Anybody trust solid-state hard drives yet?
 

I've got an older Dell M6300 laptop and will be upgrading to Windows 7 Pro in the near future. I'm contemplating swapping out the current hard-drive for a solid-state hard-drive.

A while ago I know SSD's had a bad reputation for early failure. Is this still an issue? Does anybody have a particular SSD they recommend?

Thanks for the help.

I've put SSDs in two laptops so far, no issues, total about 3-4 years operation.

Popped an SSD into my Macbook Pro a few months back. The responsiveness benefit is impressive. Storage media has its own intelligence to re-map around problem areas -- whether mechanical or electronic. They each have limitations, but in general, if you have pretty good backup habits, you're going to be fine going to SSD.

Have them in all of my machines, never an issue. Get a Crucial if you can.

I have about 300 SSDs in servers in my data center at work. In the past 5 or 6 years I've had two fail.

I have an SSD for my OS and a 7200 RPM hard drive for my VM's. Works well. +1 on Crucial.

My two are Crucial as well.

Have one in my Dell laptop 5 years.....no issues....

Dennis

I have a Samsung 840 Pro and a 1TB 7200 RPM mechanical drive for storage. Love it! It offers over provisioning to help with longevity. If you end up putting one in your computer and transferring all of your data over, make sure TRIM is enabled. You may also want to follow this guide to do a few tweaks that help with speed and longevity ... The SSD Optimization Guide Redesigned | The SSD Review or this one Sean's Windows 7 Install & Optimization Guide for SSDs & HDDs . FYI if you get a Samsung drive, they have an application that makes these tweaks more user friendly (IE just click a button to enable/disable a feature instead of doing a registry tweak.)

Windows 8 does a lot of these things already but Windows 7 does not.

Thanks, all, for the input. I have been looking at the Samsung drives and they seem to have a lot of high ratings from users.

I had a string of failures, which were all "A-Data". Fortunately, I have daily backups set on all of the office computers.

The Kingston units seem to work well.

I had two OCZ Vertex 2 SSDs fail, then I switched to an Intel (I forget the model) and it's been flawless for the past couple years. I just swapped my sister's SATA for a Crucial M500 SSD last week and so far so good. We're both using Macbook Pro 15" laptops with Intel i7 processors.

I've heard the Samsung SSDs are the way to go for PCs.

Dropbox.com is a great backup/universal access solution in case no one mentioned it. SSD data access is amazing.

If you like giving someone else unfettered access to your personal files, sure.

Is this to say old hard drives can be swapped with the new stuff ?

Not to mention as soon as a 3rd party has your data, no warrant is needed by government agencies to request access.

Certainly. But you get the best performance when you have very high speed controllers. But lag and data through put on SSD even with an old controller will still be excellent. You just don't need the top of the line SSD.

Yes, you must be careful what you put "up there". Most of what I have is not something I need to protect the privacy of.

But - good point.

We have to use SSD drives in the laptop that runs the camera in our airplane . A spinning hard drive just stops working at 10,000 feet or so. They require a cushion of air to float the heads. After 5 years it is still working fine.

The laptop I have in my garage is real old and it is the retired aircraft laptop. It is a laptop with a sticker on it that says designed for Windows XP so it came out about the time XP did. It still works fine but it was retired because it is old and slow.

How does it differ from Carbonite? (not trying to hijack this thread)

I replaced my HD a few months back and wish I had gone with an SSD. It a 2007 Mac Book Pro and just keeps plugging along. I do periodic backups on a 1TB LaCie.