Solid State Drives

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Andyman

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Andy Reed
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Hi,

I'm currently specing up a new Dell laptop and I'm thinking about harddrive options. Dell now offer decent sized solid state drives and I'm wondering whether there is enough of an advantage to warrant it. Has anyone used a laptop with SSD? Any real advantage to speak of?

Andy.
 
Got one in my eeepc, they are certainly fast and silent, but until the price drops drastically you'd do far better with a normal drive I think.
 
I have one in my dell mini (8Gb) it is fast with windows xp and it does get hot -no fan- but it is quiet.

I don't think it will be long before we see them in cameras.
 
admirable said:
I have one in my dell mini (8Gb) it is fast with windows xp and it does get hot -no fan- but it is quiet.

I don't think it will be long before we see them in cameras.
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The problem with having them in cameras is they won't be removable, and if they are they'll be just like CF cards. Won't happen for a while. As internal space perhaps, but it won't be replacing the removable memory card for a while that's for sure.
 
I'm not saying they will be removable, I just think as prices come down they will end up in cameras as backups. More so on pro spec gear, it's a possible for the 1D4.
 
admirable said:
I'm not saying they will be removable, I just think as prices come down they will end up in cameras as backups. More so on pro spec gear, it's a possible for the 1D4.
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but they are in cameras already.:shrug:

Solid state drives are just memory chips packaged to connect like a hard drive.
Exactly the same as the memory chips that are already in the memory cards you put in your dslr. (except that some large capacity memory cards are actually tiny hard drives packaged for a memory interface).
 
Beat me to it who? SSD == CF just in a different shape/size with a different controller.

Back on topic- if you can afford it, go for it. They will stand up to a lot more abuse, won't suddently die- MTBF is massive, power usage is lower & they work well in bumpy conditions.
 
I have one in my laptop. It does make a huge difference in the speed of the laptop and it extends the battery life too. The only downside is the size. I replaced a 120gb hard drive with a 64gb SSD. I dont use the laptop much apart from browsing the web so this was OK for me, YMMV.
 
Andyman said:
Hi,

I'm currently specing up a new Dell laptop and I'm thinking about harddrive options. Dell now offer decent sized solid state drives and I'm wondering whether there is enough of an advantage to warrant it. Has anyone used a laptop with SSD? Any real advantage to speak of?

Andy.
Click to expand...

Solid state drives are fast but and this a very big but, they are still not as reliable as HDD for one solid state has a read write average life of only about 100,000 cycles which can be reached very quickly if you like to properly use your computer.

But having said all that you'll probably have a new machine by the time it starts to fail in 10 years time. :)
 
Dom said:
Solid state drives are fast but and this a very big but, they are still not as reliable as HDD for one solid state has a read write average life of only about 100,000 cycles which can be reached very quickly if you like to properly use your computer.

But having said all that you'll probably have a new machine by the time it starts to fail in 10 years time. :)
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That's a bit misleading to be honest mate. Each cell has a write life of 100,000 cycles- not the drive as a whole. It would take years of usage to "kill". Also- if 1 cell reaches this limit, it will be marked as used, and not used again. They have a much much higher MTBF than hard drives.
 
The solid state drives would be good for speed on on operating system, but for storage I think the cost would be horrendous - not that anyone here has suggested that.

Imagine the cost of a RAID array made up of SSDs?

I am planning to upgrade my main PC soon - and I have looked at 64gb SSD for the OS and software, and 4 times 1.5TB SATA HDDs set in a RAID array for storage of images and other media.
 
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