Anyone use solid-state drive instead of hard disk drive?
 

I just put a 160GB Intel X-25 solid-state drive into my netbook and it is excellent. The SSD is significantly faster as far as boot times, read/write, etc. and I now have the piece of mind that there are no moving parts inside the drive that will fail. The number one downside is price, to replace the 160GB HDD the equivalent SSD cost more than my netbook altogether. But I think it is worth it, can't really put a price on all that data, and avoiding the headaches of dealing with a drive crash (if you've ever had it happen you'll know what I mean).

The other downside is that like all similar media (SD, CF, USB sticks, etc), they have a limited number of write cycles before they start developing errors (~100k IIRC). There is usually some type of firmware on the device which attempts to evenly use all the data bits - as a result defragmenting is completely useless.

Correct Brian, they have a limited number of write cycles. That's why I never recommend using a USB stick as additional working memory.

I was a real PC nerd a few (2 a 3) years back (before the RC virus struck) and SSD was WAY to expensive back then. I still think it is now so I have no experience with SSD in my PC or notebook. Oh well, early adapters always pay the jackpot.

But glad you like it. I've seen some comparison video's on YT concerning performance gain in booting, decoding etc pretty impressive :)

I thought about looking into an external SSD for back up purposes, but I went with the larger less expensive HDD.

I back up everything on a separate drive using Apples time machine. I think it is the coolest new feature to their os. I can go back and see what I have done if I made a mistake and or deleted something I didn't want to.

The drive I have is wireless so my wife's macbook can access it too, mostly used for storage of our media and documents, it has a secondary purpose of a shared hardrive. As well as being a TB in size, we'll never see the day it gets full.

15 years (rough guess) ago we thought we would never need a 12MB drive :lol:

As for back-up I would prefer a HDD. The space/$ is sooo much better than SSD that I don't see how to ''defend'' buying a SSD unless you have a pool build of diamants and filled with liquid gold.

Yeah, the latest SSD's are extremely fast, they really do live up to their reputation and ratings. My friend has one, a cheaper one, Kingston SSD NOW 60GB IIRC, one of the slowest, but damn, leaves a HDD in the dust.

I can't remember for the life of me, the firmware type, some acronym... anyways, it reads and writes in an intelligent way that drastically increases useful cycles available from the device.

Personally I would wait another year or two before jumping in, they are getting better at such a fast pace right now, by the time it arrived at your door beign shipped, a new one will be available that is faster, last longer, and less expensive.

Don't you mean 25 years ago? 15 years ago I had a 4GB HDD in with a Pentium 166mhz 32mb ram PC, beat that. :mdr:

I just did a little more research and apparently, the life cycle is up to around 1,000,000 write cycles now. Oh, and ZPB, the term you are looking for is "wear leveling".

c:\dir

Now that was how it was done!

I wish I remember the string for Doom!

IBM commodore FTW:rofl:


I miss my turbo button:whistle:

I have a Corsair P128 in my desktop machine for system drive, and a 640 GB HD for my stuff. Windows 7 boots super fast, programs open instantly. Been running it for nearly 6 months with no drop in performance, drive supports trim with win7.

Somewhere I have a 52 mb HD with a $499 price tag on it (ouch).

I can see these taking over as soon as they have the same storage capacity as HDD.

I am running 2 X25 40GB in a Raid 0 in my home PC.. They do write a lot faster depending on what you are doing and of course no noise. It was cool from the black loading screen in windows 7 to be able to click on the start button took 11 minutes to install and be able to start loading drivers..

Here is a good review..

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3618/i...25m-g2-for-250

I think for my home machine I still prefer a series of regular HDDs in a RAID configuration, mostly because of the cost (for an HDD it's about 10-20 cents per GB, the SSD I just got was $2.66 per GB) and bigger size. But for my netbook where I am carrying it around a lot and it's more likely to get bumped or dropped, the SSD makes more sense. I don't need the big 1TB size drive in the netbook since I mostly use it for email and web browsing. The SSD also uses less power, but not sure if or how much it will affect overall battery life.

I bought them to play with them, I still have terabyte's of data drives. I actually just setup my new file server and my Newzbin sites are getting shutdown for the moment..

Your laptop should see a vast improvement in performance and battery life from what I have read. I don't use my except for on the couch or I would think about buying one for mine..

I remember one time when I was moving, I packed up all my computer stuff together, including my surround sound system (big subwoofer) and without even thinking about it set one of my big external HDDs right on top of it. Kissed about 750GB of music, movies, and tv shows goodbye that day...

Honestly, I think SSD will be taking over... soon.

Their write/read limit is a bit too.....little to me.
If it follows as flash drives do, I'll definitely pass 'til the technology advances a bit.

My previous flash drives last me a few good years (Reputable ones, like Sandisk?), and then all of a sudden, wabam, everything's gone, isn't even recognized.
Had this happen to friends, and multiple times for me.

A regular HDD is fine for me as long as I'm not bouncing around in the dunes.

Too expensive for me ATM... Like most of you guys I'll be waiting a year or two for the price to go down and storage capacity/lifetime to go up!

Not quite the same thing as I was originally thinking, but TRIM is what it's called, actually for cleaning up blocks and doing smart erasing, keeps the drive performing faster over time than one without it.

Yeah, TRIM is something different. And if I'm not mistaken, the OS has to support it too. Also, TRIM is required if you want to encrypt the data, or securely wipe the data.

I just recently got a Kingston SSDNow V series 64GB drive for my graduation present. It was $112 after the rebate (they have another deal going at Newegg right now for the same drive for $115 after rebate). Gosh this thing is amazing! Windows 7 boots in 30 seconds consistently and programs open instantly. Haven't really had any crashes yet, though haven't had the drive very long. I didn't notice much of a difference for games like Just Cause 2 and DiRT 2, but something does feel a bit faster about them. I've got my 1TB drive to hold all my extra non-program data. Just gave my extra 750GB drive to my brother because his old 120GB IDE drive was very full and slow lol.

I'm really hoping that SSDs come down in price and up in capacity, as I'd really like to have a 128GB drive for my main system drive and a 256GB drive for my laptop. The speed and access times of these things are just insane.

Brijar!!!

Also, another con for me, is when these SSDs fail, there's nothing bringing them back, unless you're a pro at micro (and I mean MICRO) soldering, and can toss the flash chip on another board... Even then, that's gonna be tough..

Honestly, soldering small stuff like that is pretty damn easy. The smallest thing I can even think of as far as soldering goes is SMDs. SMD resistors and SMD LEDs are pretty easy to solder if you just have a little patience. As for size, a SMD LED or resistor is about the size of the E in Liberty on a dime...

I've had a good bit of practice though on my PSP. :lol:

Then you, squee, have WAY too much time on your hands.. :lol:

I've used SSD drive in my laptops for a while now. Sure makes an average laptop faster. But I still don't like it's performance in a desktop. Writing large amount of data is just too slow compared to a good ol' 10k drive.

Also possible, I'm just 24y old so can't remember 25y back :angel:. But it's ways funny when people say they will never need the space.

@ BrianG, thanks 4 the update. I should keep track of the news more ...

I've not bothered to drop the cash on them for personal use. I'm OK with the speeds I'm getting out of sata drives in a RAID array for now.

However, at work we've begun experimenting with them in our SAN, using IBM's server class SSD's (rebranded), and putting the "hot" data on them. Our storage controllers are smart enough to start noticing block write issues, and the SSD's we're getting have built-in redundancy, and early warnings for impending failures. That being said, they drastically improve performance for the entire SC when we move the hottest data to them. It's pretty cool stuff.

Tony

i run a pc that cost me a grand total of $20
i bought a pentium 4 3.4ghz 775 socket off ebay for $20.
the rest is all stuff that people threw out, 160gb HDD sata II, 40gb IDE for windows only so if it crashes i just throw it out and put in the spare 40gb with a fresh windows on it.
2gb of ram (corsair?)
and a gigabyte S-series MB.

but i wont be getting a SSD anytime in the near future niether will i be getting one of them STUPID external HDD's. wow...1 terrabyte of space, what it will like take ALL day to fill it assuming you have that much porn....harold :lol:

For an external drive I use e-sata, not USB. It's just like another internal drive, speed wise. (The case I use takes any sata drive, I have a few I swap into it, and also has USB, for when I take it with me and the machine I attach it to doesn't have e-sata. It's made by Antec)

Tony