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I keep hearing people say how much faster their desktops/laptops are after switching to SSD. But then when I ask them what do they use SSD for, the answers are always "booting".

Not trying to start a flame war here. I use SSD for my database server and it makes a huge difference. A single SSD can replace a 10 drives RAID 10 and is actually both much faster and MUCH CHEAPER.

But I just can't think of a usecase for desktops where SSD could make a similar impact. Sure it's kinda nice to cut boot time down from 40 seconds to 10 seconds. But is it that big a deal?

Would love to hear how SSD improves your desktop performance.

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You have clearly never used virtualization software on a laptop. –  Daniel Beck Jan 6 '11 at 18:35
This is not a discussion forum. –  Diago Jan 6 '11 at 18:51
The speed at which programs and games load is also significantly increased. If one can afford it, why not have everything happen faster on a computer? You could ask the same about multi core processors.. –  Jay_Booney Jan 6 '11 at 18:52
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closed as not constructive by studiohack, Diago Jan 6 '11 at 18:50


2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Yes, it is a big huge deal!

It's not just those 10 or so seconds for booting! There's also time saved form various crapware which is needed on desktop systems.

I few weeks ago I replaced HDD with an SSD on a laptop which had drivers for several network printers installed, one note start up application, Nokia phone drivers, GTalk program, Adobe Acrobat update and quick start and so on. All those things take AGES to start, but are unfortunately needed for user. SSD took total time needed for laptop to become usable from 7-8 minutes down to 1-1.5 minutes!

Also, SSDs are great if you're overclocker or if you use several operating systems or if you need to restart computer often for any reason.

It's not bad to wait a minute or so for computer to start if you plan to use it for several hours, but if you need to quickly change operating system or if you are tweaking settings, those tens of seconds do matter.

There are also improvements visible if you need to search a lot or if you have large amount of mails. Since I moved to SSD, searching though gigabytes of mails is really much faster now than it was before.

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SSD can be one of most significant performance enhancements done for any system. Everything that is I/O related is faster, that includes launching applications, which application (if you're using the SSD for the page file as well), and even browsing the web, since the caching is faster as well. For a system that is waiting on the hard drive for any amount of time, then a noticeable performance increase when switching to SSDs.

As fast as RAM and processors have gotten, the hard drive hasn't improved any in the last 12 years. Throughput for the most part isn't faster, meaning your hard drive is still the bottle neck for all that great hardware you paid for.

Another benefit for laptops, switching to SSD means that it's faster to do a cold boot and get up working again than it is to hibernate, depending on how much RAM the laptop has. Which has several benefits, including having a "fresh" system to work with rather than starting up your last session.

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Only the very expensive SSDs have super fast write times, so the cheaper more common SSDs read fairly fast but are not much faster than spinning rust when it comes to writes, the other half of the I/O –  Moab Jan 6 '11 at 18:50
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