!) in terms of the Keanu Reeves “whoa!” factor. Then again, I reboot my PC at least a couple times a week, and run most of my productivity apps from the SSD – so there’s little if any delay or wait on getting things going.
My machine is cold boot to login prompt in about 7 seconds, and login prompt to desktop in about 4 (and this is on Windows 8.1).
EDIT: what do folks think of those hybrid SSD/platter drives? Do they make a significant difference? I haven’t used one myself.
