Clearly SSD's are the speed winners. When I recently bought my new machines from Velocity Micro, I described my projected usage. They recommended sticking with the conventional. Then there is cost. I got 1 tb drives and a 2 tb drive for $275. They are pretty quick, but not near a SSD. Pete
HDD: price per GB is lower than for SSD SSD: they are much faster. Replacing HDD with SSD will really speed up your system. It's also hard to install your system back on HDD when you once try SSD.
As the other said SSDs pros: much faster (ideal for the OS partition, for video editing and for large databases), lower power consumption (=longer use of laptop when on battery), no need to defrag them, sock resistance SSDs cons: price, longevity (when used with lots of writes / when running large databases one will probably replace them sooner), size (in GBs) HDDs pros: price, size (ideal for storing data) HDDs cons: slower, need to be defragged, not sock resistant (drops can kill them easily) Panagiotis
Dave, An example. The same computer containing the same Win8.1 on a HD and a SSD. Win8.1 loads in 1/4 the time on the SSD. Photoshop loads in 1/7 the time on the SSD.
Wow, that's some difference. I am thinking of having a laptop made up with custom parts. I have a choice of several drives. I'm aiming to run Ubuntu on it though. Thanks for the example.
A HDD may be fast enough. SSDs are slient. SSD's don't produce as much heat. SSD's are safer from the effects of magnetism. Numerous SSD are not fully compatible with RAID controllers (e.g. can't disable write cache) SSD's are more sensitive to sudden powerloss (http://www.zdnet.com/how-ssd-power-faults-scramble-your-data-7000011979/)
I'm using a 7 year old Dell Inspiron notebook in which I installed an SSD. With the SSD it's so "snappy" I haven't felt the need to replace it. I'll never have a notebook now without an SSD. But I keep data stored on an HDD in the second hard drive bay.
One topic of interest to some here would be the recoverability of data stored within the drive. As in: whether a host can reliably determine what is stored within a drive at any given moment, reliably delete/overwrite sensitive data, reliably confirm that data has been destroyed, etc. SSDs and hybrid drives are significantly different than conventional drives. Some would want to research the implementation details, read articles about forensic recovery of data, and so forth.
I've come to love SSDs, but I still don't entirely trust FDE with them. It's not clear to me whether wear leveling, while an encrypted partition is mounted/decrypted, can result in plaintext being left after the partition is encrypted/unmounted. I'm currently playing with RAID. I have four inexpensive SSDs in Linux RAID10, with the RAID volume encrypted with dm-crypt/LUKS, and then LVM2. RAID10 is stripe of mirrors: There are two RAID1 (mirrored) arrays in RAID0 (striped). I'm wondering whether RAID0 mitigates the risk of residual plaintext. That is, any plaintext left on either member of the RAID0 array would be just one stripe, and the fragments would not end up in matching locations in the SSDs. After encrypting/unmounting, those fragments would arguably no longer be part of the RAID volume, and so wouldn't be recoverable. Does that make sense?
So what is the end conclusion? I'm planning the buy a machine with a SSD + HDD combo, and in practice this means that I will be mostly using the SSD, is this a risk? Of course I do plan to make a weekly back up of all important data from SSD to HDD.
I don't think there is any additional risk using SSD. Of course they can fail (as any other computer component) so making backup is wise.
The comment about the heat made me chuckle. I replace two 5-6 year old desktops with new ones, both gaming machines. The old machines had 2 HDD's, the new ones have 3 internal HDD's and even without SSD's I have noticed a heat difference. With the two older machines, I never need to heat my small apartment, with the new ones I do. As to speed, no doubt the SSD's would boot in a 1/4 of the time, but I don't care. I turn em on and go get coffee. Even when I am testing when the reboot speed up would be nice, it still is good to get up off my bottom and take a walk. Reboot is a good opportunity to do that. Just not a biggie for me. Pete
It's not just boot time that SSDs speed up, no? Wouldn't your gaming rigs be snappier with SSDs? But maybe disk I/O isn't the limiting factor in gaming, of which I am clueless.
You're welcome. Faster boot times, faster executing of programs, faster loading of files, faster installations etc. But when your system is up and running and the programs that you want are loaded in ram you will see no difference in speed. Only exceptions are the multimedia editing with large files and programs with large databases; everything else is more a placebo effect... Especially for games it will provide no benefit, except from the faster startup of the game. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_world_gaming_performance Panagiotis
OK, I get that. When I push machines, it tends to be in crunching data, so disk I/O matters a lot. Interesting
Speed vs. price vs. durability. The speed increase is noticeable. So is the higher price. I've had very few hard drives die ever but the SSD's in my laptop are gone. I put back the even older hard drives I had and it runs fine. If you're willing to accept the shorter lifespan and pay the higher price the speed is nice. If you want something cheap and reliable, don't bother and stick with regular HDDs.