SSD Drives - Long term views

[Churchill]

Is it as resilent as an SSD? (I've had HD's die on me in laptops so I don't trust anything).

It's not a HD, it's a 50GB SSD that's used to cache your commonly used files automatically. Not quite the performance of an SSD but certainly faster than your HD with the added bonus that if it does go titsup you've still got your files on the HD.

If you're worried about losing data, use RAID and then use the SSD Cache to increase performance.

Only works with Windows 7 at the moment but as I run LINUX in a VM it's not a worry.

[Scrag Meister]

Not sure what you consider a long term view, had mine since Sept last year.

My system drive is 2 x Corsair Force 3 striped 120Gb SSDs, and is like tulip off a shovel, boots in 30-40 secs, so far I am well impressed, Office runs like a dream too.

On the rare (cough) occasion I play a game that too is very rapid.

I'd recommend getting 1 or 2.

Only stuff I can handle losing goes on it. Everything important goes on the NAS and Bluray backup..

[nomadd]

So those of you who have been running an SSD as a primary drive in a laptop for the past year or two... how do you feel about it?

Drives are getting down to under £1 per gb and I'm getting sorely tempted!

Went with a Crucial M4 about a year ago. It's been great. Wouldn't go back to a mechanical hard disk as my primary drive.

I also upgraded my computer case to one with a hot-swap hard-disk drive bay. This means I can push in a hard-disk drive and use Acronis DriveImage to do a fast, full image backup of the entire SSD, just to be on the safe side.

Also, if you do buy an SSD, make sure you keep the firmware up-to-date. Reflashing these days is non-destructive.

[Durbs]

I've gone hybrid on both my main systems.

My beefy desktop has a 1 TB HDD with a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD working as a cache drive (Z68 chipset plus Intel Smart Response app). That works nice.

My Macbook Pro uses a 750GB Seagate Momentus XT, which has an inbuilt solid state cache. Again, works nice.

I'd love to have a large native SSD 512GB or larger but they are still too expensive to make it cost effective when the hydrid solution provides decent performance.

[eek]

Always first to answer with your link Trackly - Real time analytics spam, why do you spam the board? Spam is bad and you should stop spamming the board. Spammer.

I was going to pull it earlier this week but once you complained I decided to keep it.

Especially as it seems to annoy you so much.

[redgiant]

If you are doing any dev work I would recommend it ... the performance difference is huge from a mechanical drive.

I've had my Corsair F60 in my ThinkPad T61p for about 18 months and it is still working very well. Windows 7 runs a TRIM command every so often that works as a garbage collector and frees up space on the SSD and thus keeping it running quick. I think Snow Leopard (and above) and modern Linux distros allow this as well.

[al_cam]

Been running my Lenovo X200 with an SSD for over a year now - no problems. I keep any important stuff on my server so if the SSD dies, no worries.

It is really really fast - I haven't timed it, but it starts Ubuntu in less than 5 seconds.
I keep meaning to look at ways of tweaking the BIOS as the non OS part of the boot now seems so slow.

Al.

[VectraMan]

The (old) Samsung SSD I have in my desktop at PermieCo always seems dog slow. Generally performance has improved the more I move things off the SSD and onto the HDD; I now have all my Visual Studio projects on the HDD and it's a lot more bearable.

I don't know whether it's just because it's old, or been used too much, or just flakey. But for whatever reason, the only computer I've used with an SSD isn't good.

I'm in two minds whether to buy one for my new laptop. The HDD is nearly silent and pretty fast, so I'm not sure how much benefit there'd be. People always go on about boot times, but why the hell are you booting a laptop all the time? That's a stupid reason, and leads me to think that in use SSDs don't make a lot of difference. And for resiliance, you shouldn't be using a laptop as a long term store of data anyway.

[doodab]

The (old) Samsung SSD I have in my desktop at PermieCo always seems dog slow. Generally performance has improved the more I move things off the SSD and onto the HDD; I now have all my Visual Studio projects on the HDD and it's a lot more bearable.

I don't know whether it's just because it's old, or been used too much, or just flakey. But for whatever reason, the only computer I've used with an SSD isn't good.

Probably because it's old. The early ones had problems both with writing data being quite slow & performance degradation over time. Modern drives and OS have more or less eliminated these problems with better algorithms + the TRIM command.

I'm in two minds whether to buy one for my new laptop. The HDD is nearly silent and pretty fast, so I'm not sure how much benefit there'd be. People always go on about boot times, but why the hell are you booting a laptop all the time? That's a stupid reason, and leads me to think that in use SSDs don't make a lot of difference. And for resiliance, you shouldn't be using a laptop as a long term store of data anyway.

Boot times are something everyone can relate to, although personally I use sleep most of the time, but anything where you end up waiting on the disk a lot will show a similar speedup e.g. launching applications, starting and stopping VMs, compiling code. It makes working a lot more fluid.

I can't imagine going back to a mechanical primary drive in a laptop or desktop now.

[VectraMan]

Probably because it's old. The early ones had problems both with writing data being quite slow & performance degradation over time. Modern drives and OS have more or less eliminated these problems with better algorithms + the TRIM command.

Yes I discovered it doesn't even have TRIM support as is. It needs a firmware update, and that means wiping everything. It also threw a bit of a wobbly once and corrupted some files.

Old yes. But I guess the question is with the rate of improvement will next year's SSDs be 10x better than today's?