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Soldid State Drive

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14 replies

by systemcheck

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The question at stake here is, what are the pros and cons of a solid state drive versus the standard mechanical hard drive?

14 replies

by jamesrl

Solid State Drive:
Pros:
No moving parts, no wear
Faster than conventional
In theory much longer MTBF

Cons:
Expensive
Limited sizes
No long term reliability figures

James

by jamesrl

You probably won't see much of an improvement on an older system, you want to make sure you have SATA II.

James

by jamesrl

Because of where they are in the technology cycle, they will probably be much much cheaper next year.

Unless money is no object, I'd pass.

James

by systemcheck

how would you know if your pc has sata II, for instance i know my pc only has sata but is sata I or II, and i thought they had some for ide or was i wrong about that

by jamesrl

There are different SSDs that will work with IDE, SATA or SATAII, its just that I'm not convinced that given the slower bus speeds of IDE and even SATA that you would see a big speed improvement over a fairly fast standard drive. And if there isn't a performance improvement, can you justify the expense?

Your motherboard specs should help you determine if you have SATA or SATA II.

James

by charliespencer

And have you priced solid state drives? You can install two conventional drives in a RAID 1 config for less than the same amount of solid state space.

by systemcheck

just enough for an OS maybe 60 gb and my mobo has a fsb of 1300ish will i see an increase on my system (core 2 duo 3.0)

by .martin.

their lifespan is less than that of regular mechanical drives.

that is, the have the capability of less read/writes than their mechanical counterparts.

so if you were going to use this drive for windows, the amount of writes for a drive is 1000 to 10000 for Multi-Level Cell SSD's and up to 100000 for Single-Level Cell SSD's

by jck

It was the write cycles that are really detrimental to the SSDs.

Hence why ext3 Linux partitioning is not recommended unless you reduce the regularity of the journalling occuring on the system.

I'm building a home system with one in it, and I can't wait to see how fast the thing really works.

by tonythetiger

but not so much any more. under typical usage, you can probably go twenty years before you lose 10% of the sectors (So don't let it get 90% full :) )

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