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Which SSD to improve game texture realtime loading + General questions

Last response: in Storage
March 2, 2013 9:35:20 PM


i plan to buy my first ssd soon, probably either 64gb or 128gb sata3 but i have quite specific expectations and reasons for this upgrade. In this thread im looking for opinions and specific brand/product tips on which SSD to choose to address my needs.

My specs (only relevant stuff):
i7-3930K @ 4.7
32gb ram 1600mhz
ati 7950 3gb 384bit
win7 64bit ultimate

My computers purpose: Mmorpg gaming and computer graphics applications (3D, 2D compositing and editing)

What i expect to address by buying the SSD:
- In the gaming area (Mostly high READing needed): Along with a high memory bandwidth gpu, i want to remove FPS jitter and slowdowns when alot of various new large textures need to be loaded into the gpu memory and at that point i believe its the usual harddrive bottlenecking this process because there is no pre-loading time, textures just appear at random and need to be read from disk into gpu memory.

- In the CG area (WRITE is most important here): This is secondary and less important. I have more ram than my cg apps can fill but there is usually various cache files and quickly generated temporary work files that cant go to ram and need to be stored on disk, so along with high bandwidth ssd reading for the gaming, i could also use as high write speed as possible for the cg.

Ive done some googling but it didnt help me to decide. I have no previous experience with ssd and very little knowledge about them so i tend to look just at the read/write speed and various benchmarks and trying to find user experience.

There is two things that left me wondering the most:
- 1 - For example the Crucial and Samsung SSDs have very low WRITE speeds compared to the READ while other brands have it always very close to their READ speeds and yet i have found overall benchmarks where the crucial/samsung outperforms the competition by alot in both areas.
- 2 - For example OCZ Vertex 3 has like 500MBs read/write while Vertex 4 has 500Read but only 220write BUT has some 1meg buffer/cache memory compared to the Vertex3, how does that affect performance and in what way?

Note that the purposes mentioned earlier are all that matters to me when choosing the SSD. I mean i will install my cg apps on there very likely, they are just several gigs, but i wont be using this one for OS to speed up booting. I believe the little of random read/writes the OS itself needs during gameplay/other app running isnt the reason behind my mentioned "issues".

So other than an realworld example situation explanations of the two technical specs differences marked as 1 and 2 above, im looking for any kind of recommendations, tips or corrections on how to decide which 64/128gb sata3 SSD will make me see the biggest performance increase in the the first and possibly both mentioned areas.

Thanks in advance!