SSD HD ?'s

My motherboard recently died on my Dell, which had a Core 2 Quad, 2.3 ghz. I thought I was happy with the speed of it until I was on a friends brand new Dell i7 with 16gigs of Ram, that thing was amazing!

I recently bought two laptops so I couldn't spend much and just decided to get a new Motherboard, processor and RAM. I got a good deal at Fry's on an AMD Phenom II x4 955 (3.2 ghz, true 4 core), with 4 gb of 1333 DDR3 Ram.

I finally got everything installed and found that there really wasn't much improvement. Where I thought I might find improvement was when photoshop runs filters. My personal test was the content aware fill, with a large selection. It is a bit faster, but not what I was expecting.

Now I'm reading that SSD drives seem to be the best way to speed up a system. So I plan to buy 8 more gigs of ram tomorrow (only $70 at Fry's..) and I want to get an SSD drive for the system disc.

My main question is will 80 gigs be large enough, or do I need something larger than that for my system drive. I have 2TB of internal storage and will use those for all of my documents, temp photos and shor term storage.

I'm having a hard time deciding if 80 gigs will be large enough because I currently have 97 gigs on my C drive. Most of that is taken up by 'My Documents' and all the stuff inside that folder..

I've found a 64GB SSD drive for $105, and the next step up is $175...

Any input would be greatly appreciated..thanks in advance and happy new year!


Forgot to mention what I'm using:

Windows 7 Ultimate, 64 bit
PS CS5
LR 3
Office 2007
iTunes

Lots of threads on this.

SSD is the way to go in terms of overall performance games in what most of us on this forum do.

Typical Win 7 Pro install is about 16GB.

I put my music, videos and documents on traditional HDs (in RAID 0).

64GB is the minimum.

Look for SSDs using the Sanforce or the new Toshiba controller for performance and value. My personal perference has been OCZ. I just got a Kingston SSDNow 127gb for a build I just did and I was impressed. I have 8 SSDs between my desktop and notebook.

To determine a good SSD size, take the size of your Program Files folder(s) plus the Windows folder and double it.

The best SSDs currently are the SandForce drives (OCZ Agility/Vertex 2, GSkill Phoenix Pro, Corsair Force) and the Crucial C300. The 3rd-gen Intel SSDs are due out in the next couple months though, and supposedly there will be a price drop with them, if you can wait that long.

On my desktop I put in an OCZ Vertex II 120GB SSD as they were only a few dollars more than 100GB. The size you need is dependent on which applications you will keep on the SSD. With Window 7, LR3, PS5, Office Pro 2010 and Web Expression installed, I am only using around 50GB on the SSD. So depending on the apps installed.....80GB could be fine for everything except your libraries/user folders. I put them on a RAID 1 pair.

toxic wrote in post #11562702
To determine a good SSD size, take the size of your Program Files folder(s) plus the Windows folder and double it.

Why double it? I say use that size, and install space hogging stuff that isn't performance critical on another drive. 40GB should be more than enough for just an OS.

For Tom though I don't know if an SSD will make much difference. Get more RAM, 8GB is a good balance. Also, filter tests are a bit of a waste of time.

Tell us what you find slow in your real life use.

An SSD on the OP (Tom)'s setup will show lots of added performance. The SSD can also travel with him to his next build.

I just rant the photoshop benchmark test and it was around 270 seconds, slower than the i7's, but that's to be expected.

I will add either 4 or 8 gigs of ram this week and I'll see if the SSD's come down in price after the new IBM versions are released.

I have no other issues with the speed, just when I'm running scripts and filters in photoshop.

Thanks for the input everyone!

I also have 120G OCZ Vertex II and am using 59GB with Win 764bit, CS% Suite, MS Office 2010, iTunes, Nero 10 and and that's about it.

If I start ffilling it up I'll RAID 0 a pair of them on 6Gb SATA ports - should be fast enough.

Now sure how you guys are filling up your SSD so quickly with so few programs unless MS Office 2010 is a huge space hog.

I have Win7 64-bit Home Premium, PS CS5 with the Nik suite, some OnOne plugins, and almost all of the Topaz suite, LR3.3, Premiere Elements, MS Office 2007, Nero, PowerDVD, Directory Opus, CCleaner, jv16 Powertools, Acronis TrueImage, Perfectdisk, ZoneAlarm, WinRAR, Canon DPP, and a few other smaller utilities. And it only takes 18.5 gb on my 60gb Vertex 2.

As for the OP's question, get the largest SSD you can afford. The larger it is, the more NAND you have to rotate through, and thus the better the durability/lifespan.

I'd personally rather have two smaller SSDs than one large SSD. I don't think you should partition SSDs, and I want nothing other than OS and programs on my main drive so I can easily create an image to recover from later.

Don't forget space hog programs can be installed to a spinning disk.

solara wrote in post #11573569
Now sure how you guys are filling up your SSD so quickly with so few programs unless MS Office 2010 is a huge space hog.

I have Win7 64-bit Home Premium, PS CS5 with the Nik suite, some OnOne plugins, and almost all of the Topaz suite, LR3.3, Premiere Elements, MS Office 2007, Nero, PowerDVD, Directory Opus, CCleaner, jv16 Powertools, Acronis TrueImage, Perfectdisk, ZoneAlarm, WinRAR, Canon DPP, and a few other smaller utilities. And it only takes 18.5 gb on my 60gb Vertex 2.

As for the OP's question, get the largest SSD you can afford. The larger it is, the more NAND you have to rotate through, and thus the better the durability/lifespan.

OK - here we go:

5.30 Gb - Program Files
10.2 GB - Program Files (x86)
938 Mb - Program Data
2.0 GB - USERS
15.2 GB - WINDOWS

TOTAL - around 33GB - so why does my disc say that it is using 58.8GB!!!

Anyone care to explain?

Recycle bin takes space, and you can delete things like the ability to roll back the windows updates to save more space.

Had 12GB of pagefile space allocated as well.

Recycle bin is empty.

I've got 2x60GB Intels in RAID 0 and love them. Not sure how I use so much space, but I've only got 26G free.

ShotByTom wrote in post #11562183
My motherboard recently died on my Dell, which had a Core 2 Quad, 2.3 ghz. I thought I was happy with the speed of it until I was on a friends brand new Dell i7 with 16gigs of Ram, that thing was amazing!

I recently bought two laptops so I couldn't spend much and just decided to get a new Motherboard, processor and RAM. I got a good deal at Fry's on an AMD Phenom II x4 955 (3.2 ghz, true 4 core), with 4 gb of 1333 DDR3 Ram.

I finally got everything installed and found that there really wasn't much improvement. Where I thought I might find improvement was when photoshop runs filters. My personal test was the content aware fill, with a large selection. It is a bit faster, but not what I was expecting.

Now I'm reading that SSD drives seem to be the best way to speed up a system. So I plan to buy 8 more gigs of ram tomorrow (only $70 at Fry's..) and I want to get an SSD drive for the system disc.

My main question is will 80 gigs be large enough, or do I need something larger than that for my system drive. I have 2TB of internal storage and will use those for all of my documents, temp photos and shor term storage.

I'm having a hard time deciding if 80 gigs will be large enough because I currently have 97 gigs on my C drive. Most of that is taken up by 'My Documents' and all the stuff inside that folder..

I've found a 64GB SSD drive for $105, and the next step up is $175...

Any input would be greatly appreciated..thanks in advance and happy new year!


Forgot to mention what I'm using:

Windows 7 Ultimate, 64 bit
PS CS5
LR 3
Office 2007
iTunes

There's some problems right off the bat. The PII x4s offer great performance for their price, but in terms of raw performance they don't match the i7s. They're more on par with the newer Core 2 Quads (Q9xxx series). Additionally, the whole "true" quad core thing really is a non-issue and is more a marketing thing than anything. It may have four individual cores compared to two dual cores, but it doesn't thread better nor does it perform better simply because of that.

For me, I'm fine with my 64GB SSD on my laptop. For comparison, I have Windows 7 Professional x64, MS Office 2010, LR3, PS CS5, and misc web and IM programs. All my files I keep either on my home server or on an external, and I still have 24GBs left on my SSD.

With an SSD, it's definitely worth researching it. What really matters with SSDs isn't the name itself but the controller it uses. It's the controller that's responsible for how fast and how reliable the SSD is. A cheap SSD might be more unreliable or slower than a more expensive SSD because of its cheaper controller.

If you can afford it, try getting an SSD with a Sandforce controller. It's the latest controller out and is currently the fastest on the market. Off the top of my head, SSDs that use the Sandforce controller include the OCZ Vertex 2 and G.Skill Phoenix. There are many more, but those two are the only ones I remember off the top of my head.