How has SSD affected your day to day experience on the PC?

[veri745]

Was it an Intel SSD? Just one?

The math still seems to work out vastly in favor of SSDs, so far.

My SSD died already. I had been using it for less than a month. I'm hoping it was just a bad egg in the basket, but nobody knows what will happen to SSDs after a couple years or 5.

 

[Silenus]

Here is my experience. I have two systems. A desktop and a laptop.

Desktop is a Q6600 overcloked to 3.5Ghz, Radeon 5770, 4GB ram @DDR2-1100, 2 x Seagate 7200.11 RAID 0 WITH write caching enabled in raid.

Laptop is a Celeron 540, 2GB DDR2-667, but has Intel 80GB X25-M (and is limited to running at SATA 1 speeds!!)

Now despite the fact that laptop spikes CPU to 100% when it does just about anything...it feel consistently "faster/snappier" than the big fast desktop for doing average tasks (I don't do heavy photo editing and gaming on it like I do with the big machine). Opening Picasa and looking at some pics, loading a video, opening explorer to check email, having microsoft MSE running scan in the background while doing anything else you want.....it's all noticeably snappier than my big machine....and that's with a crappy CPU and slow memory! So noticeable that I can't stand those times I have to wait for the drives in the desktop. I am going to end up getting a 160GB X25 soon just to have peace. 🙂

That the difference an SSD can make....

 

[F1shF4t]

I certainly know about the losing data part.... I have a few external drives for storing videos, and a few of them will fail crc32 hashchecks. They were fine when I put them moved them there... but after a year or two when I randomly decided to check, a few end up with a corrupted piece of data somewhere in the file.

On that note, if I had a raid 5 backup server or something, I wouldn't lose that little piece of data in the file, right?

Raid 5 will help agains drive failure not data corruption. I have lost over 300gig of data off my raid 5 array before due to the comp crashing at just the right time. RAID5 <> Backup.

Backup is to make a complete and separate copy. For my importants files I sync between desktop, laptop and external hdd every few days then every couple of months make a complete copy in another location.

 

[hansblix]

I've been using a new SSD since this past weekend (X25-M G2), and while I like it, I can't say it has changed my PC experience that much. Maybe I expected too much after reading so many rave reviews. Bootup is certainly faster, and programs start up a little snappier, but my computer never really felt slow pre-SSD. Maybe I'm just not impatient enough to care whether something loads in 10 seconds vs 5 seconds (or 1s vs 0.5s in the case of a browser window)? Of course, maybe if I went back to my old drive I'd really feel the difference. Anyway, I kinda wish I'd bought a fast 1TB disk drive instead and saved some cash.

 

[Zap]

I certainly know about the losing data part.... I have a few external drives for storing videos, and a few of them will fail crc32 hashchecks. They were fine when I put them moved them there... but after a year or two when I randomly decided to check, a few end up with a corrupted piece of data somewhere in the file.

On that note, if I had a raid 5 backup server or something, I wouldn't lose that little piece of data in the file, right?

Well, it depends on the reason why it fails CRC. Is it a physical failure? Is it data corruption?

 

[Rubycon]

I like them and boy they can take a beating! (physically)
HOWEVER I will NEVER, EVER stop backing up important stuff. Everything and anything can, will, does, etc. fail. And when it fails it fails beautifully at the most inopportune time taking you down, shooting you in both feet, pouring baleen salt in your deep wounds! Did I say it's important to back your stuff up? 😛

 

[fffblackmage]

Well, it depends on the reason why it fails CRC. Is it a physical failure? Is it data corruption?

Physical failure as in a dying HDD? I certainly hope that's not the case.

Seems like data corruption to me. Most files play just fine, but I noticed that in a couple videos that fail hashchecks, there are some video corruption during playback at some certain point in the video.

This doesn't seem to be limited to one or two external HDDs either. All of them will have a few videos that fail hashchecks.

 

[taltamir]

SSDs made installing windows updates and programs a snap, they take a tiny fraction of the time than before. it also allows me to do some things fast (like remuxing video).
the biggest improvement is that it has allowed me to play games with unbearably slow loading times, like NWN2 (2 minutes loading for every 1 minute of gameplay on a spindle drive). Even games with ok loading times are made funner by having it cut down significantly.

The one thing I don't see much difference on is boot up times. I use sleep mode so its usually not an issue, and when I do an actual restart, most of the time is spent on the bios, AHCI (I have an old mobo, it takes a while to initialize AHCI; much faster on newer mobos), etc... and then afterwards windows takes a good chunk of time to initialize based on CPU speed not HDD speed on a well used machine (on a brand new machine with nothing installed its all HDD)... so overall I don't see a significant change to my total bootup speed. (certain portion of the boot process are obviously a lot faster; just not so much the overall process)

 

[n7]

Two of my techie buddies held off for the longest time on SSDs even though i kept telling them if there's one thing they'd love, it's them.

They finally got them, & they've been raving about them ever since. ^_^

I have four SSDs, & other than two of them, it's been an expensive adventure, so i'd say that tells you how much i like them right there. 😀