I never notice any change with ReadyBoost. My PC OCD is usually just a clean desktop, and no body touching it.
Ready Boost has sped my low memory system up by 2 fold or better. Helpful when I have a dozen or better tabs open in my browser. Glad you have the money for that. I don't... And FYI Ready Boost is more of a system RAM device than a storage device. That or I was lied to by Microsoft articles again...
SSD's are cheap now. You can pick up 120gb drives for like $45 (not high end, but better than readyboost or anything else you have in that machine) and readyboost isnt for ram, its a cache for HDD. You are probably seeing improvements on a low spec machine because the pagefile (virtual memory) is using the faster seek times of the flash drive, rather than a likely slow hdd.
I haven't seen a 120GB go for less than $100, which is still pretty cheap, but not as cheap as you're saying.
Exactly. I'm too cheap to get one ATM. And since my machine only has 2 SATA ports I will need one of those caching devices that puts a HDD and SSD on one port as one volume. Other port is taken by my DVD drive. Not to mention there's no USB 3.0 so that method is out. Gotta love them AMD APU systems...
I picked up my HyperX 120gb SSD for $60 when it went on sale... I have to say an SSD is *really* nice for things that are read/write intensive... but I'd say they are drives for "work" loads and not so much for gaming and such... sure it reduces load times and can perk games up in a sense with speed ( note for games that are read heavy ) but with such small size and games becoming quite huge in size... SSD's imo are not practical for gaming. ( yet at least )
That's true. I recently got a 240GB SSD, and I split it into 2 120GB partitions - one for Mac OS X 10.8 and one for Windows 7. It works pretty well for OS X, because normal programs don't really take up much space. I keep all my documents on a separate 1TB HDD, and it even loads my documents faster. It really makes almost everything faster. It works well with Windows too, but the problem is, because I use Windows mostly for gaming, it's filling up really fast. I only have the OS, a few small programs, and 5 or 6 games installed, and I have about 16GB free. Part of the problem is that I have 16GB of memory, and therefore a ~16GB pagefile. But mainly games just take up a buttload of space. As far as practical uses go, it's not really a problem though. While I can't install too many games at the same time, I tend to only play one or two games at a time, so I can always just uninstall some games to make room for new ones. Most of my games are on Steam, so it's really easy to add and remove stuff. I imagine there's probably a way to install games for Steam on a separate HDD, and then copy them to the SSD later when you need them. I need to look into that sort of thing. Ideally, I think I'd have one 120GB SSD for OS X, and a 240GB one for Windows. However, I don't really feel like spending more money on it, and I'm pretty happy with it as it is. I will say that I don't think the SSD really speeds up games very much. All it really does is reduce load times - and it does that quite well. Playing Crysis 2, it takes maybe 5 or 6 seconds to load a new map.
I bought a 120gb Vertex Agility 3 for like £30 (so $45) and regularly see them for sub $60. They are not the fastest drives (for an SSD). But still faster than any spinning disk and you will notice a nice speed increase. I do not have 23498234 games installed. I tend to play 1 or 2 at a time and 120gb is more than enough for my OS + base apps + games. I then have another drive for storage. Also, why would you think a SSD will improve gaming other than load times? Thats exactly the only thing it would do...
I got a 120GB SATA III SSD because my mobo has it native. Boy do the speeds impress. I don't install games onto the SSD, mostly just productivity apps, but it is nice having the bulk of the experience so much faster than it was. I couldn't possible have all my stuff on an SSD- I've already filled a 2TB and I'm well on my way to cramming my 3TB.
Had no issues with it, was apparently fixed in a firmware update (I updated to latest when I got it). For the price, its hard to complain. The agility 3's arent all that fast - SATA3 and gets maybe 180MB/s (for comparison, a vertex 3 is more like 400MB/s). But its plenty fast enough for my laptop and gave the nice speed boost (mostly random reads, which spinning disks suck at)
Google it. It is basically several drives made to look like one big volume. Like RAID 1 in size volume but the drives are written to 1 at a time instead of parity striping.
Thats called JBOD, SPAN or BIG. (BIG seems to be new, never heard that one before) No need for the .'s either Also RAID 1 is mirroring. You are talking about RAID0
^ DERP! Yeah. I been having lots of brain farts over the holidays... Family and other shit will get ya if you're not careful...
