"Please do me a favor, don't state that something is 100% reliability/longevity or whatever, 100% doesn't exist. "
Granted. Bad choice of words. I should have said 'it will be just as reliable as a non-over clocked system'.
"I believe my car analogy stands, you may have 800 HP to work with, but how much "better" (faster) is it in the real world?"
I think we agree on almost everything.. but it's fun splitting hairs because you learn things. We both know the power of the engine/cpu will double, and we know that how well that power is put to the ground/tasked determines the value of the power increase.
"One certainly can use a ram drive to speed things up, though it seems I read somewhere Mac OS has certain issues with these."
AFAIK CS5 PS will still create a temp file on a regular drive. I hope I'm wrong about this, I'd love to take all my PS tasks off the storage drives other than for pulling and storing files the files. Anyone?
"Naturally one can also use 2-4 HD in a RAID configuration which really speeds things up using HDs."
Sure, but the performance still won't equal even a mid-range SSD.. and you can RAID SSD's for huge gains as well.
"Seagate Momentus XT is a very nice alternative to the SSDs, I am currently testing them now."
Funny you should mention these.
I reviewed a couple of these here, and I'm currently testing them in another configuration on a new system I'm working up. On this system the System drive is a
standard OCZRevoDrive which is screaming fast. I was considering buying a Vertex 2 as a 'work drive' for my current image files I'm processing before off-loading them to a WD Black for my current archiving. And then I remembered I had two 500g Momentus XT Hybird drives. I put one in this new system (i7-950@3.8ghz/12g RAM2002/Revodrive, x58), put 20g's of RAW image files on the drive.. and another 20g on a current WD Black. With the WD Black I was pulling roughly 70-80mbps burst and 65-70mbps sustained. On the Momentus XT Hybrids I was getting 200-250mbps for the first 2-3g's of files, and then 50-55mbps sustained after that. Basically, as I work, the first 2-3g's of files I pull are accessed at 200-250mbps which is great. Most of my 'everyday' work while in LR/CS5/C1pro/etc falls in that 2-3g window. Excellent performance for the the money.
"You're not buying what? We don't know how much the performance will degrade over time, some of the original SSDs really took a performance hit over time and we just don't know."
If we don't know.. how do you know? I've used SSD's extensively for over a year now. I did benchmarks before and at intervals after. There has been zero change since the drives settled in over the first month. What does change, loading a SSD past 70% capacity will result in a roughly 3-5% performance hit. You'll get an additional 2-3% performance hit from active garbage being processed through TRIM.. but I suspect this varies (a bit) from SSD to SSD because of different controllers and firmware versions. I'd guess future TRIM enhancements will cut this down as well. So overall, only 2-5% degradation from a brand new OS only SSD, to a fully loaded one month old SSD with zero degradation after.
Now.. if you're saying 20 years down the road this will decrease even further.. maybe. I won't keep it that long. And there is such a difference in performance between a SSD and HDD any decrease is irrelevant anyway.
"I remember the CD manufacturers telling us that they would last 200 years, well even some of my Kodak Golds are dying. At least with mechanical HD we have had a long run. You are saying the SSD long term reliability has been established? How? they haven't been around long enough I do have SCSI and IDE HD that are over 10 years old. I'm still using a 15K SCSI HD in a RAID 0 config. works great. "
Read up on how manufacturers do extended testing to determine long term reliability. It's not complicated and it's basically the same method they've used with HDD's and they've been right. I personally won't be using any storage device 10 years. Well.. that might change with SSD's. We all know an adequately designed solid state device far outlasts even the best mechanical devices.. and the reason I don't keep mechanical hard drives past 4-5 years is due to 'mechanical' failure.. so perhaps SSD's will prove reliable far beyond. What we already know is they're at least as good as mechanical HDD's..
"All I'm saying is why overclock just to overclock?"
This would depend on your needs no? Some people are just equipment junkies and they get pleasure from this. It's not for me to judge them. For me personally, I over clock to gain up to a 30+% increase in overall motherboard functions. It costs me nothing more than a $40 CPU cooler and the time to properly select my other components. Like most others who do image processing as part of their livelihood, performance gains over the years due to more powerful CPU's, faster drives, faster and more RAM, have saved us hours each week. And that's conservative. So.. if I can get a 30+% increase in my CPU/RAM/BUS functions for $40.. that's cheap performance which I'll use.
"Why not test what you are doing?"
Who said anything about not testing? We've never entered the part of conversation about 'how' to over clock.
"Why run something out of spec if it yields nothing?"
I'd agree, except it doesn't yield "nothing." It yields a 30+% performance increase in motherboard functions.
"Software isn't always coded to run as efficiently as some believe it is. Overclocking a system and then using Lightroom, Word, Excel, Photoshop (90%) would be a waste."
This just isn't true. a. All software runs it's instructions based on the clock rate of the CPU. Faster clock rates means faster instruction execution. This isn't debatable. b. Over clocking is a separate issue from core utilization.
"Getting better benchmarks does NOT necessarily translate into an application running faster."
It does if your benchmark is replicating how you task your computer.. which is exactly why reviewers run multiple (many) benchmarks when they test/review a product. So the reader can get a good indication on how that product performs for their use running their task. Personally, when I review say a SSD.. I only use two benchmarks. One that shows a theoretical maximum under the best of circumstances, and another which closely replicates how I personally use my SSD for imaging. I don't run other benchmarks more relative to gaming or other tasks. You need to learn which benchmarks are applicable to your needs/tasks. If there isn't one, make one. It's not difficult.