SSDs for everyone? Not so fast

There's no way I would even think about buying a SSD until the prices drop dramatically.

For example, here is Australia I can purchase a 500GB notebook hard drive for $59 (which is around $55 US dollars). The same size SSD costs $380 ($351 US), which is more than 6 times more.

Aside from the cost, my next notebook hard drive is going to be 1TB - I can't even get a SSD that big.

 

until they get rid of the trim crap and the drives can take care of themselves without the OS having to do it, I will not be buying one either

 

Roger,

The best upgrade for a desktop computer is a SSD. The speed difference over a HD is amazing. I have multiple OS on a SSD and also on HD1 so I can compare OS speeds in the same computer. You only need a small SSD (128 GB) as it only needs to contain OS, not data. Data can be on a HD. Unfortunately, most laptops have a single drive so the above doesn't apply.

 

I've been thinking about your proposed laptop with a 1TB HD. If I had that laptop I'd remove the HD and replace it with a 128 GB SSD. I'd put the 1TB HD in a USB3/eSATA enclosure ($25). The performance would be excellent and would justify the cost. Data and image backups would go to the 1TB HD.

 

A couple of years ago I put a 96GB SSD in my old Dell Inspiron 1720 that I was thinking about replacing. I installed Windows 7 on the SSD, and moved the old HDD to the second bay for storage. The notebook is so much faster with the SSD that I have no plans to replace it. The notebook that does eventually replace it will also have two drive bays and at least a 128GB drive for the OS.

 

I prefer to have all my data internally. However if I had a notebook with dual hard drives, then I would consider using a SSD as my primary drive.

 

what is wrong with TRIM?

 

Same here... i would only consider to use a SSD as the only drive if could buy one with 250GB/300GB for a good price. But they are still too expensive...

 

So true!

 

I bought a new motherboard/cpu for my desktop recently, and all of the negative reviews that I read about the motherboard were due the users having issues with a SSD using the older Sandforce controllers.

I would like to hear opinions from those who have experience with a range of these drives, if you don't mind, and what have you found to be the most stable problem-free controller using various hardware setups. Intel, Sandforce, Samsung MDX, Jmicron, etc.

Thanks

 

Kirk,

I've been using two Intel 520 SSDs for almost a year. No problems at all. I've installed a few Samsung 840 SSDs for friends and they seem fine too.

Intel 520 use Sandforce controllers but I gather the Intel firmware has overcome the controller issues.

 

Intel uses custom firmware a notch above everyone else, except maybe samsung.

 

I'll probably be using both SSDs and HDDs for quite a while. It's going to be a long time before large (1TB+) capacities are affordable, and it doesn't make sense to spend a lot more money to store things like videos and pictures that don't benefit from the speed increase.

 

Because it depends on the OS having it built in, the drive should take care of itself

 

Some do and with TRIM it helps out even more and I use Diskeeper 2012 with Hyperfast to even keep my SSD's more optimized.

TH

 

Simply ideals, how do you expect firmware to accommodate for every kind of OS and the filesystem used?

 

I have found buying a standard sata iii large-cache local disk and allocation a small partition to os, something like 100gb, is just as good as using ssd, because for most people, who do not do lots of sustained i/o, this is more than enough.

This is what I did in one of my desktops, with one os 500gb (100gb alloc) disk and four data/games disks, and it flies. Takes mere seconds to boot and everything absolutely flies, at 1/10th the cost of ssd.

Mrk

 

Mrk,

I assume you have tested this by running the SSD and HD on the same computer. Let me describe mine. I have several OS partitions on an SSD and identical OS partitions on a 2 TB HD. All OS run fine but you can really tell them apart by speed.

 

The cleaning of the drive or the should I say what I consider to be a major drawback of SSD drive is the blocks have to be cleared before they can be written to again should be taken care of by the drive itself and not be dependent on any outside source

 

For best results, you should align the mech disk partitions only on the outer end, so if you're using just 128gb ssd, make only 128gb partition on the mechanical 2tb disk and leave the rest empty.

Same bus, of course

Mrk

 

Not for me yet. The price per GB is beyond justification for my needs at the moment, no matter the size of the OS partition. Furthermore, I tend not to be an early adopter when it comes to hardware.

Add to the fact that some software may not support Trim or interferes with it. I'll let others who enjoy/need the benefits of SSD do the work for now while I wait for the entire whole SSD ecosystem to mature further.

 

I can´t wait for the moment they replace the old and noisy HDD´s! But I did read some bad stuff about reliability of some SSD´s a while ago.

Btw, I´m going to buy a new HP desktop soon, with a 1 TB HDD, combined with a 128GB SSD. Perhaps I can replace it with a bigger SSD from Samsung.

Does anyone know if you need to configure the SSD yourself?

 

SSD for me is about random seek or reads. Standard HDD, even 10k scsi or sata3 pale in comparison. Sequential reads and/or writes, there is a difference, but relative to a point. Using an SSD has been a great thing for me, well worth the money, although its only for the OS, not data.

 

I have 2 Mushkin SSD's in my laptop and I wish I could run in RAID they are over 2 years old and never had any issues with them Boot time is great still running fast as always. And I truly can't go back to HDD's.

TH