Two words – JUST DO IT!!! ok… that's three words, but the point remains!

I've been pondering doing this for a while, finally bit the bullet and purchased a Corsair 'Force Series' 60GB SSD for £100 from scan.co.uk. Just completed installing it and all I can say is, WOW, what a difference it makes… granted it's a fresh install of Windows 7, but boot times have been slashed to around 10-15sec (I'd say at least 50% faster, if not more).

What's even better is that as soon as the desktop is open you can do things, no waiting around for a bit while your startup programs load… it's awesome! I'll get used to it pretty quickly (as you always do with any performance boost) but for the moment it really is superb! Also, everything just 'feels' snappier, programs are opening in a blink as do windows etc, it all 'feels' much much quicker to use…

BTW, I'm no IT techie, just a home PC builder/enthusiast, so don't bombard me with technical questions, I probably won't be able to answer them 😆

Previous to this post i didnt know what i wanted for christmas.

Even if i do buy it myself 😛

They'll probably have dropped further in price by then, this one was £200 at launch… just make sure you do some research on them, as far as I can tell you want one with a 'Sandforce' controller for optimum performance, though no doubt a newer/greater option will appear soon, it's a rapidly developing field!

Jeff Atwood's latest piece over on Coding Horror is worth a read:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-state-hard-drives.html

Short story: "The current king of the hill seems to be the Crucial RealSSD C300."

I see the rpice has stayed high for some time now. More people need to buy them to start the price drop. off you go lads.

I did look at the C300, but to get the 'full power' version (with fast read AND write speeds) you need to go to the 128GB model, which is £231, the 64GB version has the same fast read speeds, but it's write speeds are quite a bit slower at 70MB/s (vs 275MB/s for the Corsair…)

They do need to frop in price more, but they're getting there! I don't mind being a kind of 'early adopter' I like having new tech 🙂

Psychie – even the 40Gb has a claimed read speed of 280mb/s and write speed of 270mb/s

SSD thingy

or am I missing something?

How big do you need them to be?

Yep, with the Force SSD's you get the full power in any sizing, I was commenting on the Crucial C300 versions. The 60GB Corsair is only £17 more than the 40GB, so worth getting!

Sorry, just me being dense! 🙄

How big do you need them to be?

Personally, I'm just using mine as a boot drive, so 60GB should do me for this purpose. although, I would've liked a 128GB model, just a bit too expensive to justify!

I'm a convert. I've been using the 60 GB Corsair SSD for a few months now. Read and write are both at around 275Mbps. 60GB is fine for a W7 boot drive. W7 boot time is massively improved (yes very subjective I know) over a traditional drive.

Converted. OS X boots in about 7 seconds.

Apps launch in a second or so.

Ace.

I'd have one if I could get a mount kit for the second bay in my laptop. Seems they only sell them in the US.

mount kit??? wtf….
fix it in with some silicon sealant you tart!!

seriously though i`ve had one for yonks
64Gb
got tons of sh1t on it already and it still boots in seconds
best upgrade ever imho !

So, according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM#Operating_system_and_SSD_support

If you're running anything earlier than Windows 7 or linux 2.6.33, it will start out fast and then gradually turn to treacle. Does anyone know if this is true?

Yeap! It's fast alright.

I built my new PC in July with SSD as boot drive and cold start from pressing the power button to Windows (including typing in password to Windows start up page) only takes 30 seconds. Then I tried my old laptop and noticed that it took ages just to get to Windows. The different is night and day so I consider this the best investment for my new build. It's a 80GB Intel SSD by the way.

😀

Heavily used drive (boot). Fairly completely filled with large programs. Rapid sector failure follows. Not for me I don't think. If you only have 10 gig on a 60 gig drive and use the computer for nothing more than browsing the web, maybe.

Add that to the fact that on a desktop, hibernate effectively replaces power-off and gives me a W7 "boot" time of about 30-40 seconds on a mechanical drive with the desktop ready to use, what's the point?

In hibernation my boot time is less than 10 seconds. 😆

But I'm doing it on a £19 80 gig drive and during boot I can take a sip of coffee, you can't 😀

Just got some SSDs for my work PC….. in RAID 0, with a hardware controller.

It's astonishingly quick, compared to the 15k SCSI RAID 0 I had before.

Need one for my home laptop now…

Funnily enough that (SSD+raid0) is exactly what we're looking at for our stress/fea workstations for ultra fast solving. Still stupid expensive ATM though.

gives me a W7 "boot" time of about 30-40 seconds on a mechanical drive with the desktop ready to use, what's the point?

In hibernation my boot time is less than 10 seconds.

so, that's a couple of hundred quid to save yourself 20-30 seconds per day 😕

SSDs sound like the slip on shoe of the PC world 😉

Solid state failure rates would be substantially lower than mechanical storage also 🙂

It will be the way to go, as with all things tech the price will come down and make it a no brainer.

Is there any advantage to using one of these on my Mac?
I normally only reboot every month, whether it needs it or not.

so, that's a couple of hundred quid to save yourself 20-30 seconds per day

It also makes the system a lot more 'snappier', plus games etc load quicker as do levels within the game (if you install to the SSD obviously!)… Yep, it's expensive (though £100 isn't that bad), and it is an extravegance, but it does provide tangible benefits 🙂 Of course, after a few days of using it, you'll get used to the speed and not even notice it! 😆

SSD allows use of the 'disc' as fast virtual memory – can make a huge difference in memory intensive applications (such as the FEA I mentioned).

Otherwise, yes, it's a very expensive way to willy wave about how fast your computer boots 🙂

I just ordered my ssd at the weekend. It run the os and possibly Photoshop. Looking forward to it. Will be using normal drives for everything else

mount kit??? wtf….
fix it in with some silicon sealant you tart!!

(-: Sadly, it's not that simple. Dell in their wisdom provided a second HDD bay in my laptop, but not the connector. It requires an adapter (a 'transposer' or something IIRC) to offer up the SATA connections from the motherboard to the drive. The lack of mouning cage I could probably jury-rig, but the lack of connector is more of a show-stopper.

Last time I looked, Dell don't want to know (or more accurately, are clueless) third parties were asking silly money (like £100) for the kit. After I posted here, I had another look and found one on fleabay for £26 quid with a 'make me an offer' option. Put in an offer for £20 and just had it kicked back, so, meh, I can't afford an SSD quite yet anyway.

It will be the way to go, as with all things tech the price will come down and make it a no brainer.

I'm fairly sure that this going to turn out to be prophetic. Compared to other technological advances, the conventional hard disk is still relatively bobbins. SSD, or some other solid state technology, has to replace traditional disks at some point. Give it ten years and we'll all be sitting round laughing at how we put up with spinny disks for so long.

SSD allows use of the 'disc' as fast virtual memory – can make a huge difference in memory intensive applications

I was idly rolling this around in my head earlier. SSD has a limited number of times that it can be written to before failures start occuring. This is a wildly exaggerated issue in certain circles, but I wonder if storing on SSD something like a swapfile that has such a high rate of change is such a great idea. I need to research that I think.

Solid state failure rates would be substantially lower than mechanical storage also

"would be"? With only 10,000 (MEAN time to failure) writes each sector is trashed and needs blanking off and never using again. The controller looks after that, but slowly your drive shrinks. The more you use it and the more you store on it, the more that problem increases.

Netbooks, with low power and little use – fine, but not home/gaming/workstations unless money is no object to you. As above, if you have your swap file on the SSD you're trashing it. If you take it off, you're not using it's potential.

From Microsoft themselves,

If the page file is enabled, it can potentially double the number of write requests to the flash storage device, which may reduce the lifetime of the flash storage device in half.
…
If you choose to have a page file, we recommend limiting the size of the page file to 1.5 times the size of RAM.

I think that, coupled with the fact that if I were taking the SSD route I'd still have a regular drive for data, I'd be moving my swapfile to the second disk. You get a performance increase by having the swapfile on a separate disk to your OS anyway, so I suspect that the net performance difference either way will be negligible. (I'm guessing here, could be wrong; I'd have to try it and see).

not just the swap file, but also event logging and updating of file access times that count towards the write cycles. not sure about windows, but in linux it's all very configurable to minimise this.
but the killing of them really is exaggerated. they all have spare media beyond their quoted size, and all have clever algorithms to balance write cycles, so I'd guess you'd need a pretty full SSD with heavy write access to actually kill one to the point where reduction in usable sectors becomes an issue.

I'd like to see examples of lifespans etc in my intended use before I invested in it. I've had enough flash pen failures to distrust them.

From what I've seen / read, I'm with Andy on this (and said as much earlier). By the time they're worn to a point of being a problem, they're probably going to be due for replacement anyway. (And by then, you'll get ten times the storage for half the price).

We bought cheap ones at work for use in our email servers (tens of millions of emails a day). They broke within 6 weeks. The expensive ones are going great guns. With SSD, don't buy cheap.

By the time they're worn to a point of being a problem, they're probably going to be due for replacement anyway.

Drives are ready for replacement when they fail? I'm still using 40 and 80 gig drives from 1997 in one machine, with no faults/bad sectors so far? I'd like to see quantifiable evidence though, as without it we're really just voicing concerns that may or may not be unfounded.