Toying with the idea of putting one in my pc as apart from my gpu its the only thing letting my pc down. I was tempted with a 120gig one as thats all I will need for a C drive, I'm an occasional gamer thats why I haven't changed my gpu as my monitor only does 1280x760? and its more than capable to run all my games at that res.

Will the SSd improve my system or will it make no difference, the original C drive I have now is a 160gig seagate.

 

It'll make a hell of a lot of difference

 

Is it just on games or will it be on everything?

 

Everything in general. Are you on Windows 7

I still remember when I got a Crucial M225 a couple of years back. Couldn't believe how much it sped Windows up.

 

Should do. Will just make it quicker to boot and a bit more snappy loading programs. Just generally makes the PC nicer to use.

If you were on RAID 0 the improvment isn't as much, IMO. But with just a single HD you should see a beneficial gain.

I remember going from single HD to Raid0 on Vista x64...wow! So a single HD to SSD should be even better (I'm on a SSD now, but I had Raid 0 before)

 

I have about 6 drives in the pc but I always keep C drive as a small drive to force me not to put stuff on it

The pc is i5 2500k with 16gig of corsair vengence. I would love to upgrade my 8800gtx as well but at this point I'm not willing to upgrade my monitor as well.

 

My windows PC has a 128gb SSD and it boots from the end of the POST to windows useable in a matter of seconds, and no noise either.

Some games won't run much faster as they spend a bit of the load time processing and preparing the next level, not just loading.

 

SSD will make quite a difference, avoid the cheap first generation SSDs and go for the 2nd or 3rd gen SSD's. Also your i5 is very overclockable, some have them OC's to 5Ghz though 4.5Ghz should be achievable with modest cooling. I have an i3 2.9Ghz and runs stable at 3.8Ghz with a Zalman Flower air cooler, runs silently and is essentially a free performance upgrade!

 

I've been toying with getting a SSD for my pc as well - QX9650 OC to 4GHz with 8Gb DDR3 and SLI GTX570s, it's the only thing really slowing it down now - but the expense of the disks is still putting me off.

 

I havent botherd with OC on my cpu as the last time I overclocked it to 4.5ghz it hung the pc that much I had to re install windows again, probably doesnt help Im on a stock cooler.

 

Yep the stock intel cooler is rubbish for OC. You don't need expensive water cooling, just a decently large copper heatsink that will fit in your case. Also you will most likely need to increase the voltage ever so slightly for the CPU and possibly the RAM to increase stability the higher you go. A decent m/board should allow you to do this.

 

aye im on the same sort of setup, and games like BF2BC showed a huge difference in game loading times etc and something stupid like 10 seconds to boot windows

if you use steam this is quite useful http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

i play alot of BF3 nowadays, but easy enough to do what the above does manually

 

Just use it as your boot drive, put anything important on there that you want (though you do have to do a bit of house cleaning now and again), ensure anything you dont need to go on there goes off to your D drive, but the boot times will be drastically reduced
Even quicker if you have a sata 3 mobo

Tony

 

i am in exactly the same boat. my old 6600 gt is fine for the reolutions my monitor is capable of. i dont play games on my pc anyway so for browsing its fine. i stuck a 64GB SSD drive as my main drive and only have the OS on it. Linux boots up in about 10 second. win xp in VirtualBox takes about 15 seconds.

 

SSD will make a big diff, did to my Win 7 64bit, however, be warned they have reliability issues. My OCZ Vertex 2 has refused to show up in BIOS after just 8 months. Sent back to CCL and they are replacing with a new one, hope this one lasts longer......

 

I think this problem is based on SSDs using the 'Sandforce' (SF-2281) controller.

When I was searching for SSDs I saw lots of threads containing tales of woe with alot of the SSDs based upon these Sandfrorce controllers...even the revised ones have issues
This is mainly with OCX Vertex and Corsair Force 3. Corsairs had a recall, and OCZ had upgraded firmware, but despite this people still appear to have some problems. (have a google and you'll see what I mean).


Thats why I thought it would be wise to just avoid anything with the Sandforce 2000 controller (especially the 2281). So I went for a Crucial M4 SSD instead which uses a Marvell controller. It may not be quite so fast (well, in terms of advertised speeds at least), but seeing I'm only on SATA2 as of current, its not really an issue for me.

 

Same here with my OCZ Vertex 2E. Just got my second replacement drive and debating whether to bother with it this time around.

First time it went after a couple of days, lasted about 5 months the second time. Made a massive difference in boot times and application response, but I just can't trust it now.

 

Intel SSD X25-M series are/were regarded as the best. We have over 4000 installed in laptops since beginning of last year and we so far have no reported failures. Not sure if the other SSD have a TRIM tools, but Intel do a SSD optimizer utility to keep them healthy.

 

Yeah I had mine running on the upgraded firmware. This time round the system will be cloned so recovery is a much speedier process (and I won't be blowing away this normal HDD install either so theres always a fallback OS! even if it sorta defeats the object lol).

 

mm, been pondering this myself, byt the number of failures doesn;t fill me with confidence at all. I still think there a bit pricey as well.

 

The reliability issues puts me off SSD.

I'm booting from Win7 64 hibernation Core i5 oc'd to 4.6ghz in <20seconds and <40s from cold boot anyway on a 7200 Sata2 hdd and everything loads up really quick, so I dont see the point for a few added seconds, as for noise there isn't much these days from recent HDD's.

 

Crucial M4 128gb SSD here in my Dell laptop and it just flies, nothing is a big ask anymore it just opens and works.

 

I fitted an Corsair Force 3 SSD in October last year. Made an amazing difference to boot times, and times to load photoshop, lightroom etc. Also silent in operation as well.

I did have a few issues with BSOD after a month, but went onto the Corsair support forums, found the latest firmware, updated to that and it's been faultless since.

 

I think thats the current 'safe' choice, same with the intel SSDs. Well, at least until the new product lines become mainstream, which 'should' be ok.

So avoid anything with a Sandforce at the 'cheap' end of the market IMHO, as its hit and miss if your system will like it or not. Statistically the majority of people are ok, but there is a large % of people who have had problems. Which for a OS hard drive can be a royal PITA....I don't like BSODs at the best of times, even if its a 20second boot time!.

Unfortunatley this includes the likes of Corsair, OCZ and Kingston. All well known brands which leave little alternative choice unless you go for the newest/lastest relases (i.e this quarter onwards).

 

Went from Raid 0 Raptor set up to a M4. System now boots in under 30 seconds from turning on

 

Anyone got any definate drives that won't crash but as said I need 120gig, I have tried to get by on a normal C drive with 80gig and it just gave me loads of grief as even with not using it it would fill up. I pressume it was with restore files???C

 

I have to admit since I'm on a p67 board it does go into hybernation where as my last board would stay on full power for 70hours if you just left it on.

 

Yea plus I always get a PSU with a power switch, as sometimes hibernation although it puts your pc to sleep (i.e cpu/hdd's/fans etc are turned off) does not always powerdown the mobo.

Basically once in hibernation if u can wake the pc from the keyboard or wired mouse, then the mobo is still powered.