Buying an ssd, what to look for?

[amuffin]

Hey guys, i have finally decided buying an ssd is worth it as I would like things to be slightly faster and hdd's now are very expensive What do I look for? Also is this ssd a good deal? http://www.frys.com/product/6756625?site=sa:adpages page:Sat_p11 sorry don't know much about them

 

[geofelt]

There is much hype with SSD benchmarks. Fast sequential reads and high IOPS seem to be the performance metrics.
Unfortunately, that is not what we normally do. The OS does mainly small random reads and writes. It does so at relatively low queue
lengths.
The actual drive response times are what matters, and those response times do not differ much among all SSD's.
The SSD gives you much better response times compared to even the fastest hard drives.

Newer drives tout the benefits of 6gb sata, and they do show up well in synthetic benchmarks.
But how many apps do you run that do sequential processing?. If it is enough to make a difference, you probably
can't afford the price for the capacity you need.


As to which brand, I think the safe choice today is Intel. They have had much lower return rates in the past:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

My take is, get the capacity you need and don't look back. A SSD makes everything feel so much quicker.
Look at the Intel 320 series today.
In a year, expect the prices per gb to be much lower.

 

[amuffin]

Well I would like an ssd as a good boot drive, I am planning on dual booting windows and mac os, however I just figured If I bought an ssd I could store mac os on it and the files on the windows drive.

 

[amuffin]

Oh yeah, can you make partritions on an ssd?

 

[geofelt]

Oh yeah, can you make partritions on an ssd?

Yes, a SSD looks to windows exactly like a conventiional sata hard drive.
The only way windows knows to treat a ssd differently(no defrag, trim..) is by how fast random i/o is. Perhaps 50x faster.

Don't know about what mac os does.