What do you think of SSD drives?

[JCB1]

about 6 months ago I bought an SSD drive and put it in to my laptop and re-installed windows xp, i was very suprised with the speed increase I got that I bought an SSD drive for my home PC

The only down side I can see to SSD's are the cost and shorter life span, what do you guys think about SSD's ?

 

[Joel~]

I have a Kingston SSDNow in my main computer and the speed difference for the large file operations, as well as installing applications, is definitely something I love. Although they do have a shorter life-span, there are a few sites out there where people have done some working out and chances are you'll have upgraded your drive before it expires unless you're writing hundreds of gigabytes to it per day. I would definitely buy another one when they become cheaper and I can afford more than 128GB.

 

[berry120]

The shorter lifespan argument is fast fading, with more and more research the write cycles are being pushed higher and higher - we're now really at the point where unless you're using it for intensive server applications it's pretty unlikely to fail in a good few years. Soon it'll probably be a completely irrelevant point because they're so high!

The main problem at the moment is of course the cost and capacity. For large capacity uses traditional drive technology is not dead, in fact Hitachi are apparently set to unvail a new technology aimed at taking hard drive capacities well beyond the 4TB mark. I daresay solid state disks will eventually replace their mechanical parents, but I think it'll be a while before they completely take over.

 

[Tommy Boy]

I think they are perfect for laptops, they make less heat, use less power, they add speed and are light weight. I'd love to put one in my laptop someday but I'm just waiting for the cost to come down. The price per GB is way out of sight right now. If I was building a desktop though I would buy a smaller SSD to use as my main drive and buy a big ol' regular hard drive as a storage drive since they're so cheap these days.

 

[foothead]

I still don't see enough of a benefit to justify the cost. Since there will most likely be a large a huge storage disk in the system, the storage space added by the SSD is pretty much negligible. This means that all you are really paying for is a performance increase, and given the speed of the WD blacks and 7200.12s, the performance increase will only be apparent during bootup. $100+ to boot a few seconds faster is not worth it at all IMO.

 

[aPanzerIV]

Good for boot drives, actuall game playing? Not so much.

Unless you find one incredibly cheap and fast, hdd's are the way to go.

 

[Indigo]

I still don't see enough of a benefit to justify the cost. Since there will most likely be a large a huge storage disk in the system, the storage space added by the SSD is pretty much negligible. This means that all you are really paying for is a performance increase, and given the speed of the WD blacks and 7200.12s, the performance increase will only be apparent during bootup. $100+ to boot a few seconds faster is not worth it at all IMO.

Given how often my laptop seems to chew through them, even when I leave it sitting on my desk at home all the time, I'm waiting, eagerly, for the price point of SSDs to drop to the point that I can do a horizontal upgrade (i.e. I have a 160GB HDD in there now, I want at least 160 GB SSD to even consider it) on the system.

I have one of the Intel X-25M (mainstream) 40GB SSDs on my workstation and work, and it's just not as snappy as I was expecting. Generally speaking, it does a great job, but it's only 40GB, so I have to be careful what I install on it. But it boots up fairly quickly, and I don't have any space problems here at work, so it's been a fun thing to try out. Plus it makes my boss and coworker jealous. bwahaha.

FWIW, Maximum PC lately has been reviewing high end PCs with SSDs in both standard AND RAID 0 configs that blow away even WD Blacks in performance. That's a given for RAID 0, but the single drives are beating them as well.

 

[lhuser]

Due to their lifespans, and people loving to defrag their systems...well they won't last much. It'll last a good year or two, but not afterwards. Pricewise, it's still expensive, but for emerging technology, I'd say it's common. Will they replace HDDs? No, I don't think so, since they are the best for longevity (providing no head cracks, bad sectors or PCB failure), sizewise, and they can read/write almost endlessly, since it's all about a magnetic charge.

 

[Indigo]

Due to their lifespans, and people loving to defrag their systems...well they won't last much. It'll last a good year or two, but not afterwards.

If you install Windows 7 on a TRIM enabled drive, Defrag is disabled. You can't do it unless you download a third party solution or force Windows to do it. Defragging on an SSD is not necessary due to file access times. I have not seen any longevity claims that match your assertion here.

Vista also works fine on SSDs.

 

[Remeniz]

I think they're a total wast of money. If you get horny over your boot-up times and pornographic over how quickly a program executes, and you have money burning a hole in your pocket then go for it.

The only benefit you get with an SSD is better access times and lower power usage, that's it. You can get some very fast, reliable platter'd drives now that will also out live SSD's. Hell, i've picked up computers off the street with 40GB PATA 5200RPM drives that still work! Can an SSD last at least 5 years?

It's a no-brainer as they say.