[Data]

Ok chaps, so for a bit of fun and maybe slightly educational here is a poll on SSD’s

Please everyone take part if you can.

Thank You 

[GT40]

Of course Data I voted "I would like an SSD".

So many reasons to be violent and hit the computer and break the hard drive.

[Data]

So many reasons to be violent and hit the computer and break the hard drive.

Would one of the reasons be because your computer is so old, slow and extremely frustrating GT    (joke)

Yes I see your point, you do need an SSD    I knew this could be fun 

Thanks for the vote   

[Freddy]

I voted too, you can guess how.

I noticed my SSD is about £65.00 now on Amazon, that's about 50p/GB.

[Diesel]

I am highly impressed with my SSD, still running flawlessly and a Boot time of about 10 seconds.  The only down side though, when my SSD was fitted, it ate my Graphics Card whole, leaving no trace what so ever that the Card had ever even existed. 

[Data]

I noticed my SSD is about £65.00 now on Amazon, that's about 50p/GB.

Yeah and as SSD prices come down and HDD seems to have gone up a little it is making the choice of SSD over HDD easier.

There also seems to be a trend of using external 5400RPM USB HDD for holding large amounts of data.

Why 5400RPM and not 7200RPM drives? The slower drives tend to be more reliable over the years and have less chance of failing.

[Art]

1). When the price of SSD's come down to earth to the point that it becomes practical to own and use one, then I might consider getting one.
2). I have a Terrabyte drive that runs very fast and quite reliably at the present.
3). I really do not have a use for an extremely fast drive...I don't play extensive graphics driven games or 3D rendering that might require writes to a drive.

So...I guess for the time...not a big deal...for me.

If given one and it was large enough to be practical then I'd take it.
I'd have to let you know if and how much I like it after trying it.

[Data]

Thanks for taking part Art 

Personally I think the price of SSD is pretty down to earth, about £70 will get you a 120GB drive, perfect for windows and all your programs (so the important things run fast) then use the 1 TB drive for all your documents and data. 

The main problem I encounter when up-grading peoples computers to SSD is that no one has a windows disk, they have pre built computers that only have restore disks and they will not do the job, so quite often it’s an SSD and a windows disk.

One of my customers recently phoned me up at 8am (got me out of bed) just to say “This computer is so fast, thank you” it was nice of him but 2 hours later would have been nicer.     

[Freddy]

Yes thanks to Data's advice I have a very quick PC now.  All the things I need to be fast are on the SSD, ie things I use a lot; Adobe CS for example and games.  And I still have the 1TB drive in there for less frequently used stuff and for storage.  Works a treat.  Can't think of a good reason to upgrade anything at the moment, which is a welcome change lol

[Art]

Sure but apples and apples or oranges / oranges...no matter.
Memory storage 70 quid for 120 GB? for about 70 quid (perhaps a tad more, YMMV), one
could secure a TB drive...yes...the old fashioned type with sectors and platters, etc.

Still, byte for byte, I will get more bang for my buck by sticking with my standard spinning
hard drive. Given that nothing lasts forever and everything will fail, it's just a matter of time,
they (developers) need to beef up the competition in a much larger way before I byte and
it's not a money issue...it's purely principle for this situation.

Remember those flash drives that were way out in orbit when they first arrived? A year or
so later, they were are most discount stores and their size had increased over 4 fold. So give
them time, and like all things technical, the performance will increase and the price will settle
down to earth a bit better. Just my $.02.
 

[Bragi]

my pc is about to hit 6 years. It'll soon be replaced, so it would be a bit of a waste of money to upgrade now. The speed of SSD's does sound appealing. Dont' know about the price yet.

[Data]

I don’t think SSD will ever get near the price of HDD per Gigabyte, it has too many advantages over HDD, lets have a quick look at them.

   1. Silent operation

   2. Less power consumption

   3. Heat, there is very little heat generated by the SSD, unlike HDD that should be kept cool at all costs.   

   4. No need to ever defrag

   5. Seven times the throughput or Seven times faster than HDD

   6. (Possibly its best advantage) The ability to access multiple parts of the drive at the same time or so very close to the same time that it isn’t noticeable. No latency.

   7. Windows boots between 5 to 10 seconds and stays booting fast even after months of windows up-dates.

   8. My favourite of all is the shutdown time, click shutdown and the computer does just that no more waiting as the computer says shutting down.

   9. All your programs will start up much quicker than with an HDD, not just a little faster but noticeable quicker.

   10. No moving parts to go wrong, 100% solid state.

[Art]

Some good and interesting points, Data, thanks!

After doing a bit of research on the subject, I found the following:

Some really nice info on SSD's from top to bottom:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

Some distressing news:
Each block of a flash-based SSD can only be erased (and therefore written) a limited number of times before it fails.

While SSDs appear to be more reliable than HDDs[63][64], researchers at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research "are adamant that today's SSDs aren't an order of magnitude more reliable than hard drives".[65] SSD failures are often catastrophic, with total data loss. While HDDs can fail in this manner as well, they often give warning that they are failing, allowing much or all of their data to be recovered.

Another Really informative site:
http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-maximize-the-life-of-your-ssd

It appears that TRIM can be both a Good thing and a Bad thing...hmmm....

An SSD often does not give much warning before it fails. Electronic components don’t begin to grind or buzz as they grow older. They work – and then they don’t.

When an SSD suddenly goes silent, it’s bad news. The problem is that solid state drives are new and recovering data from them is not like recovering data from a disc drive. Gillware, a storage recovery company, published a report stating that “solid-state technology represents an entirely new set of engineering problems to research teams at data recovery organizations”.

If a solid state drive fails there’s not much that you, the consumer, can do to recover it. Your first step would be to use decent data recovery software such as OnTrack EasyRecovery or Wondershare Data Recovery, but neither option is free.

The prognosis is worse for drives that use TRIM, which is commonly considered a must-have for consumer hard drives. TRIM works to keep the data on your SSD organized so that it can be easily and quickly access, but the downside is that TRIM aggressively deletes files in the process.

If you are unable to recover data yourself you will need to rely on a data recovery service like Drive Savers. This won’t be cheap, so if the data on the drive is not absolutely essential you’ll want to skip it. If you do need the data I suggest you first call the hard drive manufacturer’s customer service line. They may be able to refer you to a specific company they work with.

One company said that even with lots of writes and erasures a typical SSD should last between 10 - 20 years, in which case it will have become seriously outdated.

I have learned much but am still staying with my HDD for the moment (or at least until I hear that whirring, clicking sound...)

[Freddy]

Good points both, some interesting stuff there.

Art, that's why I backup my data on a separate drive, some of my stuff is backed up in two places..

I've had HDD die on me in the past, I don't feel any more concerned about the SSD going belly up.

If it lasts 3 years I will be happy.  In the meantime I continue to enjoy it's benefits

[Diesel]

I'm with you there Freddy, the two machines that I currently have on my Home Net Work with SSD's fitted, only use the SSD for OS. Therefore, any SSD crash would only require a reinstall as all other Data is stored else where (HDD).

What this amounts to is Change. Change in most circumstances is good. Does the SSD sound a death knell for the HDD ?, currently, I would say not.

But, was it not said, that the Home PC will never catch on because it is to unreliable and expensive. 

We each need to make our own choices, right, wrong or indifferent.