Highly considering getting one. Should I? Pro's and Cons please. I know they have a write limit, but would you ever actually meet it?
I have a Corsair 60GB for 18 months now, I haven't looked back. Having 8GB of ram I obviously disabled the page file, as it takes much space, and having it on the storage HDD doesn't make much sense. On the write endurance topic: its usually in the ballpark of 10 000 write cycles. That means with 25GB SSD you can rip one blu ray movie every day for many years. And if you are watching the 1GB per 720p episode TV series, you'll die from old age before the drive does. With the larger GB drives the write problem is reduced. What is it good for: makes loading times faster: 120 seconds to load Visual Studio 2010+ a certain project on a 7200rpm drive makes it just 3 seconds if they are both on the SSD. Compile times are faster too. For media, you can use it to record video. Browsing pictures too. Playing 1080p videos probably wont make much of a difference, since when seeking, the CPU processing part is usually way longer than the hdd latency. Hope this helps.
The SSD in my GF's laptop lasted about one year before it died from being worn out. It was not a great drive but it shows hom important wear levelling is. You need many GB of free space left on the drive all times for wear levelling juggles.
How big was her drive? I was thinking about getting something quite a bit larger than even 60 gig. I would only use it for the OS and my installed applications.
It was a tiny 32GB thing. Having 3...4GB of it available was not enough to keep it going. 4GB is 12.5% of the drive capacity. On a bigger drive you get a significantly larger GB figure. Large drives should last quite a while though none the less but I personally would use SSD only in a laptop due to mechanical stability and utilize different methods on desktops. One thing I would experiment with is RAM drives and traditional RAID setups. RAM drive costs nothing due to being just software and are blazing fast but volatile so not much use besides being a temporary location.
In my old laptop I had a 128GB SSD. My new one, I favoured for a 500GB HDD (cheaper). Wish I hadn't and stuck with the SSD. They're much much faster, programs seem to react a lot quicker.
Of course its worth it. I have a 120 gig san disk model. pros- rars, zips, transfers, booting up, quiet cons - price Theyre falling price quite gradually too. When I got mine, it was about 140 last year, now its 115. Its becoming common to find 120 gig ones under 100 bux. Brand shouldnt be an issue, I'm not gonna bother fighting a dedicated fanbase over a label, so I just got a known one with high reviews.
Just don't throw yourself at the cheapest ones. OCZ Vertex 4 for example has very high defective rate. On the other hand the more expensive ones of the same capacity and interface won't be nocitably faster that the cheaper ones. Like TmEE mentioned, you'd want to have a bit more free space, I tend to target at least 10-20GB free, no matter the capacity. I've seen many friends getting their HDDs with just 1-2 GB free space tops, and their performance falls through the roof. I bet thats similar with the SSD performance too.
from SA "This is essentially a non-issue on today's SSDs. In general terms, an SSD can be erased and completely refilled every day and survive for at least 5 years. Some tests show SSDs greatly exceeding their rated write cycle lifespan, though it also shows that some drives become completely unreadable when worn out. Data on flash memory also "fades" with time, meaning that you can't necessarily fill an SSD with data, stuff it in a drawer, and pull it out years later to read the data. JEDEC standards say consumer flash memory must retain data for at least 1 year at 30C when all write cycles are exhausted, so this probably isn't an issue for most people, just don't put your wedding videos on an SSD and store it in a safe for your kids." basically, if youre just gonna use it for your os and programs, then definitively get it. personally, I think theres no reason not too, I've had mine for a year with no problems. A friend of mine has had one for about 3 years with no issues. Also, seconding that OCZ comment, they seem to be just terrible manufacturers in general, another friend of mine ordered 2 from them last month and both were DOA. Theyre that bad.
Win7 boot already does thousands of log writes and such, you'll be surprisod to know how much stuff happens behind the scenes. When I buy a HDD I expect it to last at seast 10 years (looking at some in my home that already are and aren't showing signs of dying... yet) but for SSD I hope for perhaps 5 years. There are so many mixed things told about them, some people praise one model and one other curses that same model for dying within a year. I guess luck and work environment matter a lot on those. Being familiar with NAND Flash technology I really do not trust it, NAND Flash is very dodgy. All of those chips come with (patched) dead soctors already and offer some spare sectors in them already. One thing to consider is that when your SSD has say 1GB left and you still do lot of file moving then all the wear levelling can only happen it those last free sectors and it will wear them out very quick. 10000 is best case, where sector erase already takes a second or two in normal conditions (depending on a manufacturer) and tens of seconds in hot environments. Keep that free space available ! 10-20GB Figure winterhell mentioned is good but the more the merrier. For a laptop it is a no brainer to me, HDD disintegrates on sudden movements and shock during operation, but for a desktop I think twice. I do like 10 second boots though.
FYI the 'wear' is caused during erasing of the cell, which requires zapping it with high voltage. This leads to electrons being stuck in the dielectric layer etc, making the next erase require a bit higher voltage, and a bit slower too. Thus when the power and lag get too high, the controller marks the cell as read-only. Things that I've noticed with the Resource Monitor is that every time a torrent client writes on the HDD, the system services write to the boot drive, which is annoying. Similarly Google Chrome is heavy on the I/O, and I cant seem to be able to move its cache away from the boot drive.
Here's a thorough test on HDD vs. SSD. Go to 2:31 for a vibration test on it, pretty funny actually, but SSD owns! As for the lifespan on my SSD, 6 years and its still working.
I've been using an Intel SSD mercilessly for the past two years and the write cycles aren't even 10% used up (with 19000+ hours of power on time and over 7.5TB data written). You will replace it multiple times before it gets close to reaching the write limit. The only downside to SSD is the high price and relatively small space, but even that becomes a smaller and smaller problem as years go on.
I'd go for a small SSD (let's say 128 GB) for the OS and software and a big cheap traditional HD for the documents/data. That's how I have things sorted out in my system and it works a treat, so you'll greatly benefit from the SSD speed and maintain your important data safe. This way you'll have plenty of free space on the SSD too and it will wear out more slowly. Btw, I strongly recommend going for an SSD: the speed boost is incredible. I've witnessed all kind of speed boosts, going from a 80286 to 80386 and so on, and I've never seen such a dramatic improvement so far.
Not a bad idea, but it's only a good idea if you have the space to put 2 drives in the computer. Unless you're talking about an external HD of course.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but SSDs come in the 2,5" HD form factor, so you might just slip it into the Floppy Disk drive bay (no one uses those anymore) if you don't have an hard disk bay available - or you can put it into a CD reader bay with an adapter. Anyway, I was talking about internal disks although if you have an eSATA port you might use that as well: it is quite fast and thus suitable for a Data storing disk.
No one has them anymore =P But yes, you can always take something out to replace it with the SSD bay. If it's a laptop though, then the external HHD is the better way to go. I am a laptop man myself (no room for a tower in my poxy flat lol)
Floppies are still used for old hardware in places like factories and such. In fact there are even special motherboards that take Intel Core cpus and have ISA slots to support legacy hardware in places where it matters.
Not true at all, I still have my 5,25" floppies with Prince of Persia, Xenon2, Paperboy2, MS Pacman, an amazing Duck Tales game (I think it was Quest for Gold) and others... not counting the MSX2 3.5" floppies... In a laptop you can replace the optical drive with a second hard disk through a bit of tinkering :P I've tried using USB 2.0 external hard disk but they're a pain to use due to the USB bus not being very reliable (and windows' USB stack sux, btw) and quite slow. Firewire 400 (or better 800) has given way better results, eSATA even more. Haven't tried USB 3.0 external hard disks though.
