I'm upgrading my PC. I'm going the usual route Win 7 64-bit, new GC Card with 2gb VRAM and adding more RAM. I'm also considering an SSD HD. I haven't investigated this option at all, so I'm not knowledgeable about it at all. I need some info from you guys.

Questions: Does the SSD drive enable games to play faster or does it just enable the PC to boot up faster? If any of you here has one what has been your experience with it. Does the higher cost justify the purchase price performance-wise overall? I assume SSD drives are much more reliable, hence the higher cost.

...because my 30g SSD came with my latest kit (from IBuyPower), I can't say whether it bumped up the speed from where it would have been with a stock boot approach.

That said, it boots up silly fast, games load very quickly, and performance has consistently been good.  Also, when the NON-SSD HD gave up the ghost, it didn't cost me the whole system and force a massive restore...which was nice.

OTOH, bear in mind that you will have to install just about EVERYTHING to a non-standard drive to conserve space.  My Win-7 install and MSoft basics keeps me at ca. 8g remaining space which isn't all that much these days.  It also makes games like Tigers Unleashed (which demands a standard install path) unpurchasable for me.  Until I figured out the importance of keeping my download folder clean...nothing older than 10 days lives in there...I was seriously running out of space.

Overall, I'd do it again.

Best,

Jim

"Cyrano"

:/7)

on a side note...

Originally Posted By Cyrano

 makes games like Tigers Unleashed (which demands a standard install path) unpurchasable for me. 

Cyrano, IIRC that issue has been solved with a patch  

Originally Posted By trek

 

Questions: Does the SSD drive enable games to play faster or does it just enable the PC to boot up faster? If any of you here has one what has been your experience with it. Does the higher cost justify the purchase price performance-wise overall? I assume SSD drives are much more reliable, hence the higher cost.

It acts like a regular hard drive, only faster. It has no moving parts. The largest gain you'll see is that everything loads faster.

Are SSD's more reliable than platter drives?  Thanks!

No SSDs are not more reliable that mechanical drives. They are like having a usb key.

They fail differently to mechanical HDDs and have a set life span, although that life span is approx the same as a spinning mechanical drive. Mechanical drives are tested to MTBF but in theory do not really have a time that they will fail for sure.... a lot of this is untested because the tech is new at least in the pulbic arena

However they do have advantages in that they are quiet, not susceptible to shock like mecahnical drives .... this is what makes poeple say they are more reliable.

Put it this way... no common server I have seen is using SSD drives that I know of yet as primary drives.

DO NOT back up data to an SSD drive. SSD drives are an unknown quantity for sooo many things. I see them die all the time. 

You see like the old hard drives got bad sectors and mapped them out. SSDs get bad cells and map them out. 

SSD drives tend to have the controller fail and individual cells. A lot of drives I have seen (vertex2 i'm looking at you) just decide to go into panic mode and never come out. (yes panic mode is a real mode for SSD drives.

Once SSD drives mature a bit more they should take the lead. At the moment though a good solution (I have not tried) is intels new chipset (z68?) which I believe allows you to use up to 64gig of your SSD drive as cache just as a hybrid drive would do. For those who do not know what hybrid drives are they are mechanical drives with little SSD drives on them for cache. They cache the most commons stuff you use and make it lightening fast while still saving to mechanical HDD.

A lot of people use the SSD as the boot drive for windows while storing all data including their profile (my docs etc) on a secondary mechanical drive. That is the most common way I have seen these days. If you do not do this you can fill the drive quickly and have to re-install.

Sorry I am rambling out of time here.

Destraex,

Thanks for your reply and info. I concur with your opinion after googling SSD drives for info. I had a HD failure, and since my SFF Falcon-NW Fragbox2 is now over three years old I decided to send it back to Falcon for upgrading.  At 64 years old, I don't feel like doing hardware upgrades anymore (besides, I'm too busy cycling outside here in Florida, when I'm not gaming!) As stated above, I'm going with Win 7 64-bit, increasing RAM from 4gb to 8gb and swapping my Radeon 512mb 4850 GC for an Nvidia GeForce GTX570 1.2GB. I was going for the Radeon 6950 2GB GC, but my Fragbox from 2008 has the old chassis and the Radeon won't fit. I'm still using my Intel Duo-Core 3.16GHZ Chip though and a 500-watt power supply (another reason for either the Radeon 6950 and the eventual choice of the GTX570.) 

Even with my old configuration with Vista 32-bit I've been able to run everything I've thrown at it (ROF, A-10C Warthog, Blackshark and COH, etc.)  I figure this new config will get me through at least another couple years at which point I may either upgrade the Fragbox again or buy a little bigger model, the Talon. The advantages of shipping a small form factor PC is great as far as shipping cost is concerned, and since I downsized my living space since my move to Florida I don't have the room for a large tower in the spare room I do my gaming in.

It was one of you guys on this very forum that recommended Falcon to me three years ago. They are a little more expensive than other vendors, but their customer service is unequaled. I would recommend Falcon to anyone like me that wants a PC they can upgrade every few years and doesn't want to do the work themselves.

Thank you Destraex, that was very informative.  I can live with mechanical for now.  It' ain't gonna kill me to wait for things to happen.  Like you said, no one uses them as servers, so I will just wait for that time to come, and then we will know that SSD has reached a satifactory level of reliability.