BTW ...my Windows Experience Index went from 5.9 to 7.2 just because I installed the new SSD ... that's how good SSD's are.
My system is fairly average :
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66Ghz ( default ... not overclocked ) Patriot DDR2 4Gb 1066Mhz Ram Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 1Gb DDR5 MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit SP1 OCZ Vertex 2 Sata II 3.5'' 120Gb SSD ( c drive ) WD Velociraptor 600Gb 10,000rpm ( secondary drive ).
Recently added a PCI USB3 Card to give me 4 x USB3 Ports.
Plays Crysis 2 very nicely ...
Love my FPS Games.
Flash ..
Can't remember what my HDD score was before I upgraded but I get 7.8. Apparently topping out at 7.9 on the HDD rating is pretty hard to do but not impossible.
My CPU/RAM (Intel i7 870 / 8GB 1600Mhz) is holding my overall rating back at 7.5 and I get a top score of 7.9 on the 3D/desktop graphics thanks to my ATi HD6950.
I take the Windows Experience Index with a grain of salt though. It's more a quick general information on how well your computer performs more than anything.
My brother and I bought our first PC back in 1982 - as Uni students so it was discounted from $6,000 to $4,500 - for a NEC APC (8088 or 8086 CPU) with 256KB of RAM, DOS 1 and CPM one and two 8" floppy disks. Absolutely no software or documentation was provided we had to wait 6 months for the C compiler and write all our own software - the first being a decent WYSIWYG editor (we only had edlin - which makes notepad look like the bees knees)!
We looked into hard drives - you could buy a 5MB Winchester for another $5,000 - only catch was you had to write your own controller for the drive! Heaviest PC I ever owned - by a very long shot. The drives when they read sounded exactly like metal lathes, but we found out Diskcopy on DOS 1 would copy absolutely any copy protected disk
Mine was an old 286 with 640k ram and a 20 meg disk running drive space compression to give me 30 megs nearly !! Green Screen ...
Dungeons and Dragons text game ....
Star Word processor.
And before that even, a Xerox 820 running CPM OS. ( I can't even remember what CPM stood for now !! ). And I used to fix them !!
Was only looking at SSD's today and wishing I could afford one. 60gb $120 is a bit small for what I would need. I would want one for my laptop to replace the 750gb drive. I reckon in about a year or so the drives will come down in price. Somewhere in a packed box I have an advert for a 10 megabyte hard drive for around $10000 to fit an XT PC.
Adrian
If you can, do what I did, get a HDD caddy for your DVD drive bay.
I have a 250G SSD and 500Gb Hybrid HDD (4G SSD Cache +500G 7200rpm HDD).
I never used the DVD drive. Still have it there for posterity.
My first PC was a TI99 with 4k ram bought around '83 for I think about $150 on special. Only lasted a couple of days and it died took it back for refund and bought a C64 (wow) with dataset. Had a TRS80 1,2and 3 before getting a 286 with 1 Meg of ram for uni. Worked as a grape packer to buy more ram, VGA graphic and a sound blaster sound card.
One of my daughters just got a Macbook Air with a 256Mb SSD.
Man that thing flies moving files and in general. I'm looking around for one for my netbook and main processing computer. Maybe one as a boot drive and one as a swap drive?
How easy it is to spend endless $$$ on PCs over the many years. I think I've given about 7 away, rebuilt 10 or so multiple times and still have enough hardware to build another half dozen if I chose! Its a shame there isn't somewhere worthy to donate all the old motherboards, RAM, CPU, videocards, DVD drives, Power supplies, soundcards, cabling and monitors too. I couldn't even donate a 21" Sony monitor - that used to be my pride and joy - to the local charity - they won't take monitors.
For a long, long while I'd spend around $3-4K per year on upgrading PCs. I only tend to upgrade video cards now every year or too. I totalled the amount of RAM in PCs around the house = 50GBs, over 12GBs of Video RAM, terabytes of Hard drive space, 10 UPS, 3 * gigabit switches, 2 routers (one demoted to be an access point), two networked laser printers (one colour, one pure black and white), two faxes, one scanner ... - okay its an addiction, plain and simple.
If I start playing with SSDs it will never end. Seriously with a 3 year old quad core CPU I don't feel any urgent need to go to an I7 - that would involve another $7K to upgrade most of the house. Then I'd be tempted to move from 24" to 30" monitors, then bigger (or dual) graphics cards. If you let this hobby get away from you and you kit out for a family you can easily spend $30K - $50K over a decade or two. I'd rather spend that on holidays or astronomy gear!
you would probably find that your local Tafe IT teacher would love you Mathew
i still remember the old - donated - machines i worked on at ourimbah university
some of them worked - some didn't
we had to combine them to get a working unit
Just a question for all you tech heads out there..
I have a Windows Vista Sony Viao about 3 years old that has a very full HD, is it worth buying an external SSD and transferring everything on to that then just using the native HD for day to day programmes like PHD/Astrophotographers Tool etc
I ask this because I would have no idea how to change the HDD inside the machine
Do external SSD's really help spped up the machine or is it slowed down by a USB 2 connection?
Graham
Just a question for all you tech heads out there..
I have a Windows Vista Sony Viao about 3 years old that has a very full HD, is it worth buying an external SSD and transferring everything on to that then just using the native HD for day to day programmes like PHD/Astrophotographers Tool etc
I ask this because I would have no idea how to change the HDD inside the machine
Do external SSD's really help spped up the machine or is it slowed down by a USB 2 connection?
Graham
The only way it will speed your computer is to clone the old drive then put the SSD in your machine and restore the cloned image to the SSD. Using software like Ghost. They can only speed it up if they are the drive installed in the machine
My two cents for the tech heads... I upgraded my MacBook Pro to an Intel X-25MG2 160 GB SSD and replaced the DVD drive with a Toshiba 1 TB 5200 RPM HDD. I use the HDD for storing large files (SLR RAWs, videos, app images, etc) and everything else on the SSD.
Here are a couple of screen shots of my Activity Monitor taken when I was defragging my virtual machine disk image to recover some disk space. Sequential reads: over 200 MB/sec. Input/output operations per second (IOPS): often in the thousands, exceeds 10000 when installing apps. My previous 7200 RPM laptop HDD was lucky to hit 60 MB/sec and 120 IOPS for random reads/writes... my SSD is often 30 to 100 times faster!
The best part of all is the scalability. Loading Photoshop CS5 on its own takes about 3 or 4 seconds. Loading Photoshop, Lightroom, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint simultaneously takes a bit over 5 seconds. Amazing... especially in a laptop!
The current generation drives are literally twice as fast (or more) than mine (Word of warning if you're planning on buying one... be sure to do your research, as the cheapest/slowest SSDs are virtually no faster than HDDs!)
My SSD was literally the single most impressive upgrade I've experienced in my 20 odd years of using computers at home.
I look forward to doing a raid 0 on sata 6gbs bus with an i7 driving it.. 1 day when i stop spending cash on telescopes
The crazy thing is that the current top-of-the-line SSDs peak at about 80% saturation of a SATA 6 Gbps bus... RAID 0 would easily saturate it (unless you had two separate SATA controllers).
Quote:
My work still insists that a single mechanical HDD is fast enough and the cpu needs to be upgraded instead. *rollseyes*
Well... if they upgraded to an SSD then the CPU would probably "need" to be upgraded ;-)
The funny thing is that since getting an SSD, my computer actually runs HOTTER than ever before - because the CPU and GPU are no longer sitting idle during batch processing.
Seriously though, you could demonstrate to your work that the HDD is the bottleneck (and not the CPU) by profiling a typical task using Activity Monitor (Mac) or Task Manager / Performance Monitor (Win). Then again, I've had people argue to my face that their CPU is "too slow" even when I showed them the utilisation graph that stays below 10%
So if my motherboards only support SATA2 and there is only one PCI Express connector - so I can't add in PCIe SATA 3 converters - is there much point considering SSD or should I wait until I upgrade motherboards?
Recently one of my mates bought himself a very nice gaming rig and for the storage system he uses a 60GB SSD in conjunction with a 1TB HDD set up in a RAID type cache mode.
Simply put, the SSD drive is used as a cache for the most accessed blocks of data and the more he uses the computer the faster the load times get as the system puts more and more of the most used data onto the SSD.
He's said that initially the PC would boot with a normal speed but now it really flies at boot-up and with program start up times.
The system is called Intel Smart Response Technology and you need a specific mobo and chip-set for it but I reckon if you are going to invest in a new PC soon it's definitely something to look into.
