Yeah I personally feel that SSD's price: performance aren't worth it except when they're used exclusively as boot drives. I wish they were cheaper =p the main thing I like about them is the lack of heat/ power consumption/ noise; great for laptops. But of course if I were to get one of equal size to my current laptot it would cost the same as the entire thing (about 1000 bucks lol) which is not worth it at all...

(11-04-2010 09:00 AM)Hungry Man Wrote:  Yeah I personally feel that SSD's price: performance aren't worth it except when they're used exclusively as boot drives. I wish they were cheaper =p the main thing I like about them is the lack of heat/ power consumption/ noise; great for laptops. But of course if I were to get one of equal size to my current laptot it would cost the same as the entire thing (about 1000 bucks lol) which is not worth it at all...

Power consumption can actually be greater in some cases as SSDs use more power in their standby state than conventional drives do when they spin down. In this case a hybrid drive would offer the best power consumption as it could spin down and has less flash chips to keep awake than a full SSD.

Unfortunately hybrid drives have a ton of issues (at least from what I've seen) >.< but they're very new.

As for SSD's having high standby power usage, are you sure about that?

"Power Consumption (Active): 2.4W Typical
Power Consumption (Idle): 0.06 W Typical"
That's for a 32GB Sata II SLC SSD. They usually average around .06 or .05 W at idle.

For comparison the hybrid is .8W idle.

(11-04-2010 08:15 AM)Hungry Man Wrote:  I didn't say it would give you 5FPS for PCSX2 =p but I don't see how it wouldn't cause the iso to load faster or for you to access it?

The FPS increase was implied in one of your earlier posts. As for not improving loading times, simply because the ISO's load fast enough that moving it to SSD doesn't make a noticeable difference.

Quote:Nope, don't have an SSD and I'm not pushing anything. I just think that as an upgrade it's one of the better ones. HDDs are seriously gimped technology and drivers are still bein gsold at 5,400 rpm just as they were years ago. I just think that a lot of people don't know that buying a SSD is a really good upgrade.

That's because high platter densities help speed up drives. A 1TB 5400 RPM drive is faster than, say, an older 300GB 7200 RPM HDD.

(11-04-2010 08:27 AM)YukiS Wrote:  You say HDDs are gimped technology yet I remember reading somewhere that even the latest Intel SSDs are only good for 3TB worth of write operations before the peformance degrades to below that of a magnetic drive.

That was an issue mostly with JMicron controllers. Intel SSD's (even w/o TRIM) don't suffer as severe a performance penalty. Iirc, decrease in performance is less than 10% and even with decreased performance, it's still faster than traditional HDD's.

Of course, it's simple physics to understand why larger platters are faster, the outside rings have to keep up.

And if I implied FPS I was wrong, I simply implied that PCSX2 would run better. The program would start faster, isos would load faster, you'd see a performance increase.

Once textures are pulled from the HDD it has nothign to do with FPS so of course it wouldn't affect that. It will affect loading times though... which is what I've said from the beginning (or so I thought)

Give me an example of a PS2 game with long load times along with a save state near that specific scene/area so I can try it on both SSD and HDD.

PCSX2 isn't exactly the best example of a program that benefits by moving to SSD. It just doesn't have as many dependencies compared to, say, Photoshop for example. I don't know about you but I've never had to wait for PCSX2 to load even on a 5400 RPM laptop drive. Granted, initial load of ISO's may be a bit faster but I can't say I've noticed any difference either way. PS2 games were designed with optical drives in mind, hence, level loads within a PS2 game should be easy enough for a traditional HDD to handle without long wait times. If you have to wait even 10 seconds on an HDD, that means load time on the PS2 is almost 2 minutes and that's simply unacceptable.

hdd is probably not a limitation. In ps2 data go from dvd to ram. But the ram is only 32Mbyes. So an hdd can fill it fully in less than 1 second. Another issue with the dvd reader is the access time which is surely bigger than a hdd.