SSD drive in PC

[gr8fl4porsche]

Wow!

If you haven't switched yet - you should.

After a months use, I am still stunned by how fast certain tasks are performed.

Notably, Photoshop, MS Office and Win Explorer are greatly improved. PS used to take forever to open, now its only a few seconds. Word opens almost instantly.

iTunes is still a bloated pig and makes you wonder if it ever is going to open ( I know, it works great on a Mac - I guess Apple intentionally puts out a crappy PC version as a marketing technique).

[Schrup]

I bought my first Intel 80GB 2 years ago after 6 months of waiting for the price to drop. I think I paid $250, I bought the upgraded model last year for about $100 after sale, rebate, & a 50% off $40 Newegg gift card. I'd stay away from the OCZ stuff, I've seen a lot of complaints about their quality & customer service taking a slide the last couple years. Pity, they used to be top notch. I haven't had any problems with my drives, Intel isn't the cheapest, but I think they're by far the best.

My son & I play MMOs during the winter & my new machine was so much faster loading, I had to buy another for my old gaming rig so I'm not always waiting for him. In all my years of building & upgrading gaming PCs, I can say that SSDs are the biggest noticeable upgrade. Nothing else has been so obvious. I have a ongoing hate hate relationship with apple & their products, I hate being forced to use them.

[MysticLlama]

Yep, have had them in all my PCs for 2+ years. A deal at twice the price. (Which is about what they were back then)

[red-beard]

For all of our work computers, I upgraded the primary disk to SSD. Everyone has a 60GB startup drive. For the most part, we use the network drive for storing and working on files, etc. Startup time for the SSD drives is fantastic.

Keep the machines backed up, though. I have had 2 SSD drive failures in the past year.

[gr8fl4porsche]

I have read about the failure rate - which drives died on you?

I am using a 180g Intel 330 drive with Win7 backing up to a storage drive.

[red-beard]

A-Data - 2 of the 60GB units from Newegg.

I have also had a Kingston go bad. The large (250 GB) unit in my Laptop has been fine.

We're running Win 7 Pro 64, so we backup to a network drive.

[john70t]

How did you do the drive imaging? (i.e. making a complete copy)

Is there some sort of USB gismo which connects to the new SSD before installing?

[red-beard]

Some of them actually do have a built in USB interface. Some of the Kingstons come with a "kit" which has transfer software to move the disk image.

[jyl]

The Crucial SSDs I've bought come with a utility and dongle to clone the hard drive to the SSD, then you physically swap.

I've got a 64 GB SSD here trying to decide whether to swap it for the HDD in wifey's new MacBook Pro, she probably prefers lots of space to speed. Pack rat.

I'm told OWC makes a kit to replace the ODD in a MacBook Pro with an SSD. You put your OS and apps there, leave data on the HDD, so you get speed and space.

[intakexhaust]

Any pro - con about the hybrid's for laptops?
I'm considering a laptop with 1TB 5400RPM SATA HDD + 32GB mSATA SSD w/Intel Smart Response.

[speedqueen]

how about mac?

[GH85Carrera]

We have to use SSD in the laptop in our airplane. Almost anything above 12,000 ft and a spinning drive just stops. Spinning drives need air pressure to keep the heads floating above the platter. SSD drives are fast and don't care about air pressure.

[widebody911]

I have ~200 servers now with SSD drives, all in single-drive configuration, since the servers are clustered. So far I've lost a couple of drives in 5 years. The speed is phenomenal, but when one decides to go, it just goes. Lights out, gave over - there's no warning like with a mech drive. There are tools available to determine the health of the drive, but I haven't played with them yet.

[lane912]

.... and if you think those are fast, try one of these- ssd for the pci-e slot. much higher data transfer rates-
Pcie And Ssd -- Engadget

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by lane912

.... and if you think those are fast, try one of these- ssd for the pci-e slot. much higher data transfer rates-
Pcie And Ssd -- Engadget

320Gb, only $9k

Amazon.com: HP ioDrive IO Accelerator SSD 320GB PCI-E Solid state drive: Computers & Accessories

[lane912]

Originally Posted by widebody911

320Gb, only $9k

Amazon.com: HP ioDrive IO Accelerator SSD 320GB PCI-E Solid state drive: Computers & Accessories

i think we all are aware of the equations for performance v.s. cost on this forum

[flipper35]

Wayne, have you looked at the FusionIO drives for the databases? (HP rebrands them as the ioDrive and adds a couple grand to the price)

[Brando]

Be sure to setup your PC for SSD use. You want to minimize writing to the drive to preserve it's life. That means turning off lots of logging operations, setting caches smaller (you should be using memory anyways) and with a 64-bit OS you should have as much memory as your motherboard can handle. Set the paging file down as low as you can.

For Photoshop a "scratch disk" allocation is still needed. I love working with my SSD. Have one in my work laptop, and at home my desktop has one.

[flatbutt]

Man I wish I knew what you were talking about.

[intakexhaust]

^^^ me too. Scratch disc??, scratch that, I'm scratchn' man.