Thoughts on a solid state drive?

SSD's from a reputable manufacturer are blazing fast, and reliable as the day is long. According to some torture tests that have been done, some will write several thousand terabytes of information before they just go bad.........several thousand terabytes, or several petabytes. Let that sink in. Your hard drives will likely go bad before a good SSD will.

This is an extremely long thread, but it is what Kbrady was talking about. SSDs are more reliable than mechanical hard drives, and will typically last much longer. SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm - Page 56

King Arthur I'm sorry you have had a bad experience with your ssd.
As you can see reading this thread the rest of us have nothing but good to say about ssd's.

Price is relative to ones desires and ability to pay.

Here is example of two Intel 120 gb ssd I have bought and still use.

March 2011 $286.00
June 2014 $100.00

Bought both from the same local dealer.

Go for it Max. I'm no computer wiz but I've found the difference in speed is night and day. I researched a lot before settling on the Samsung 840 Pro and picked up a 256gb for $165 Australian. A WD 1tb black at the same time cost me $90 but I'm glad I went for the SSD as the primary drive. I've got Windows 7 O/S, Microsoft office, all the necessary antivirus and malware programs plus various other programs to cover everything I want to do. Total space taken up on the SSD is only just 70gb so I still have around 170gb to play with and still have the WD spinner for storage and any rarely used programs. Best decision I've made since I left home to get a newspaper in 1975 and never went back!
Pros: faster, quieter, more reliable
Cons: A bit more cost but well worth it.

Storage is still the slowest piece of hardware in your computer. Slower than the CPU, Graphics card and RAM. A hard drive is exponentially slower than an SSD and an SSD is still slower than the other components. For the foreseeable future, that's the way it's gonna be.........storage is gonna be the bottleneck in any system. That being said, there is no area in which an SSD doesn't outperform a HDD by a substantial amount......sequential read/write, Random 4k's and access times. It's been said above in this thread, but I will stress this point......there is absolutely no piece of hardware you can buy that will be more significant an upgrade than an SSD. So by adding an SSD into your system, you are boosting the slowest component up a substantial amount, and getting it closer in terms of raw speed to your other components.

Once you get an SSD, you will never settle for less.

lffoar said:

Go for it Max. I'm no computer wiz but I've found the difference in speed is night and day. I researched a lot before settling on the Samsung 840 Pro and picked up a 256gb for $165 Australian. A WD 1tb black at the same time cost me $90 but I'm glad I went for the SSD as the primary drive. I've got Windows 7 O/S, Microsoft office, all the necessary antivirus and malware programs plus various other programs to cover everything I want to do. Total space taken up on the SSD is only just 70gb so I still have around 170gb to play with and still have the WD spinner for storage and any rarely used programs. Best decision I've made since I left home to get a newspaper in 1975 and never went back!
Pros: faster, quieter, more reliable
Cons: A bit more cost but well worth it.

kbrady1979 said:

Storage is still the slowest piece of hardware in your computer. Slower than the CPU, Graphics card and RAM. A hard drive is exponentially slower than an SSD and an SSD is still slower than the other components. For the foreseeable future, that's the way it's gonna be.........storage is gonna be the bottleneck in any system. That being said, there is no area in which an SSD doesn't outperform a HDD by a substantial amount......sequential read/write, Random 4k's and access times. It's been said above in this thread, but I will stress this point......there is absolutely no piece of hardware you can buy that will be more significant an upgrade than an SSD. So by adding an SSD into your system, you are boosting the slowest component up a substantial amount, and getting it closer in terms of raw speed to your other components.

Once you get an SSD, you will never settle for less.

I have 2 computers with SSD's and one SSD shipping to me as I type. My wife and I have a Toshiba 256 GB SSD boot drive in our main machines. I have a Kingston 120 GB one in a 2009 Dell T3400 Precision workstation which I think is SATA II. I put a Kingston 120 GB drive in an Asus Eepc and it made the netbook very responsive and usable. In all cases the computers are far faster than increasing the ram CPU speed or any other tweaks you can think of. The operating system boots in seconds and the programs start instantly. On the point of long term reliability there have been horror stories but they are generally more reliable and not susceptible to shock. They have no moving parts. I am saving up for another 256 GB SSD for my other main PC. An SSD is the best upgrade you can make for a PC without doubt.

The Kingston drive is here: Amazon.com: Kingston Digital 120GB SSDNow V300 SATA 3 2.5 (7mm height) with Adapter Solid State Drive 2.5-Inch SV300S37A/120G: Computers & Accessories

The Toshiba Amazon.com: Toshiba 256GB Q Series Pro PC Internal Solid State Drive (HDTS325XZSTA): Computers & Accessories

My aim is to put SSD boot drives in all my computers over the next year or so. 256 GB for the better machines and 120GB for the rest.
Get an SSD, you will not regret it.

kbrady1979 said:

Storage is still the slowest piece of hardware in your computer. Slower than the CPU, Graphics card and RAM. A hard drive is exponentially slower than an SSD and an SSD is still slower than the other components. For the foreseeable future, that's the way it's gonna be.........storage is gonna be the bottleneck in any system. That being said, there is no area in which an SSD doesn't outperform a HDD by a substantial amount......sequential read/write, Random 4k's and access times. It's been said above in this thread, but I will stress this point......there is absolutely no piece of hardware you can buy that will be more significant an upgrade than an SSD. So by adding an SSD into your system, you are boosting the slowest component up a substantial amount, and getting it closer in terms of raw speed to your other components.

Once you get an SSD, you will never settle for less.

Just for an example, the access time (from the time you push the button until the hard drive starts opening the program) for the average Mechanical hard drive is 14-15ms, the access time for any decent SSD is 0.1ms.

essenbe said:

kbrady1979 said:

Storage is still the slowest piece of hardware in your computer. Slower than the CPU, Graphics card and RAM. A hard drive is exponentially slower than an SSD and an SSD is still slower than the other components. For the foreseeable future, that's the way it's gonna be.........storage is gonna be the bottleneck in any system. That being said, there is no area in which an SSD doesn't outperform a HDD by a substantial amount......sequential read/write, Random 4k's and access times. It's been said above in this thread, but I will stress this point......there is absolutely no piece of hardware you can buy that will be more significant an upgrade than an SSD. So by adding an SSD into your system, you are boosting the slowest component up a substantial amount, and getting it closer in terms of raw speed to your other components.

Once you get an SSD, you will never settle for less.

Just for an example, the access time (from the time you push the button until the hard drive starts opening the program) for the average Mechanical hard drive is 14-15ms, the access time for any decent SSD is 0.1ms.

Very true......and that is Real World performance that you can feel. Random 4K Reads/Writes are exponentially faster as well, which is what the OS consists of. Here is a snippet of my Samsung 830 SSD and a Seagate 7200 RPM 2TB HDD......note the difference in 4K scores.