I just got through fighting my laptop and upgraded to an Intel 160 GB SSD! WOW! Much, much faster! I'd noticed that a lot of time when the machine was slow, the CPU load was low, but the HDD light was lit close to permanantly. The difference is huge. Matt BTW, I got an Intel 160 GB X25-M G2.... And it comes with a STICKER!
What is this sticker business. That's the second time I heard that today. Still a bit too rich for my blood. But i just bought a SATA II 1.5 TB 64 mb buffer drive for $80. (Looking forward to the SATA III controllers and devices to come out) Tomorrow I will be updating my web server from eight year old Red Hat distro to Ubuntu Server. While at it I will abandon my NAS hardware running FreeNAS and instead run it in a VM on the same hardware as the web server. With all the associated goodies: FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, VNC, RDC, SMB, RSYNC and this time iSCSI. But with less power consumption and a little less heat in my office.
Yep SSDs rule. Kristee and I are converting all of ours. She started with a 250 in her new laptop back in jan. It's the. Only way to fly. Especially due to stability. No moving parts!! Of course transferring the other 4TB is going to take time on a student budget
I need to get on that train for my next computer. Apparently Toshiba just came out with a 500gb SSD recently. Before that though, methinks I'll get a Drobo.
What are they charging for that 500 GB? I looked at some SSD's today, but had to go for 8 times the storage at 40% of the price. For my needs my bottle neck is the WAN.
The prices are high for sure.. the 160 GB Intel drive was $430 or so from NewEgg. But for me, I live on my laptop for lots of stuff, and tons of it was HDD limited (and I had a 7200 RPM unit, but it couldn't keep up with the demands of SolidWorks and the like). One downside is that you have to be much more methodical about backing stuff up, cause when SSDs die, thier really dead and no moving platters to other boxes etc to get the stuff off. At least I haven't heard about options like that. What's really suckie is that if you look at the chips that go into a SSD, there's the FLASH, and a couple of controllers. There is no effin' way that they cost anywhere close to what they sell for. Lots of profit in these suckers for sure. But with all new tech, the prices will keep dropping. Anyway, it's really revitalized the laptop. Matt
Good to hear that worked well for you. Like they say with cars money = HP how fast do you want to go? It's times like this I'm glad I'm a late adopter of technology. Saves me a lot of money being behind the times.
I keep finding myself totally shocked at how fast the computer responds. Now I wonder how fast it would be if I'd done a clean install instead of moving all the digital dandruff over by moving a drive image.... Oh, and defragmenting time seems to have dropped by about 75% Matt
SSD's have no moving parts so there is less latency, traditional drives have high latency waiting for the heads to find the information on the spinning platter... ah..good stuff.
There are also apparently some differences in the way different SSDs handle caching, fragmentation, etc. I have friends who have had experiences similar to Matt's, and others who have experienced huge slow-downs after using a less expensive SSD for a while, and traced it to defrag issues or something similar. And gone back to spinning disks as a result.
Those issues are going away.... Windows 7 supports automatic correction, and for laggards like me (I'm on XP Pro), there is a SSD toolbox from Intel that support thier drives. Schedule it for night time when I'm in bed and then all is good. Intel reccomends once a week, but I think it's probably dependant on usage and the like. Anyway, I'm still shocked at the difference. Matt
Just ran some cheezy benchmark tool Read rates : 102 MB/sec, seek time 1.2 ms. Not great, but it's only a 1.6 GHz CPU. It was faster than a VelociRaptor on the comparison page. My laptop is only SATA 1. If it were SATA II, it could easily double that or more. Some are reporting over 200 reads. When I look at 2.5" HDD, the benchmark data base shows ~25-45 MB/sec.... Matt