What's the difference between SSD's and normal drives? Any recommendations?

[BaztheSpaz]

Looking to get an upgrade from a very old 300gb internal SATA hard drive (that is very poor) and am always told about the 'magic' of SSD's etc. But what is the difference? And does anyone have any good value SSD's or hard drives in general?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

 

[notherdude]

SSDs boot very, very fast and then the OS and other programs you install to it start up and snap about quite quickly. Worth it! They are limited in capacity compared to mechanical drives so it usually pays to have sn SSD and a regular drive for mass storage.

 

[ss202sl]

It's not that they are limited in capacity, it's that they cost a lot more than a HDD. Most people have about a 120GB SSD for the OS and a few applications, and then a HDD for everything else. It does make a huge difference in load times, and makes the PC seem faster.

 

[notherdude]

True, cost is the main factor, but they are actually limited to about 1TB (in any reasonable configuration), and those cost about $500 and up, so their relative capacity is limited in fact and in cost practicality.

 

[ss202sl]

True, cost is the main factor, but they are actually limited to about 1TB (in any reasonable configuration), and those cost about $500 and up, so their relative capacity is limited in fact and in cost practicality.

I have a SAN at work full of fast SSD's to the tune of about 100TB's. Plenty of speed and capacity, it just costs an awful lot.

 

[notherdude]

Dude, I KNOW that. This is a short form discussion, what I said to the OP was correct in that context, you are splitting hairs here. When building a desktop PC your REALISTIC desktop SSDs ARE limited in capacity, period, end of story. I know they can be very large in irrelevant configurations.