----- Original Message -----
From: "steve harley"
Subject: Re: Solid State Hard Drives
On 2010-05-14 20:53 , William Robb wrote:
I'm wondering what the consensus on these new beasties is?
I am planning on an upgrade to Win7 and adding some ram, and am
wondering if I should get one of these as a C drive as well.
I am thinking of one of the 40 or so gb ones, since I don't use my C
drive for anything other than OS and programs.
just noticed this buried in the Chicago thread (i use a true threaded mail
reader, so if you use "reply" to post something on a new topic, it will
still get threaded with whatever you reply to)
i have done some study in this area, so here are some points:
* first maximize the usable RAM in your computer; it's a much cheaper way
to improve performance
* if it's reliability you're after, SSDs do not mean you don't have to do
backups
* be sure you know what aspects of your hard drive use most affect your
computer's performance -- the system and applications may or may not be
the most important, so using the drive how you propose may be
disappointing
* SSD drives can get slower with age because of how they re-use cells, but
the newer internal controllers (currently only on higher-end models) do a
good job of working around that
* in a desktop
- you can beat some SSDs with a good RAID, perhaps even at lower cost
- but if speed is paramount, then a RAID of SSDs could be even faster
(though you might risk saturating a SATA II interface)
* on a laptop
- almost any recent SSD will be faster than a spinning disk
- most will extend battery life but there are big differences in power
consumption between models
- another SSD advantage in a laptop is that it is almost immune to
vibration & shock
- most laptops have room for only one drive, and big SSD drives (e.g.
for lots of photos) can be quite expensive
Hi Steve, thanks for the reply (and thanks to everyone else who took the
time).
I ended up buying 8gb of ram, a 60gb Kingston SSD and Win7 Ultimate.
I suspect I'll spend most of next week rebuilding my computer, and then most
of the week after that bugging the guys at the computer shop to fix what I
screwed up.
William Robb
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