QOTD: Have You Bought An SSD Yet?

[dkcrogue]

I just bought an intel X-25M 160Gb for OS + games. Has had a very noticeable impact on load times across the board.

Booting my other computer with a pair of raptors in RAID 0 seems like a joke compared to the single SSD drive in me primary PC.

 

[dkcrogue]

Can't think of any more effective upgrade for £500.

 

[abs512]

I'd really wish to do so, but the economics of such an upgrade are just not yet there... I'll stay with my 300GB Raptor as the main drive for my Nehalem Mac Pro for the time being and wait for prices to come down!

 

[hundredislandsboy]

[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]Are you stupid enough to trust any single HDD with all your important data?[/citation]

Whether anyone is stupid isn't really part of the QOTD is it? But thank you for your contribution and enlightening others to the value of SSDs.

 

[halcyon]

No.

 

[krazyderek]

just got a vertex for a workstation at our office, finger's crossed i'm going to like it

 

[randomizer]

In 2013, yes, I did.

 

[JimmiG]

I would like a SSD to hold the OS and my most frequently used programs. However I can't justify paying so much for such a small drive. With 4GB of RAM, Superfetch, automatic defrags etc., Vista is optimized from the ground up to hide the poor performance of mechanical hard drives, resulting in acceptable performance with any mid-range 7200RPM drive or better.

Now that the problems of high write latency and poor random write performance have been more or less solved there are no disadvantages to a SSD except for cost per GB. One major advantage is that flash-based drivers tend to fail in a predictable and graceful way. When a cell fails, it's simply marked as bad and the data is written to another one. Also, the cells tend to fail on writes, not reads, so your existing data is safe. When my 74GB Raptor failed on the other hand, it just started making weird noises and 10 seconds later all data on the drive were lost for good. That would be extremely rare with a SSD but it's how hard drives usually fail.

 

[Guest]

I am using an SSD for my boot drive. I think the price is fully justified versus a standard hard disk. I am using a 60gig drive and doubt I would ever need more on the boot disk. Naturally performance and price will improve even more in the future. Having faster read times, and a lot of peace of mind with the extra reliability of no moving parts is the main seller for me. I like a nice stable PC. I have had too many re-installs and bad experiences over the generations of hard disks. Goodbye standard disks.. good riddance. SSd's should overtake them in capacity and price point in 5 years or less.

 

[leo2kp]

I have not.

 

[Guest]

Yes, the patriot Warp 32GB SSD, and the G.Skill64GB SSD. They are great SSD's for cheap. Definitely helped with speeds of boot times.

 

[braindonor75]

I bought a cheapo ($140) 64GB SSD for my aging notebook. It's silent which was a nice surprise. Reads and general operation is around the same as the 7.2K drive it replaced but writes (like when installing software or updates) is very slow. That aside pretty pleased. Looking forward to building my next desktop with a pair of high speed SSDs.

 

[Guest]

Heh, my raptor disagrees with the statements made.

 

[jsloan]

nope, too expensive, capacity sucks, and how many writes can you do to a sector before you have to throw the drive away or before reading becomes unbearably slow?

 

[FHDelux]

Yes, i put an X25 into my laptop. To my surprise, my 2.66Ghz dual core loads up faster, and feels more snappy than my i7 @ 4Ghz with a Velociraptor. I had no idea the speed increase would be that much, it leaves me wanting to upgrade my desktop drive as well, but i will wait on the price to come way down before doing that one.

 

[rodney_ws]

Maybe next year.

 

[fausto]

Too expensive, overhyped and as far as i know there are some things HD's are better for that SSD's need to improve on. maybe in a couple of years

 

[twanto]

I bought an OCZ Vertex recently (170 after rebate). I think it was a very worthwhile upgrade- my system performance is so much more snappy. When I boot to the old hard drive on occasion, waiting the 2.5 minutes to boot up is excruciating. Everything is so fast on the SSD. Awesome.

 

[kidster3001]

Yep, X25-M 64GB. It's my games drive. Muuuuuuch faster than my 10k Raptor raid 0 boot setup.

 

[nickcardwell]

Not yet. I have a 36GB Raptor right now and was going to upgrade to the VelociRaptor soon but them these SSD started to hit the news. I think i'm going to wait a bit for the price of the Intel drive to drop or for the bugs to be worked out of the cheaper brands.

 

[scooterlibby]

My move from 7200rpm to the 10000 rpm V-Raptor left me a bit underwhelmed (not saying it's a bad drive, but I didn't see a decrease in load times of the magnitude I expected). Therefore, I am a little gun shy about paying another price premium for the even faster SSD's. When SLC's get under a $1/gig I will see what all the fuss is about.

 

[Onus]

I really want to, especially for my "green machine", but prices are still a little too high. I am getting an extortion refund this year though, so maybe in another month or three...

 

[HermDawg]

Yes, I bought one for someone whose hard drives in her laptop kept on going bad. She said she didn't handle it rough, but 3 hard drives going bad in a year is suspect. She hasn't had a problem yet.

 

[Sinned43]

Since Seagate is entering the SSD market, I'll wait until they start mass production. The problems with SSD's haven't been totally worked out. The new SATA 3 should allow new SSD's to be in the instant on category. It's still to early to buy a SSD, but the future looks very bright.

 

[kezix_69]

Nope. I found the 300GB velociraptor to be a much better deal. It may not be quite as fast but it does speed things up and 300GB is a good enough size for me. 64GB is WAY too small, 128GB is pushing it, once they are 200-500GB and cost around $100-200 I'll probably throw down some money for one.