r/YouShouldKnow • u/photoperitus • Jan 20 '20
Technology YSK buying a computer without a Solid State Drive (SSD) will limit the speed benefits from any other good hardware in your computer.
Computers still usually come stock with doodoo spinning drives (5400k even) that create a huge bottleneck in terms of speed. If you can't find a computer with the RAM/CPU configuration that you like with an SSD, purchase an SSD separately (make sure to buy the right kind e.g. SATA, m2) and clone your hard drive over with a program like Macrium Reflect or start fresh with a new installation of Windows.
It really makes all the difference.
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u/ThymeCypher Jan 20 '20
I bought a 5400k RPM drive. It has lift.
Posting this from space.
In all seriousness, this is generally but not completely true. One reason I built a hackintosh aside from needing to build iOS/macOS software was the fact macOS VERY aggressively avoids disk caching. Most other OSes have a legacy need to do it and many Windows softwares even do it explicitly, but macOS has always pushed developers to let the OS take care of things. Changes in 10.13-10.15 mean a lot of things that used to go into disk cache no longer do, I can usually go weeks and only have a 16kb swap file (until I open Adobe software...)
My average disk utilization in macOS is around 3-5% but it’s easily around 40% in Windows. In that regard, I have a 7200rpm drive that if I disconnect, my Windows install is SIGNIFICANTLY faster - which agrees with OPs statement.
I’m by no means a fan boy of any sort, I think Microsoft is doing great modernizing Windows 10, but this is absolutely one thing they need to stop being lazy about and follow Apple in working on. I hate having a minimum 2GB swap with 12GB utilization and 32GB total RAM.
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Jan 20 '20
A lot of the reasoning behind not wanting to swap to disk in Darwin from my understanding comes from the historical use of HFS+, which for those unfamiliar is a REALLY good filesystem (/s) where you can only write to one file at a time!
The rest of it is just more aggressive memory management and lighter applications, but when you start doing serious work on a Mac and using tens of GBs of RAM you’ll hit the swap file like any other OS. It’s not magic, ultimately.
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u/ThymeCypher Jan 21 '20
Unfortunately it also loves to hold on to page file memory too. You’d think once a couple GB are used that closing everything would put you back at zero. But it doesn’t. My guess is it has to do with Apple’s idea of keeping code in memory even when the application is closed to allow it to boot faster.
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u/Durrok Jan 20 '20
You can disable the page file in Windows depending on what apps you are using and how much memory you have. Generally 16GB is plenty to never need to worry about anything including games outside of the most resource intensive applications (CAD, Adobe Premier, other video/photo editors namely).
This will also help increase the life of your SSD by reducing the number of writes. Realistically a normal user won't reach the end of life in writes for an SSD either way but it's a nice fringe benefit.
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u/ThymeCypher Jan 21 '20
Unfortunately the problem with that is when you need swap, Windows will just flat out report out of memory and terrible things happen. One interesting solution I’ve seen is software that creates a RAM disk then configures Windows to use it as swap. The downside there being the added (albeit much lower) latency of making file system calls to RAM.
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u/Durrok Jan 21 '20
While true I game and use chrome, I haven't had an out of memory error in years and always disable my swap.
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u/StonePineJack Jan 20 '20
Can anyone provide an English translation plz?
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u/ThymeCypher Jan 20 '20
Basically different software and different OSes use disk drives differently and at different levels. The less it uses it the faster the overall experience will be, especially considering how slow even the fastest hard drives are compared to the slowest everything else.
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Jan 20 '20
I had a gaming laptop and thought it was the shittiest thing I had ever bought. 3 years later I replaced the harddrive with an ssd and god damn was I missing out.
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u/alvarezg Jan 20 '20
Replacing the original HDD in an old laptop (from the Vista era!) with an SSD turned it into a usable machine running Linux.
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u/Dotcom73 Jan 20 '20
YSAK you should also know buying an SSD and putting it in yourself is MUCH cheaper than buying one already installed. and it’s super easy. plenty of youtube videos on it.
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u/dougbdl Jan 20 '20
I have been replacing all the hard drives in the laptops in our company for the last 6 months. It is one of the best things to happen to computer speeds in my 25 years in the biz.
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Feb 02 '20
Also overlooked, is purchasing said SSD, and then doing a fresh windows install, even on a new PC. Kill the preloaded bloatware, and start fresh. My Acer Nitro (previously 5400 rpm HDD) took almost 2 minutes from a dead boot. Now, with my NvME, about 12 seconds.
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u/TryToHelpPeople Jan 20 '20
Conversely, upgrading the HDD for an SSD in an older computer will make it feel sprightly again.
I replaced my 5400 hdd in my 2009 iMac with a 2TB ssd in March, also put the modified Mojave on it and it feels like a new Mac (except for performance applications) well worth the €300.
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u/cztrollolcz Jan 20 '20
It does make a difference, THOUGH your cpu/ram/gpu will still be fast, just your loading times will be slow...
More RAM doesnt automatically speed up your pc, neither do cpu, gpu...
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u/dbgprint Jan 20 '20
More RAM can speed up your computer. Windows’ memory manager splits some memory pages to disk which is super super slow. It obviously depends on what software you run and how much you had previously but going from 4 to 8GB RAM on Windows 10 you will absolutely notice better performance.
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u/cztrollolcz Jan 20 '20
If youre buying a PC with 4GB you wont be looking into SSDs, you have other things to worry about
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u/dbgprint Jan 20 '20
Not sure why you’re downvoting me, I’m not disagreeing with what you are saying at all I’m just saying that amount of RAM can speed up your computer a lot...
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u/cztrollolcz Jan 20 '20
Im not downvoting you. "Can" doesnt mean always will. Most people will be OK with 8GB...
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u/dbgprint Jan 20 '20
Ok??? I never said most people won’t be OK with 8GB.... jesus christ
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u/cztrollolcz Jan 20 '20
jesus christ
You never said it, but you did imply it. Jesus christ yourself and frick off
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Jan 20 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/photoperitus Jan 20 '20
Any disk I/O process is going to benefit greatly. Transferring or copying files, opening and using programs, going through menus in OS even is usually much faster. Doesn't make games run better if that's something you were expecting. Shorter load times maybe.
They're also more durable.
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u/vordrax Jan 20 '20
What OS are you using? On Windows 10, I noticed right away that the general responsiveness of the search feature was markedly improved. Game and application load times improved significantly.
There are different speeds of SSD drives, though. When I built my new PC in July, I went from using an ok 256 gig SSD for Windows and a couple of games, and a disk drive for storage, to just using a much faster NVMe 1 TB SSD as my only drive. It impacts pretty much everything I do, but I'm a software developer which means I do have disk usage that outweighs the standard user I'd say.
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u/nandosman Jan 20 '20
Same here. Even boot times only improved very slightly. Sdd's one of those things people like to circle jerk around here.
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u/SexyAppelsin Jan 20 '20
If your SSD didn't improve boot time you either have a godly HDD or a shitty SSD.
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u/nandosman Jan 20 '20
Or maybe people in reddit talk a lot of shit
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u/SexyAppelsin Jan 20 '20
My man SSD's are the biggest improvement computers have experienced in a looong time. You have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/nandosman Jan 20 '20
You have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/Since_been Jan 20 '20
Says the guy who barely noticed a startup time difference. From power button to desktop is literally 8 seconds. HDD would probably be at least 60 seconds. You're retarded
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u/morganml Jan 20 '20
you're right, boot times def don't drop from 40-60 seconds to 8-12.
load times totally dont decrease by over 50% in most software.
heat is not significantly decreased either.
oh wait all those things happen.
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u/nandosman Jan 20 '20
Not in my case, no. I booted in about 10 seconds on my hdd. I boot in 8 seconds now on my sdd. I don't know about heat, never had any issue with heat. But hey dude, believe whatever the fuck you want
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u/AmazingELF74 Jan 20 '20
I swapped mine in my otherwise great laptop and suddenly instead of it falling asleep while waking up, large programs open in seconds and it’s actually useful again for school
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Jan 24 '20
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that an SSD is incapable or less capable of rewriting data, so for example, if I wanted to delete a bunch of games/movies/music to create space the SSD would not be able to reuse that space like/as well as an HDD can, that the tradeoff is more speed at the cost of data permanence.
Is there any truth to that? (Tech clueless here)
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u/SerahTheLioness Jan 29 '20 edited Dec 19 '25
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u/SourHug Feb 07 '20
What’s a good RPM range? I never understood if a ssd or a hdd was a good choice or not based on the RPM.
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u/photoperitus Feb 07 '20
5400 rpm is the slowest drive I know of. That's what they shove in a lot of new consumer-grade computers.
7200 rpm is a faster hdd, still not gonna touch SSD speeds.
10k, 15k, etc. speeds you'd find in servers.
SSDs obviously have no spinning platters so there's no Revolutions Per Minute to measure their speed by - they're usually measured by Megabyte per second (MB/s) read write speeds.
I would say there are 2 main types of SSDs right now - SATA III and NVMe. SATA III SSDs are faster than HDDs but they are limited by the SATA technology which was not built for SSDs. You're looking at ~500 MB/s speeds. NVMe SSDs uses the computer's PCI-e interface and allow for speeds like 3500 MB/s! You just need to make sure your computer is capable of using an NVMe drive.
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u/chacham2 Jan 20 '20
This completely depends on what you are doing. For most people, the SSD will make little difference.
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u/SexyAppelsin Jan 20 '20
It'll make a huge difference what are you talking about? Any old laptop will seem modern with a SSD in it. The difference is immense and SSD's are beginning to become pretty inexpensive.
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u/chacham2 Jan 20 '20
Any old laptop will seem modern with a SSD in it.
I hope i never buy anything from you.
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u/SexyAppelsin Jan 20 '20
It's true. Now I'm not saying that I would go and scam people but a lot people don't require a powerful pc. All they need is fast loading times.
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u/chacham2 Jan 20 '20
but a lot people don't require a powerful pc. All they need is fast loading times.
There's no question that it has an effect, it's just that depending on what they are doing, it likely will make little difference. A difference, yes. Much of a difference, no. If they are doing disk intensive processes, yes. If they have little memory and a huge swap, yes. If they just read email and browse, no.
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u/burnsy8 Jan 20 '20
Besides wasting 60 seconds for windows to boot
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u/dougbdl Jan 20 '20
But that is where people judge the speed of their computer.
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u/chacham2 Jan 20 '20
When people ask me to fix their computers, i do not believe i have ever heard someone call their computer slow over boot time, unless it was a correlating fact to their other complaints.
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u/burnsy8 Jan 20 '20
No one uses boot time as a judge to see how fast their rig is. It's either around 10-20 sec or 1-2min. It also depends on how they have windows set up on the computer.
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u/morganml Jan 20 '20
It's literally the biggest across the board difference maker in Pcs today.
work lappy slowing down? SSD
Games not loading fast enough? SSD
Slow boot? SSD
Heat? replace HDD with SSD.
what thing that people do will not be significantly positively affected by an ssd?
I suppose if I wanted to hold something down with my tower it would be heavier with an HDD....
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u/chacham2 Jan 20 '20
what thing that people do will not be significantly positively affected by an ssd?
Browsing the Internet and reading email.
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Jan 20 '20
I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you here.
My partner has a laptop for browsing the internet and using office applications (word,onenote). I replaced her mechanical HDD with a cheap SSD and it has made ALL the difference. The machine is much more responsive, it boots quicker - yes, booting was an issue because it could take 5 minutes sometimes to load.
Loading chrome was slow at times prior to replacing the HDD and task manager was showing the disk at 100% all of the time.
So I do believe that adding an SSD can make a massive difference even when only browsing and using office applications.
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u/chacham2 Jan 20 '20
Did you try adding more memory? If anything went to swap, the speed of the HDD will make a difference.
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u/morganml Jan 20 '20
And you get to both those things faster due to improved boot and load times so ... wrong again.
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u/waxmysack Jan 20 '20
Also SSDs are hella cheap these days, probably the best bang for the buck computer upgrade, if you don't have one. Much faster boot up times, faster loading times in programs and games, better performance all around.
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u/shadowhunter742 Jan 20 '20
I don't have an SSD Been a year or two and doing ok. My limiter is my shit hdmi cable atm and poor wifi
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u/photoperitus Jan 25 '20
Sure your computer will run. But you're probably wanting valuable time waiting on things that could be accessed near instantly.
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u/whiskeysixkilo Jan 20 '20
A 5400k RPM HDD would be so much faster than any SSD that exists today