SSD - what a difference it makes

I had built a PC just for Zwift about 2 years ago - went with a 2.5 inch HDD…and boy was it a dog to load. Zwift would often take like 10 minutes to load. I’ve missed a few rides due to the lag. I finally got around to installing an SSD and want to share that loading is super quick now - and i can be ready to ride within 5 minutes when before the SSD was installed i needed at least half an hour for everything to be loaded properly.

So if you’re still using HDD - go get a SSD - it’s a game changer for me.

It should be the law to not sell 2.5" HD’s for use as the primary drive,sure as a storage drive if you need the space…but an SSD in any form as your primary drive, especially with how cheap they are now…spending a little more to get say a 250G SSD over a 1TB 2.5" spinning rust is always worth it!

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Actually, aim for an NVMe drive… way faster than SSD (if yours is a desktop, you may need an adapter card, though)

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What Year is it? :rofl:

This whole “a SSD is better” discussion belongs to 2012.

And no, with a proper PC System you will not notice the difference between a 2.5" SATA3 SSD and a PCIe NVMe SSD.

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Not so… have you examined the transfer speed difference? I recently switched my M.2 SATA3 SSD to M.2 NVMe SSD. I surly do notice a difference (though I would agree this depends on the workload.)

btw, the subject was not if SSD is better - the point is which interface is, and the answer is NVMe (PCIex4) is.

I’m a professional systembuilder.

Yes, you can measure the difference.
But you can not notice the difference.

If you have a car with 100hp and one with 800hp, you can measure a difference in speed at a racetrack, but you will not notice any differnce if you’re only doing 50km/h in the city every day.

btw. it’s not about the transfer speed. The main reason a SSD is much faster than a HDD is the random access time. And that’s mainly the same with all SSDs.

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I won’t go into my credentials.

All your technical points hold merit. So do mine.

Then let’s agree that all modern PCs need a SSD as boot drive.
If the PC has a M.2 slot that supports PCIe, a NVMe SSD is the way to go.

If not, I would not invest in a Adapter card. Mainly cause most PCs only have one PCIe x16 slot, and this is where the GPU sits.
And most users won’t notice the difference.
Not to mention a slightly older PC only has PCIe 2.0

Unless a newer system made in the last 2-3 years, they don’t have NVMe

I could go into my credentials, sure many of us could. For sure, if you have an NVMe slot make use of it and if an NVMe drive is the same price as a 2.5, go for it. Many older boards only have an M.2 SATA slot before NVMe / M.2 PCIe became the standard.

NVMe is great, , and yes most are fast, but unless your moving around large files all day long, the 2-5GB/s through put vs 500MBs of a 2.5, 99.999% of users would not notice the difference and certainly in the case of Zwift there will be no noticeable difference. As noted, workload plays a part. most of a users usage is the 4k random read / writes, OS levels and majority of all applications.

Also, like SSD’s you can get into the nitty gritty of what NVMe or SSD to buy, PRO versions from Samsung where you can get 5GB/s throughput, or cheaper lower quality Intel 660’s or WD Blue’s which do not handle being largely full very well…

The Subject was in fact, SSD’s are better, better than spinning rust.

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Seems we are all basically in violent agreement here…

:smiley:

Ride on!

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I.T - Brings out the best of us! :slight_smile:

Reminds me of back in the day, when everyone and their mother would tell someone to go buy a Q6600 quad core for their grand mothers web browsing computer over a Core 2 Duo because it would be faster…:slight_smile:

Well, Monkey Island 2 looked much nicer with the new 386DX40 with a ET4000 VGA card and a Adlib sound card than with my old 286 8MHz with EGA and PC Speaker :grin:

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Sorry for the bump - please humour someone who likes Zwifting but isn’t a tech wizard.
Apparently my old HDD is struggling with the latest version of Zwift - so what SSD should I get and can I get an external one rather than install it inside the PC ?
Cheers.

Oh ignore me - Dave_ZPCMR has put me onto a suitable SSD. Ta.