[aklug] Re: SSDs

Prices have come down and reliability/controller tech as increased to the point to where SSDs are a great solution IMO. As with HD's there are still occasional controller/SSD interaction quirks but as a whole the performance is a beast. If an app takes more than 5 seconds or so to boot now I find myself tapping my fingers (a long way from pressing Play on the tape drive then making a sandwich...) To give a real example - starting a Windows VM on my Mac used to take 5+ minutes to get to a boot screen from the Mac desktop, now it takes <45 seconds.

If you have a ton of data and don't want to spend all the cash up-front I've seen multiple people buy a SSD for your boot/system/app drive, then use the SSD to store all your media, which removes the burden of general system activities from the HD. All of the folks I've heard upgrade in this way have reported good results.

Strange to think that five years ago everyone recommended RAM as the primary upgrade you could do to boost performance, and now, in the world of 4+GB machines for cheap, speeding up the next bottleneck - the HD - has become the target.

At least for me, I say go for it. Once you are spoiled by 20-45 second computer boot times you won't want to go back.

Now that I've said all this, I've only been on a SSD in my computer for months rather than years so I might still have rose-tinted glasses. I've heard positive results from those who have used them longer but I haven't had long-term experience yet except in gadgets with flash memory and random hacked-up devices using CF/SD as their primary media.
-Alan

On Oct 18, 2012, at 11:52 PM, Christopher Howard <christopher.howard@frigidcode.com> wrote:

> Anybody on this list using SSDs instead of traditional hard drives? How
> has your experiences been with them? Reliability? Lifetime? Did it
> justify the higher price?
>
> I'm considering making the switch... have had a rather frustrating
> experience with my hard drives in the reliability area. Seems like I'm
> rolling a dice every time I buy one. Never know if one is going to last
> two years before having issues, or two months.
>
> --
> frigidcode.com
> indicium.us
>

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Received on Fri Oct 19 00:06:33 2012