To SSD or Not to SSD?

Does anyone have any experience regarding installing Guild Wars to an SSD? I've been hearing a lot about them lately, especially in regards to gaming. I have a friend who plays City of Heroes, and he got a (used) ioDrive and swears by it.

I know OCZ, Intel, and ioXtreme make the ioDrives I think, but they're all between $250 and $895 a pop! Are they really worth that amount of cash? What exactly is it about the game that they improve? Is it just load times between zones?

for most games, it's just load times.

for GW, it might actually improve performance in some cases. this is because GW has a tendency to empty vRAM at random intervals, which results in the game having to re-cache all the textures needed. having a really fast drive can potentially lessen the performance hit from that. other than that, GW tends to be extremely frugal with memory usage, which means it won't preload textures until the objects actually show up (you'll notice this the first time you meet your opponents in any pvp map, as they come into radar range). this will again result in a performance hit, and again, SSDs can potentially lessen it.

however, these are very minor issues, and not really worth spending the money for.

get it only if guildwars isnt the only game you play pvp seriously in.

Once you've used a solid state drive, you'll never go back. Whether you play GW or not.

I got a 30GB OCZ Vertex. It's small, but comparitively cheap. It has Windows and my "static" applications (about 8GB, quick and easy to back up using drive imaging software). Windows boots deliciously fast, my applications start up like lightning. I'm keeping all my photos, music, etc on a big old hard drive until big SSD's become affordable.

I recently added GW to my SSD. Startup, and zoning is very noticably faster. I am often first into a map, but not always (some people have better internet connections).That's it. It's probably not worth the cash just for that, but the boost to overall system performance is soooo sweet... makes using other PCs feel like wading through treacle.

Well, I'm actually also playing SWGEmu too right now, and I also do real-time video editing and graphic design, which is why I was also entertaining the thought of getting one of the higher-end SSDs like the Intel X-25M... but if I got an SSD, I'd be gettign it for pure performance, so would it be worth waiting for the ioXtreme? It's (finally!) listed at Amazon, so it should be right around the corner, right?

Can you boot from a PCI-E storage device?
If not, you will need to put your OS on a different disk....may be beneficial just to go with a SSD instead

I dunno but that ssd you listed...sold out at newegg in a very, very short time.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...A%20II%20 MLC

there was a shell-shocker deal on it today.

Intel X-25M isn't really high-end these days, it's the standard.

High end is an SLC SSD (eg. Intel X25-E, OCZ Vertex EX etc) or the ioExtreme you mentioned, OCZ Z-Drive, etc. If your work involves hours of disk-crunching every day (sounds like it does), then the high-end ones are worth it. Bear in mind your motherboard/chipset will need at least 4 PCIe lanes free to use an ioExtreme, after your graphics card(s) and any other PCIe cards you might have.

But for most home users... SSD's are developing so fast, performance keeps increasing dramatically, and prices keep falling. Until things stabilise, one of the small cheap modern SSD's might make more sense - you can get most of the benefits without breaking the bank, until:

a) SSDs are both big and cheap, and

b) we have disk controllers that aren't instantly saturated. (Today's entry level SSD's can almost saturate existing 3Gbit SATA controllers, high-end ones could already saturate 6Gbit SATA which isn't even available... that's why we're seeing SSD's mounted on PCIe cards), and

c) We have OS's and file systems that make the most of SSD's without manual tweaking (OS's are largely geared up to work around the shortcomings of spinning disks)

Sweet, thanks for all the input guys. At the moment, as far as I know, you can't boot from any of the high-end PCIe devices... but booting isn't really an issue for me anyways; I've been running Ubuntu for over a year now, and the few seconds booting from an SSD would save me once every several months isn't really worth it.

Besides, I figure if I just keep my OS on the HD and boot from that, I can lengthen the lifespan of the SSD, right?

I think for now I'm gonna wait a little longer for the ioXtreme. If it's not out by the end of the month though, I'll have no choice but to settle for one of those slower OCZ Vertexes Hissy mentioned.

Having the OS running off of a SSD is one of the biggest benefit of having an SSD, in fact it's likely the single biggest and best reason to get one.... having an SSd and not installing the OS on it is like buying a Ferrari and never driving over 30mph in your driveway....

i have been running Ubuntu 8.04 off an MMC/SD card with ext3 in an EeePC 900 and while booting speed very nice (no point using the readahead script) there are issues...

Writing is very slow. I've switched the IO scheduler to deadline which helped a tiny bit but when it happens you notice. Worse still, when using firefox 3 the window seems to go out to lunch periodically for tens of seconds. Looking at top when this happens shows the system gobbling up lots of IO.

Suspend to RAM is a filesystem killer in this setup. The EeePC implements its SD card reader as a USB device (which makes things somewhat simple). However if I do suspend to RAM and then resume (remember the system is running from this SD card) it seems I will guarantee corruption (although I might not notice until I reboot). Parts of the filesystem simply seem to turn into zeros and the whole experience is quite terrifying. It's hard to know if it's the EeePC, the SD card or the kernel.

Geeks

If you'd like some "lite" (Read: 27 pages) reading, you could always check out the fantastic article by anand over at anandtech on SSDs.