SSD or 15K velos?

[tornadog]

I am pretty much ready to ditch my 7200rpm drives as they have been failing quite often now. I am thinking of going with either a 256GB SSD or a 500+GB Velo. Which would be more reliable. I will store all my data on the 7200rpm drives which is not much anyway, and use the new drive primarily for the OS and gaming.

 

[tweakboy]

Your 15k hard drive is spinning fast gathering files and putting them into RAM ,, the latency on your drive should be 8ms . A SSD is 0.0001 soo all your stuff will load at once,, as soon you click it its up..

SSD is nand flash, the 15k is a spinning mechanical hard drive and it blows goat compared to a SSD .......... I know all this cuz my dads rig has a 120GB A-DATA cheapo 375mbps sata 3 ,,, Especially when theres lots of HD action going on for no reason thanks to Winbloz7 , but whatever I do on his system launches or does it in 0 seconds. His MS Live outlook used to show a nice animation while loading, Takes like 8 to 10 seconds. Now it takes 0 seconds to load. You can get the 15k for storage but its not worth it to have storage fast drive,, it should be your second drive for games and stuff ,,,, gl

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

As Tweakboy put it there really is no comparison between how quickly SATA/SAS drives access information and how quickly a SSD does. This video will give you a good idea how big the difference is between a HDD and a SSD.

 

[cytg111]

agreed .. SSD as the OS/Apps drive, spindles for storage.

In perspective, say I could get a 3G 7200rpm spindle for 100$ and a 3G 4200rpm spindle for 50$, i'd get 6G worth of 4200rpm spindles for my 100$ any day, as long as i have a good SSD as a maindrive.

 

[Coup27]

As Tweakboy put it there really is no comparison between how quickly SATA/SAS drives access information and how quickly a SSD does. This video will give you a good idea how big the difference is between a HDD and a SSD.

Sorry to nitpick, but you should not refer to a HDD as SATA/SAS as these are interfaces applicable to both SSDs and HDDs.

An SSD beats a HDD in every metric apart from price per GB. The difference they make is night and day. Get a sensibly priced one big enough for your OS, applications and a subset of regularly used data and use a regular 7,200rpm for bulk storage of files such as media.

Tweakboy that was a cheap shot at Windows 7 which is not actually true. Yes, Vista used to keep the HDD activity light on 24/7 doing pretty much nothing. This was sorted out in Windows 7 and my system does not constantly blink the HDD light.

 

[greenhawk]

interesting that people appear to overlook the original part of the OP's original question. The part about reliability.


in this area I would lead towards the v'raptor without knowing exactly which SSD you would be looking at getting. The v'raptor IIRC being a enterprise / entusiest drive has a 5 year warrenty. most SSD's do not have this. That being said, the v'raptor is a spinning drive and they do fail. With SSD's, short of a bad firmware, once they work, they keep working. You have to either fry them or write a LOT of data to kill them (sort of well over 20GB per day for a year, well outside the average user home PC).

As to reliable SSD's, basically the current ones are based on the M4 and Samsung's 830 chipset. Avoiding the rest is advisable if reliability is #1 on your list when buying.

 

[bryanW1995]

I don't have access to VR return information, but generally speaking intel ssd's have a much lower return rate than hdd's do, and the m4 and 830 are excellent as well.

edit: And 20gb of writes a day for many years is perfectly fine on modern ssd's, especially larger ones like 256gb +. In the early days of ssd's it could be more of an issue if you had, say, a 30gb ssd as your primary disk and you wrote 20+gb/day on it. That is a lot of data to run through such a small drive.

 

[Blain]

SSD or 15K velos?

WD doesn't make 15k rpm Velociraptors.
Are you asking about 15k SAS or SCSI drives?

 

[exdeath]

SSD. Spinning disks belong in 386s.