SSD: For those who agonize over upgrading

[tornadog]

So right now 100 can buy you an 80gb first gen intel drive which will last you 10+ years

140 can buy you a sf2200 120gb adata drive

That should be enough. Anyone who tells me that 120gb isn't enough to hold all their games misunderstands the point. SSDs are for what you use, not what you want to keep around. Most non game programs are very small. Games however can be massive but not enough to really cripple a 100+gb drive. The most number of games I can play at once is like 4. Thats like 30gb if they are massive games. You're telling me you play 120gb worth of games all day everyday?

I know SSDs are cheap because I'm considering sticking a 140 dollar SSD in my laptop, my gf's laptop, and replacing both my intel x-25 gms with 2 raid-o 120 gb drives/ 140 dollar drives. I don't make that much money (< 30k a year if you want to know) but its still very very feasible and really the only thing holding me back is that some of the ssds I've been eyeing have some reliability reports that concern me slightly. At the very least, they are going in my laptop because the thing about laptops is you typically are on a schedule when you really need to use them (ie in the airport trying to pull out some ticket info, walking into a conference and need to pull out a report) and knowing you can be bang in and bang out is well worth the cash.

I have 10+ games installed, that I play off and on. Sometimes I like to just see them there, even if I dont play them in the hope that when I do feel like playing it, I dont have to go hunting for its disks, and hope I had backed up the save games somewhere

 

[Sunburn74]

Right now on my PC I have 6 very mainstream PC games intalled (l4d2, fear 3, red faction armageddon, deux ex HR, crysis 2, starcraft 2). I have 5 others with the install exe saved on my storage drive.

I have 148gb worth of total ssd space. As of this moment, I have 60gb free. I think I have like 10gb worth of music and like 5 gb worth of personal work files. Not sure what your workload is like, but honestly with a good storage drive and reasonable limits on what you want to install and keep around, 120gb should be fine. However what defines reasnable limits obviously are different between people.

Where are people finding 120 GB SSDs for $140? They all seem to be more in the ~$180-$220 range.

Adata was selling their120gb 2nd gen sandforce SSDs last week for 139.99 (159 shipped with 20 dollar rebate). Even now the agility 3 (a 6gbs drive which still screams) is 168 with a 20 dollar rebate. In fact I believe last week the 120gb vertex 3 was 189 shipped on newegg as one of their ultra sales specials marked down from 249.

You can routinely find ssds like the 120gb vertex 1 or 2, early intel ssds, etc for $1 a gig or less no problem. Look around .Right now on newegg the vertex plus 120gb is $118 shipped after rebates. Just have to look. For 95&#37; of notebooks, i'd grab a cheap 1st gen drive because most notebooks don't have 6gb/s ports.

 

[Eug]

The improvement will always be bigger on laptops sense they have the slowest drives and they have inferior hardware. Not to mention battery life will be better.

Actually, a few of the SSDs are power hogs. You have to be careful which model you buy, if it's for a laptop.

I also agree with the other poster that said it's really kind of a luxury on a desktop. The other reason I haven't jumped to update the iMac is because I don't really care that much. However, 5400 rpm low end platter drive speeds of the power saving drives that came with my laptops were getting really irritating in their slowness.

That said, while the improvement on both laptops was significant, it was more significant on the MacBook Pro 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo than it was on the Windows laptop Pentium SU4100. With that latter dual-core 1.3 GHz machine, the CPU has become the limiting factor. With that in mind, I wouldn't waste my money to put an SSD in my Atom machine.

(Machines listed in sig below.)

 

[biostud]

While I'm happy for my SSD I think the most notable difference is that my laptop now feels more sluggish

 

[lsv]

Price!! Price!! Price!

Well said. I want to take the plunge and would probably buy a 128gb SSD for the operating system.

Bought my 80gig at $300 over a year ago and it is still completely worth it. Suck it up, pansies

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have yet to experience a SSD for myself, but I'm planing to go with one as the OS drive for the next machine I build. By then they'll probably have come down even more in price as I don't plan to built another machine any time soon. No cash.

I am just worried about the limited read/write cycles, but from what I've read, the numbers are so big, you'll still get like 5+ years out of it if you don't use it for a heavy IO operation. So for OS drive it should be fine. With the price of ram these days, can probably even go without a swap file too to increase the lifetime of the drive.

 

[groberts101]

Actually.. everytime these topics come up I have to think to myself..

most of these people have absolutely no clue as to the great feeling and overall time savings that almost instantanious response times combined with almost instanious loads/installs will add to their lives.

Plus what about scanning duty benefits with most all applications/OS's that do that sort of thing these days?

And don't even get me started on the massive multi-tasking capabilites or lifespan thing. If you have more time than money?.. keep telling yourself these things are "not mature enough tech yet".. or "the difference isn't all that great from what I've read and the price is still too high right now".. or "my business will not allow me the time to deal with issue's". You could fix your computer 3 times a year and STILL come out ahead for time saved! Hell.. you could probably even pay a data recovery firm to get some data back if you didn't know how to properly protect the data and even save in some business over the long term.

And then the other thing I often wonder about is.. don't people have a Best Buy or computer shop with a liberal 30 day return policy where they live? Cause that's exactly how I got hooked... I just tried it one day and now I have 15 of these addictive little bastards.

 

[Eug]

^^^ Well, I have two of them, and I don't really see a compelling reason to spend the coin to update my iMac or my AMD desktop.

The real benefit is with laptops. With desktops, it's nice, but usually not really necessary.

And, I think the reliability issue is a very valid one. Sure, it's a must to have multiple backups for any data, but the failure rates of some SSDs (OCZ Sandforce?) just seem unusually high.

 

[Sunburn74]

I am just worried about the limited read/write cycles, but from what I've read, the numbers are so big, you'll still get like 5+ years out of it if you don't use it for a heavy IO operation. So for OS drive it should be fine. With the price of ram these days, can probably even go without a swap file too to increase the lifetime of the drive.

I think you're underestimating the life cycles. In fact there was an experiment done on extremeforums looking into this sort of thing. I'll have to look it up and find it for you.

Anyway I remember when I bought my x25ms, intel posted stuff in the manual about expected lifespan. Enterprises wanted 20gb of writes a day for 5 years. Intel said their drives will do at least that. Intel then went on to say (off the record) that the x25m controller was so good you could actually write 100gb a day for 5 years. I will say this, the number of writes you actually make to your SSD is way underrated. I've owned my tww x-25ms for about 2 years now. I've accumulated a little under 4tb worth of writes on each one. They drives are rated for about 36tb worth of writes minimum if you follow intels 20gb per day quite. The fact of the matter is most of the day my PC is asleep, when its on I don't write a whole lot (via copy paste etc) and your OS only does micro writes over time. In fact, I've probably done more damage reducing the lifespan of my SSD by the 4x or 5x secure erases coupled with windows reinstalls than I've done with regular use.

 

[Zap]

I just tried it one day and now I have 15 of these addictive little bastards.

Damn, you've bought around as many as I have. I've sold off about half of mine but still have around four 256GB, two 120GB, one 80GB, one 64GB, one 40GB and one 32GB. The 32GB and one of the 120GB are NIB from hot deals, all other drives are in use somewhere. My main rig has a 120GB and a 256GB. I run Windows, all games and all applications from them.

 

[Midwayman]

I'd have to say the biggest difference with a SSD is really hard to benchmark. You know all those annoying little pauses in your UI when you try to do anything? The ones that make you want to punch your monitor? Those all disappear. The general responsiveness of a SSD equipped computer is completely unmatched. Sure levels load quicker, windows boots faster, apps load quicker. All that is great, but the responsiveness is what made me really smile.