Which SSD do I "need"

[Homerboy]

Looking for small storage size 64GB MORE than enough, cheap (BIG factor), but without suffering performance.

I'm totally lost in SSD world.

 

[razel]

If you're on Vista/7, especially 64 bit, it's a better purchase to need at least 2GBs of RAM before you need an SSD. After 2GB or if your on XP and if you're coming from the notebook HDD world you won't regret an SSD. Desktops HDDs... it depends.

Don't worry about suffering performance with any of the current model SSDs. If you're looking for cheap, check ebay. Off ebay, if used, I'd only Kingston, Intel or Crucial. Stick with major brands used because they got troublefree transferrable warranties. There's too many question marks with the smaller and overseas companies.

$2/GIG is a typical sale price for a new SSD. Ideal would be $1.5/GIG which is showing up more often. The best I've seen was during 09 Black Friday at Fry's. A 64GB Kingston V series was about $90.

Choices, choices...

 

[kmmatney]

There are quite a few good SSDs out there, but I'd recommend the Intel 80GB model. You can get the rebranded Adata model for $20 cheaper as well:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820211412

If you want something cheaper, then this one is really low if the rebate comes through, and has a lot of positive reviews:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820139133

 

[Homerboy]

There are quite a few good SSDs out there, but I'd recommend the Intel 80GB model. You can get the rebranded Adata model for $20 cheaper as well:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820211412

If you want something cheaper, then this one is really low if the rebate comes through, and has a lot of positive reviews:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820139133

The last one is actually the one that got me thinking about this in fact. I thought it was a decent deal.

I'd really love to TRY one of these out before I buy one though. Are they REALLY that incredible of a perfomance boost in System boot, program load etc etc?

 

[flamenko]

Yes they are and, for the most part, you will see pretty much the same performance increase from all as a typical user. The reason for this is because of the access time it takes the ssd to pickup information in comparison to that of a hard drive. A typical hard drive used to run something like 9.2ms with the ssd running .1ms.

Things susch as the OS itself and its installed system programs will see instant. Its almost like the computer knows what you are going to do before you do. If you are a word fan, its a 2 second start and so on with other programs.

If you work with large reports of serveral hundreds of pages and use Acrobat, This is where the ssd really shines. An example I can use is redacting (or vetting) a report that might take a minute or more from a hd system whereas an ssd drops it down to 5-10 seconds to do the final result.

 

[kmmatney]

If you are expecting the SSDs to amaze, then it might be a dissapointment. They are much faster, but once windows is up and running, many programs get cached after you use them. The biggest difference I've noticed with the SSD is multitasking - for example I don't even notice virus scans anymore, and they use to bring my system to a grinding slowdown. Everything is just much snappier with the SSD, something you notice when you go back to a standard hard drive. If 64 GB is enough space, then I'd definately go for an SSD, especially at $109 after rebate, with TRIM support.