Solid state drives (SSDs)

[JDArt]

Anyone ventured into the world of solid state drives yet? Would be interested in hearing first-hand impressions. Had a notebook drive crash recently, and I'm ready to be done with traditional disks.

[Take12]

SSD has been an unfullfilled promise for at least 30 years...*! The technology is still very much developing (check this too). But GB for GB it is still faaar too expensive for the consumer market compared to magnetic harddisks. That part hasn't changed in those same 30 years...

I wouldn't hold my breath for the short term, JD, unless you've got money to burn.

*like nuclear fusion technology has already been an unfullfilled promise for at least 50 years...

[Quad]

I recently put on the the inexpensive MLC based SSDs in my wife's tablet. It was a first generation one and it works a bit faster than her old drive. But not much faster (the latest drives are significantly faster). It is silent and so the laptop is a lot quieter. One of the side benefits is that it needs no defragmentation and I also turned off the harddrive shock protection software. A tablet PC tends to be a bit slow compared to a regular laptop due to all of the auxilary stuff that needs to run (virtual keyboard, snipping tools and such) so turning off a couple of background pieces of software was a nice bonus.

Eveything considered she is happy with the change.

I am going to rebuild my main machine in a month and will try a couple of the latest generation SSD drives in a RAID0 as the boot drive. I am travelling right now so I have to wait a while before I can try this out but one of the reasons I want to do this is for sound output from the machine. My hardrives right now are by far the loudest part of my computer. I am interested in the performance aspects as well since harddrives are a major bottleneck in a todays computers unless you want to put in multi drive RAID systems that are then quite noisey.

[mort]

I have used a Sony Vaio with a SSD in place of the HD. the performance was not good and it struggled to handle internet browser caching. It was an early generation SSD and newer models are reported to be better.