why the move from mechanical hdds to ssds? it doesn't make any good sense to me at all. the speed factor is absolutely minimal, sometimes even non-existent from what i've seen from people using them, and then there is the whole numbered amount of write cycles thing. i mean what's the point of switching to a drive that more than doubles price over a mechanical one for the same amount of space, has a fewer number of write cycles, and is only faster by a few milliseconds, one or two seconds at the most??? does not make any sense all... maybe someone can explain to me how changing to an ssd is not stupid...
Then you're looking at wrong benchmarks. SSDs are used in professional environments too. Do you think professionals would just by an SSD if it had the same performance? They don't buy it because if the name, "SSD" is not that spectacular. They are expensive yes, and I wouldn't buy one right now either. But if you have the money an SSD is epic. But you shouldn't be so focused on the prices/GB, as SSDs aren't meant to be mass storage devices today. They are meant to carry the OS and applications, all huge data storage happens on HDDs. The speed is at least twice that of a regular HDD, and it gets even better with new SSDs, so if that's "no advantage" according to you than I think something is wrong...
then prove it with some "real" benchmarks then instead of just talking trash... no advantage until there's proof which no one has offered other than what manufacturers of them "say"
I agree with Stayboogy the price isn't worth the performance increase. But remember this is new technology, give it a year or two more and the prices will get better. The performance over a standard mechanical disk is excellent, you see the difference when you have to access many files at once it just pops up. But it's not worth the money, mechanical disks are just too cheap to be wasting money on SSD's.
To expand on acrsn's comment above, since an SSD uses significantly less power, you will notice a dramatic increase in battery life when used in a laptop. A few extra hours is definitely do-able. Just my 2 cents.
You know one could compare numbers and charts all day and still not get a true perspective. Take it from someone that's been using a pc for years, buying an SSD at a cost of £120 was the single most worthwhile upgrade I've ever performed. Ignoring numbers, the responsiveness / general feel of the OS is noticeable in a big way. I will say that price is an issue but a year after moving to SSD I can now get double the capacity for the same money .
So true ^^^^ I bought OCZ Vertex 2 60GB. over a year ago for ~$170 and now I just got 120GB for the same price, same brand.
Something is wrong with this thread. People who don't have any practical experience about SSDs are arguing against it. (Not worth to buy, more battery consuming, 'a waste of money'). All the others who have a SSD and say it is worth to buy one. Do they have to argue with benchmarks? Why not believe them what they say that they are far better?! Sure SSDs are more expensive, but they have a lot of more performance. The question is: Is it worth to pay more for the performance gain? To decide about that you need to test SSDs or to go to a friend and GET practical experience. Now my opinion: To buy a SSD is the best 'upgrade' you can do! Alex has encountered the same, I did, everybody will. A small one as sys drive is enough (60-120-240 GB), I also recommend to install the most used applications on it. Why is it the best upgrade? You will notice about already at first boot. The OS boots a lot faster and the applications open a lot faster. The speed increment is far better than you'd expect. In fact you will be surprised about! And IT WILL last, no matter what's about OS. You never need to reistall the OS because it slows down due to fragmentation, registry / applications left-over..... It just feels like a faster PC with a freshly installed OS, every day. A sys HDD is a bottleneck! Everytime when you switch on your PC you will notice about the performance gain while booting and working (r/w access occurs any time) Believe it or not. The only 'mistake' you can do is to buy the wrong SSD. Of course there are slow SSDs available...but the access time of them is anyway a lot better compared to a HDD. Sys partitions have a lot of small files, so read speed (MByte/s) is an important value at small files together with the access time.(seek time). OCZ SSDs for instance rock.
Just for the record, my Macbook Pro went from about 6.5 to 8.5 hours after switching over. I can't say this is what everybody experiences but I definitely have. I'll leave it at that.
Yes sure. Everybody needs to make his own decision. Same question is : When is the right time to upgrade any other component of the PC (CPU, GPU, RAM, MOBO.....?) Before I think about an RAM or CPU upgrade I'd go for a sys SSD.
Well said Yen. When I first moved my system partition to SSD i was using a Q6600, an Nvidia 8600 gt and a Gigabyte mobo using a G41 chipset . Slightly dated specs to be honest but the OCZ Vertex 2E made a massive difference, it felt like a new machine. I've now upgraded to Sandybridge ( I7 2600k ) on a Z68 board so my rig is permanently at warp speed...., LOL I want to reiterate that if I only had £100 to spend on an upgrade then I'm in no doubt that SSD as sys drive would be my advice.
I have a corsair force3 120 GB sata 600 working as 300 in an 880 Gigabyte. My old disk was an ide SG one which I’d adapted to internal self-made usb connection in order to run as ahci mode. The upgrade is similar as if you use to go walking and now flying. My wife laptop is a vaio fw series. Internet and lot of photos. That’s why I need little more storage capacity and installed a Mushkin Callisto Deluxe2 240GB sata II. I know isn’t the best SSD in the world but it makes a big difference to the prior Toshiba 5200 sata II. Got a P55 from Gigabyte as well and I’m planning a new upgrade next year. I don’t argue about something that seems to me obvious. Technology is life shorted and now is the moment in my opinion.
not to insult anyone, because there are some really knowledgeable people here, but, all of you can say what you want about how your machine "feels" more responsive, or "feels" faster, but that crap is only subjective. i can say that my car "feels" faster when i use premium gas as opposed to the cheap stuff, but that is just subjective crap. numbers don't lie. and i've yet to see any numbers posted by anyone, or online for that matter that prove that an SSD is that much "faster" than a mechanical one, especially to the point of being three to four times the price. say what you will about "feel" and so forth. prove it with numbers. where are the benchmarks? still missing from this thread. sorry, but subjective faster is not faster, period.