Are SSD's ready for prime-time? I'm talking about out of the datacenter and into mom'n'pops internet cruiser. It is here that these drives need to be fuss-free and set'n'forget. In a datacenter you can have geeks running diagnostics day in and day out on company paid time. Hot swapping them.. All that good stuff that hobbyist can handle too. But, at home, these drives need to be self sufficient and trouble-free. In 2008 and 2009 I kept hearing stories about when they blow up they take all your data with them, and they BSOD unexpectedly and that's it. They cost like $1000 for a 128GB drive and all that stuff. So, who here was an early adopter and can comment on the new ones? Are they mainstream ready? Or should I give the mfg's another year of beta-testing?
They've been just as "reliable" as regular hard drives for some time now. Recent generations have huge limits (as in it takes a huge amount of data) on writes and there are considerably differences in speed. The largest factor has been price though with that factory getting trashed they're more competitive than ever. I personally run a hybrid drive in my laptop. For a single configuration on a budget it made the most sense.
I've got an SSD for the OS drive, and a larger HDD for storage in my two drive bay notebook. My system is so much snappier now...I'll never have a computer again without an SSD.
When using a hybrid drive does the entire SSD section serve as a system partition? ...and have you found that your SSD partition lives up to the hype of delivering much faster Windows performance?
There is no "partition" for the memory part of a hybrid drive. Think of it more like a cache than an "SSD section". From the real world discussions I have been part of at other forums the general opinion is that these drive do not live up to the hype by any means. I have never personally had one to test, but the general consensus it that it is not worth me getting one to try. I have a couple of SSD drives and those are outrageously fast, they are just unfortunately priced too high for my taste. Well worth the money however.
