I’m not sure how much more I cna elaborate. Are SSDs really all that? Would I see awesome loading performance with Windows and the like?
Speed for things that are constrained by disk i/o are much faster. Booting, certainly. Some things don’t use a lot of disk i/o, and would be improved less. On laptops, the battery life is also much better with SSD. If you can get by with a relatively small one (say, 128GB or less), I think it’s worth doing. If you need a lot of disk, it starts to get prohibitively expensive and is unlikely to be worth it unless you do a ton of stuff that’s constrained by disk speed. Also, keep in mind, some SSDs tend to be unreliable. It’s always important to have good backups, but I’d say it’s even more important with SSD. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
Two other points in favor of SSDs: They don’t make any noise, and aren’t likely to break if you drop them. I haven’t seen the horrific failure rates that FoundWaldo quotes, but my sample size is very small. My own little netbook has an SSD and boots to Ubuntu in about ten seconds. It shuts down in two. It’s also two years old and going strong.
I have SSD in this computer.
With SSD, I have found you get what you pay for. Not the part of a computer to pinch pennies on.
The big downside compared to traditional hard drives is that they have a limited read write life by nature. The other two are mentioned - price and failure rate. May or may not come into play for your application. But they are smaller, lighter, quieter, faster, use less power, create less heat, and are just inherently cooler.
Well, they do in principle, but where I’ve seen the math done on tech websites based on heavy usage, that limited lifetime is a decade or more. That’s far longer than I’ve ever used a conventional drive.
Haven’t had a chance to play with one, but I’m considering getting one for Christmas. With a modern PC, you are more frequently waiting on the hard disc than the processor. I’ve heard good reports, but they are still fairly pricy, less reliable and have a shorter lifespan than a hard disc. You also need to make sure your OS has trim support to maintain performance (Windows XP and Vista(?) do not).
In a desktop PC, it’s typical to have an SSD boot drive and a secondary hard disc for data. You want the OS and applications installed on the SSD. Storing things like mp3s and video on the hard disc will not impact performance, as they will happily stream the files.
SSDs are great (I have a 120gb intel one on this computer), but I wouldn’t trust some of the earlier sandforce models (probably most of the ones you are seeing super discounted right now). It seems like a lot of SSDs have controller/board failures, rather than any problems with write exhaustion or failing memory. Which means when they fail, your data goes “poof” instead of like with a hard drive where you often can get most of it off a “failed” hard drive if you are paying attention and catch it when it first starts to fail. So third the “you need backups if you use one” camp.
A SSD is the single most noticeable upgrade for everyday purposes. Your CPU and memory is probably more than adequate, assuming it’s less than 5 years old. Just about every time you’re waiting for your computer to do something, it’s due to the hard drive. With a SSD, programs just open, without thrashing the disk for several seconds.
Nobody really knows about the actual life span of a SSD. As for reliability, there are definitely brands and models you should avoid. Often these problems are fixed by firmware updates, but that may take a while and in the mean time your operating system and every program you use is degrading rapidly. I bought a cheapass OCZ Vertex Plus when they were on sale. Since it had a rebate I couldn’t return it to the store when it started acting up. So I had to wait several weeks for a fix from OCZ. The hassle was not worth the ~$50 I saved vs. a more reliable model.
I recently built a new computer using a 120 GB SSD. Including the post, my machine boots up Win 7 in under 25 seconds. Word/Excel etc open in under 1 sec.
If you are adding one to an older machine you may not get the same blazing fast speeds. To get the 500+ MB/sec transfer rates you need a new motherboard with a SATA3 port.
I think, even with SATA1 or 2, that most people would still see a big difference. It’s the random access time, not sustained transfer speed, that holds back a lot of tasks like booting or launching a bunch of programs. The sequential transfer speed has the biggest effect when the computer is transferring large contiguous blocks to or from the hard drive. In normal sorts of uses, I can imagine that it would make a difference for game load times, where there’s 500 mb of textures that have to be loaded into memory.
We put SS boot drives in our new PC’s last year. Mine has been fine but my husbands has failed twice. Both within the warranty period but very annoying.
I love the boot speed though, it’s a marked contrast to my corporate laptop.
Absolutely worth it.
A 2-year old computer with an SSD will feel faster than a brand new one with an HDD. Because the times that you notice your computer being annoying and slow are the times that it has to page to disk to get some data.
My laptop boots in 15 seconds. That’s at least twice as fast as any other computer I’ve owned.
They do (maybe) fail more quickly. But that’s just a minor inconvenience because you’re backing everything up every night, right? I mean, it’s not like HDDs are a paragon of longevity. Sooner or later, your storage medium is going to die and take all your data with it, so make sure you’ve got more than one copy of “all your data”.