Anybody out there using solid state drives?

Shaggy

Shaggy

Vice Admiral
I'm getting ready to upgrade to a new machine and I've been pricing things out. I noticed that a bunch of companies have started offering solid stated hard drives, with no spinning disks or reader heads, their built kind of like an overgrown thumb drive, and they're being offered as primary hard drives.
I'm curious as to how they perform in relation to traditional HDDs.
I could get a high speed gamer drive that runs at 10,000 RPM, but the space is limited, or I could get something that spins at about 7,000 RPM, which I think is what my current drive spins at, and get a Terabyte of storage space.
Couldn't these solid state drives be built to have massive amounts of storage and blistering speeds? If they can, that may be how I want to go.
 
For the price of a terabyte hard drive, you're looking at around 64 gigabytes in a solid state drive. They're primarily for laptops in 2.5" size.
 
I'm mainly curious about their performance. I'll probably get a Terbyte main drive, for all the games I play and want to play, because I need space more than speed and I fear change.:D
 
Tomshardware did a study a while back on them and basically said that they werent a serious match, theyre smaller, read time is marginally faster but write time is significantly slower and random read/writes the hard-drive wins by a massive amount - whats worse was that this was an old 8gig HDD vs an 8gb SSD.

For a main drive, go with the HDD, for a windows drive it may be justifiable having an SSD but I doubt it.
 
I think lifespan is the issue here. I used to work as a technical advisor for early ADM modules, which are based of flash drives, the technology known as NAND-flash is used in SSD's the problem you face is the limited number of rewrites, please let it be known that a professional flash drive "locks you out" when you cross it's life expectency line, but you can still unlock it and recover your data.

AFAIK there is no rewrite ratio on a harddisk that I have crossed in the past 20 years, but i know you can get a lifecycle of about 3 years from a NAND-flash based product(that is keeping in mind you use it everyday), or one billion guaranteed rewrites(this number is from 2006, and the tech keeps improving)

When it comes to speed, flash reads on an SSD are infinately faster, but i see no ned for that kind of speed.
 
I might look into getting one myself when I do my next PC build next year. Might use it just for the OS. It might pay for itself in the end since it's MTTR (Mean time to Repair) is a lot longer than a normal HDD. But I was mainly looking at size to since you can pick up a 1TB drive on newegg for under $100 now.
 
Mace said:
When it comes to speed, flash reads on an SSD are infinately faster, but i see no ned for that kind of speed.
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There is always a need for greater speed, but then, that's the nature of hierarchical data storage anyway. From registers to CPU caches to volatile memory to hard disks and whatever other media comes along.

But if you mean that the speed is not necessary considering the service we already have from traditional magnetic hard disks, then maybe you're right. I don't think solid state drives are really all that useful in the desktop at present. With improving technology and increasing storage capacity, lifetimes, performance, and better value for money, they may one day become a reasonable alternative to hard disks. I wouldn't know.
 
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