The all to common SSD question!

[Kohta]

My brother isn't very tech savvy, and i built most of his rigs. I have a Solid state in a box in my daughters room, along with my 980x parts, which i'm not ready to put together yet (still working on my 1090t overclock) i like to finish one thing before i start another. My brother lives 30 minutes away so i don't go to see him to often, but he did have one question about my part line-up, the SSD, i have no experience with them-yet. But he has 2 rigs he says he wants to "speed up" and i immediatly considerd the SSD. buy speed up, he doesn't mean game load times or Frame rates, spacificlly, he wants it to be 'zippier', like booting into windows-he is the type that shutsdown his PC when he is not using it, so he turns it on/off sveral times a day, and i believe he has it to "sleep/standby" after an hour idle.

His 2 rigs are an Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 with an Ultra DMA-IDE 7200rpm Barracuda 300gb (he wouldn't let it go back in the day!), and an AMD Phenom II X4 955 with a WD Black 640gb SATA I, neither are overclocked. He wants to know if the speed will be worth justifying the cost of a SSD, he doesn't want to put more than about $600 in a couple of SSD's, and he uses about 70GBs of space with everything he currently has installed.

I have opened the option to buy him a couple of Motherboards that support SATA II or SATA III if it was necessary for an upgrade, the AMD board i'm pretty positive is SATA II already, the E8600 rig i can't remember if it even had SATA at all, i'm thinking it did, but this was back in 2008 or near 2009 when i put it together and i used a cheap board, i think it was like $70, since he didn't care for Overclocking, and had a strict budget.

If it is worthwhile, what would you recommend?

Additionally: Iv'e still got a misconception about drive space and RAIDs. Assuming he got 2 of some other SSD, lets say 60GBs, RAID'ing 2 of them would equate to 120GBs of usuable space? or just 60GBs? From a personal standpoint i wanted to try RAID's but it's unexplored territory and aparently a crash = you have to fresh install windows, and as i'm O.Cing that would eat to much time. a pair of 60GB HDD's seem to come out slightly cheaper than 1x 128GB though.

 

[Psykoikonov]

You can get a 30->60GB SSD for a reasonable amount of money. I would get one for now and install and try it. Install it to the older system to make sure it has no issues, then install it to the newer system and ask your brother if the difference is significant enough to warrant purchasing another one for the older system. Just a thought. Most ssd's on the market today are faster than a mechanical drive in terms of both reads and writes but the snappiness comes from there comparatively very low latency.

 

[BigZ1981]

Additionally: Iv'e still got a misconception about drive space and RAIDs. Assuming he got 2 of some other SSD, lets say 60GBs, RAID'ing 2 of them would equate to 120GBs of usuable space? or just 60GBs? From a personal standpoint i wanted to try RAID's but it's unexplored territory and aparently a crash = you have to fresh install windows, and as i'm O.Cing that would eat to much time. a pair of 60GB HDD's seem to come out slightly cheaper than 1x 128GB though.

It really depends...with a mirrored RAID array, you would only have 60GB since the second drive is being written to mirror the primary drive. There are several different types of RAID arrays. This thread will help you understand more about RAID:

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=104802

 

[Efonzerellie]

I don't think Raid would even be necessary with SSD
I just installed a single SSD a week ago and it's blazing fast.
I fully load into windows in about 20 seconds and overall useage is fast. If he's a big Steam gamer, there is a program called Steam Tool Library that allows you to swap game data between the storage drive to the SSD so you can figure out what size SSD you actually need. check this clip, very informative on installing an SSD

 

[BigZ1981]

I don't think Raid would even be necessary with SSD
I just installed a single SSD a week ago and it's blazing fast.
I fully load into windows in about 20 seconds and overall useage is fast. If he's a big Steam gamer, there is a program called Steam Tool Library that allows you to swap game data between the storage drive to the SSD so you can figure out what size SSD you actually need. check this clip, very informative on installing an SSD

Wow...I'm gonna have to look into investing in one...

 

[4GHZ_or_bust]

single SSD on SATA II with Windows 7 and optimized bios, you can get from power on to ready in about 30 seconds. If you get motherboard with UEFI instead of relic BIOS, I've heard 15-20 seconds boot time.

Last time I had any computer that was ready in less than 20 seconds was a 386 with DOS 6.22

 

[theELVISCERATOR]

single SSD on SATA II with Windows 7 and optimized bios, you can get from power on to ready in about 30 seconds. If you get motherboard with UEFI instead of relic BIOS, I've heard 15-20 seconds boot time.

Last time I had any computer that was ready in less than 20 seconds was a 386 with DOS 6.22

Why doesnt everyone just go to sleep? I can come out of sleep mode on this rig in about 5 seconds.. I only reboot for updates...

 

[jason4207]

Sleep doesn't work so good on SSDs.

Both of those mobos should support SataII.

 

[Zerix01]

Additionally: Iv'e still got a misconception about drive space and RAIDs. Assuming he got 2 of some other SSD, lets say 60GBs, RAID'ing 2 of them would equate to 120GBs of usuable space? or just 60GBs?

Assuming two 60GB drives
RAID 1 = 60GB's - one drive dies, no data is lost and system can still boot. Reads are almost double but writes are slightly slower than one drive.

RAID 0 = 120GB's - near double reads and writes. One drive dies you lose everything on both drives.

I wouldn't worry about the other types of RAID's when talking about SSD's for an OS drive.

From a personal standpoint i wanted to try RAID's but it's unexplored territory and aparently a crash = you have to fresh install windows, and as i'm O.Cing that would eat to much time. a pair of 60GB HDD's seem to come out slightly cheaper than 1x 128GB though.

A crash can mean different things to different people. A crash from an OC shouldn't cause any problems with a RAID array*. A drive "crash" as in a mechanical error will cause a problem. If your running RAID 1 then you have a "backup" drive. Replace the dead drive and carry on, no OS re-install. RAID 0 and it will be the same as having one drive and that drive dies.

* During some recent over clocking I had my main drive's filesystem get corrupt during an unstable boot. It took a few reboots before fsck (Ubuntu) corrected the issue and let me reboot. I think this was while OC'ing my RAM which may cause different issue than just a CPU OC. I know I was also pushing my motherboard a lot, so I may have simply caused an error in the SATA controller itself which corrupted the file system. All the while my RAID 5 array stayed solid, which is logical since it does not get mounted until a little later in the boot process. But my point is a simple freeze here and there will not tear apart your RAID array. A very unstable OC might. OC first, setup RAID when stable.