If you were replacing a HD in a desktop – would you now go the SSD route?
I would use SSD as boot disk and one large normal as storage – but it’s 3x as expensive.

Depends. OS and applications – SSD (if I could afford it). TBs of movies and music – normal.

95% of use is Interweb browsing and simple Word/Excel. No storage of movies or music to speak of. The other 5% is a little games use.

With 120gb drives now £50 I can’t see why you wouldn’t use one for OS and programs as they are the best thing since sliced bread!

If you were replacing a HD in a desktop

How big is existing HD and how much have you used?

As above, if you don’t have masses of crap to store it’d be silly not to SSD

No,

95% of use is Interweb browsing and simple Word/Excel. No storage of movies or music to speak of. The other 5% is a little games use.

Especially not, as I can play Blu Ray rips from a normal HD then the only benefit of SSD is silence, after that it’s not really worth it for day to day use like that.

Yes. Use an SSD as a boot/os/programs drive, add an old fashioned HD for data if needed.

As above use an SSD for the OS and programs and use your old HD for your data

Lots on scan.co.uk

128MB enough IYO?

For normal use yes, for gaming you want more as most modern games are massive. This seems like good value for money at the moment:

http://www.dabs.com/products/crucial-256gb-mx100-sata-6gb-s-2-5–7mm-ssd—9-5mm-adapter-9HH0.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc%20product%20search&utm_campaign=Components%20and%20Storage%20-%20Hard%20Drives%20-%20Internal%20Hard%20Drives

Update – my new SSD is awesome!
Thanks for the advice.

That was quick! Congratulations on making the right decision 🙂

Update – my new SSD is awesome!
Thanks for the advice.

Wow – question to purchase to install to working in 20 hours !

FWIW last year I looked into similar and went for 750gb HDD running at 7200rpm (vs 5400 rpm replaced), it was £65 vs £250 for 500GB SSD. The HDD is half the speed of an SSD (based on internal spec of my machine, 2009 Mac Mini, which limits SSD to 50% of theoretical max). The new HDD is nearly twice as fast in practice as the old one.

The HDD is half the speed of an SSD

Be careful how you measure ‘speed’ as there are several factors. The actual data transfer rate is one thing. However where SSDs win big is seek time. In a HD the head has to phyiscally move aorund to find stuff, this is the ticking noise you hear so it’s clearly doing it a lot. In an SSD it can access any part of the storage instantly.

@molgrips – understood thanks, I use BlackMagic Speedtest. As my machine is SATA 2 it cannot exceed 250 mb/s whereas the the ssd’s are capable of 500, my WD Black gives 110. Bottom line is I am happy enough and the SSD was too expensive for size I needed !

If you were replacing a HD in a desktop – would you now go the SSD route?

SSD, and have done for 6 years now.

Also as above, comparing sequential transfer rates SSD seem barely faster than an HDD. But that’s not what matters or what you notice, it’s loosing the 7ms seek time on each random access. Look at the random read/write performance, there’s 100s of times performance difference, even on SATA2.

Also be wary of looking at numbers for big SSDs and assuming your identical model lower capacity one will be the same. It’ll be slower – less chips to access in parallel.

I’d advise anyone to get an SSD these days, and stopping spinning rusty plates like an animal 😉

Built a new custom machine a couple of months ago with a Plextor M.2 boot disk, a couple of SSDs for scratch and a 3TB HDD (main storage is a NAS).

Granted it’s replaced a 4 year old PC but I can boot it and be editing pictures in Lightroom before the old machine has finished loading the W7 boot screen.

I wouldn’t buy a computer without an SSD now.

SSD for OS.

Other drive for storage.

Laptop+SSD = 🙂

What about hybrid drives? Just built a desktop with a 1TB hdd with 8GB of cache. Boots up fast.

Boots up fast.

Who’s booting computers these days? suspend to ram