World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

[Arvine]

How can you NOT want an SSD?! It is the single most noticeable upgrade you can do. I mean... you can sit there with your silly mechanical 55MB/s drives... or pick up something with virtually no seek time and transfer rates of 280MB/s or even higher if you want to go nuts. OCZ Z-Drive = zomg orgasm. We're talking 1.5GB/s+ with those.

But yes, I am terrible if you want me to build you a budget rig... It just does not compute. If you're saving money, you would spend more to save more when it comes to some of this stuff. If you're like Dave, you need to buy awesome stuff because you only will upgrade every 15 years.

[FirstBlood]

But really a SSD will just make your games load faster rather than actually improving in-game performance, right?

[Chux]

It's a fast drive, that's about it.

[dave is ok]

I've installed everything in a computer except for mobos and fans, I think. Those two still scare me. They involve screws.

[Chux]

Mobos are simple, it's just screwing into the case. Fans, same thing. CPU's make me flip out since that's like THE computer, and usually the more expensive part.

[Arvine]

void rant();
{

An SSD does improve performance. If you're ever running around WoW or any game and you get a pause/stutter, it's being caused by the hard drive normally. You don't get any of that with a good SSD. You also don't defrag them, there is no need and it causes more harm than good.

I had an argument with a classmate the other day about SSD's vs. a WD VelociRaptor. He was all set that the Raptor was a better drive. I proved him very wrong in just a few minutes. The only part he won was $/GB ($2.5 vs $0.60).
Compare this: The VelociRaptor is a FAST hard disk. Yet it still has a seek time between 4.2-4.7ms. Your "regular" 7200rpm hard drive will take it's jolly old ~8.9ms to find your data on its platters. Take an OCZ Vertex 2 and you're down to a seek time of <0.1ms, also couple the fact that the drive uses 1/2 - 2 watts at most with no moving parts and you're left with a slightly cooler and quieter system.

Yes you are living on borrowed time with MLC based SSD's... but honestly, you will replace it before it dies anyways. If you are running Win7 with a newer SSD, it has built in wear-leveling to distribute the writes evenly across the drive. Writes are what kill those drives. Instead of the MTBF for writes being 1,000,000+ with magnetic storage or SLC SSD, you get ~50,000 - 100,000+. No one really knows how long these things last because no one has had a significant number fail from excessive writes.

Basically, to kill an MLC SSD you would need to write to it at full speed non-stop for 5-6 years to complete all the write cycles. SLC would be tens of years.

SLC was vastly ahead of MLC in terms of speed until recently. MLC drives are now pushing the limits of SATA3.0 bandwidth.

Also, SLC = Single Layer Chip, MLC = Multi-Layer Chip. You can see why SLC should be faster and more reliable because each bit size of the chip has only one state, 0 or 1. With the MLC you have multiple bits in each bit-size area and extremely excessive writes over a particular area make it "hazy" and unable to read the lower layer writes.

Buy one... two... Raid0 two Vertex2's = zomg fast. Who was that shaman in the guild for a short time? Redhotz or something? Crazy bastard had 4 SSD's in raid 0. Back then it would be the same speed as two Vertex2's now. I could only imagine the insanity of 4 of the new drives pushing 1GB/s+.

return(0);
}

[Chux]

Shut up, Donald.

[George]

When I do a new build in two years I will probably consider getting an SSD or whatever Sci-Fi holographic memory bullshit they have by then. Right now I'm pretty comfortable with my arcane moving parts.

[general_tao]

^ IBTN, same, when I upgrade, I might just grab a 100GB SSD for windows and my games, but they are way too expensive right now.

[dave is ok]