Solid State Drive?

[Radicool]

I was thinking about buying a solid state drive, but a few questions I had to consider which I didn't find over the internet.

• 
  Apparently there is a limited amount of times you can write to a solid state drive before it wears out. Is this a problem anymore? How long do they last before they are unusable?

• 
  Due to the expense, I was thinking about buying a 32GB one to put the OS on, then a HDD for my games, movies, music, etc. Is a SSD any good for just the OS alone? Am I only going to get a faster start up time and shut down time?

• 
  If I did put a game on a SSD, will there be a FPS improvement? Or a SSD has nothing to do with FPS? (aware that a graphics card is the major factor to FPS). Will running games off a SSD make it "wear out" faster?

If relevant, I am running Windows 7.

 

[Cihparg]

You should be getting a minimum of 64GB SSD, go for 120GB. They're quite cheap, I got mine for 39.90€.
I suggest NOT to install files that you'll commonly remove to the SSD.

 

[Maker]

I'm running everything from a 128 GB SSD, my 500 GB HDD broke. I wouldn't worry about the memory corruption due to writing data so many times. Modern drives will last years with normal use.

Loading times are great, but otherwise than that, it won't increase your gaming performance. Your cpu/gpu are much more likely to cause a bottleneck.

 

[The_wand_mirror]

• 
  Apparently there is a limited amount of times you can write to a solid state drive before it wears out. Is this a problem anymore? How long do they last before they are unusable?

• 
  Due to the expense, I was thinking about buying a 32GB one to put the OS on, then a HDD for my games, movies, music, etc. Is a SSD any good for just the OS alone? Am I only going to get a faster start up time and shut down time?

• 
  If I did put a game on a SSD, will there be a FPS improvement? Or a SSD has nothing to do with FPS? (aware that a graphics card is the major factor to FPS). Will running games off a SSD make it "wear out" faster?

1 - Yeah i was worrying about that once too until i read that it should actually last 10 years with normal use. So don't worry about this because while HDD's are more reliable they do wear out more in transition speed because they are obivously moving disks. If you get a 300/600 read write SSD it will always be like 4 times as fast as a 7200 RPM HDD.

2 - I have a 128GB one and i have 11 GB left on it. I would advise you too get a similar or bigger size as you just don't know what you would want to install on it and running programs of your SSD goes, well how can i put this... Very fucking fast!

3 - Maybe a tiny bit, but generally not. It does give an incredible boost to load speed sometimes. I would reccomend it for example with games like Battlefield 3 which takes a while to load sometimes on a normal HDD but on a SSD it is done with ~10 seconds or less.

Oh yeah and be sure to check wether you have a 1155 motherboard with SATA 600 before you get a 600mb/s writing one otherwise you will get 300-something like me. It's still really fast but it can be twice as fast xD

 

[Dr Super Good]

Apparently there is a limited amount of times you can write to a solid state drive before it wears out. Is this a problem anymore? How long do they last before they are unusable?

Each sector can only be writted to a finite number of times. This is due to the destructive way of setting the silicon doping with current for permanent memory.

This makes SSDs not advisable for I/O intensive applications such as databases in web servers or for the page file. Additionally the temp files used by internet browsers are not recommended for SSD as they have short life times.

It might be a good idea to place things like the page file and temp folders on a conventional mechanical drive (small and fast) while using the SSD for the OS and programs.

Due to the expense, I was thinking about buying a 32GB one to put the OS on, then a HDD for my games, movies, music, etc. Is a SSD any good for just the OS alone? Am I only going to get a faster start up time and shut down time?

SSDs are good for games as well since they will remove a lot of annoying load time and for the most part they do not perform much writing to disk all the time.

If I did put a game on a SSD, will there be a FPS improvement? Or a SSD has nothing to do with FPS? (aware that a graphics card is the major factor to FPS). Will running games off a SSD make it "wear out" faster?

There will be no FPS improvement but loading (especially initially or in games with more data to use than you have RAM to cache it) will be greatly improved. As games mostly read from the disk they will not do any damage. Only writing damages the disk because it requires using a highrt voltages to alter the doping for permanence. Reading uses lower voltages which have no affect on the doping.

The main killer of SSDs is using them for things like temporary files that have to be written to disk with short lives and to hold the page file in a system that runs out of memory (page thrashing).

 

[Radicool]

Ok, thanks for much for all your answers, very useful.

This makes SSDs not advisable for I/O intensive applications such as databases in web servers or for the page file. Additionally the temp files used by internet browsers are not recommended for SSD as they have short life times.

Just wondering, is windows 7 smart enough to autmatically use your secondary HDD or even RAM for such "I/O intensive tasks", or must I manually set the Temp internet files usage to my secondary HDD?

 

[Dr Super Good]

Just wondering, is windows 7 smart enough to autmatically use your secondary HDD or even RAM for such "I/O intensive tasks", or must I manually set the Temp internet files usage to my secondary HDD?

You need to do it manually. RAM is used inside applications when possible but if that ever is full it will be forced to start using the page file to prevent an out of memory error.

 

[Ironside]

Personally I'd suggest simply getting a Hybrid hard drive (HHD), it's far better than a normal HDD, but has the cost a little above a normal HDD. My brother has it, it's proven to be the best choice to pick when matching criteria: Best performance for least money.

 

[Dr Super Good]

I am not sure about hybrid drives as they might still suffer from the same problems as solid state drives (they write to the SSD first before the HDD). Or do they use the SSD for read caching only?

 

[Ironside]

They use it only for read caching. as far as I'm aware.