confused help please

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kyle69

New Member
so i am getting another hard drive and i came across a solid state drive
iv never heard of them all i can see in difference is more expensive way less space can someone please tell me the difference
 
Hi kyle69!

I don't want to be an ass, but questions such as these can be easily answered by using Google. I Googled "solid state drive" and third down the list I found this page: http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/SSD.htm

It answers your question here
Why Use a Solid State Drive?
Solid state drives have several advantages over the magnetic hard drives. The majority of this comes from the fact that the drive does not have any moving parts. While a traditional drive has drive motors to spin up the magnetic platters and the drive heads, all the storage on a solid state drive is handled by flash memory chips. This provides three distinct advantages:

  • Less Power Usage
  • Faster Data Access
  • Higher Reliability
The power usage is a key role for the use of solid state drives in portable computers. Because there is no power draw for the motors, the drive uses far less energy than the regular hard drive. Now, the industry has taken steps to address this with drive spin downs and the development of hybrid hard drives, but both of these still use more power. The solid state drive will consistently draw less power then the traditional and hybrid hard drive.
Faster data access will make a number of people happy. Since the drive doesn't have to spin up the drive platter or move drive heads, the data can be read from the drive near instantly. In a recent demo of two similar equipped notebook computers, Fujitsu was able to demonstrate a roughly 20% speed increase in the booting of Windows XP on a SSD over a standard hard drive.
Reliability is also a key factor for portable drives. Hard drive platters are very fragile and sensitive materials. Even small jarring movements from an impact can cause the drive to be completely unreadable. Since the SSD stores all its data in memory chips, there are fewer moving parts to be damaged in any sort of impact.
Click to expand...


I've never used one personally, and if I were you, I'd probably just buy a traditional HDD until the SSDs become more affordable. But, very nice to have if you can afford it. ;)
 
At the moment people (like me) are only really using them to put their operating system on for faster boot times
 
Jackassluver said:
At the moment people (like me) are only really using them to put their operating system on for faster boot times
Click to expand...

They don't just speed up boot times. Any program you put on there, it will massively speed up opening times, saves times, loading times etc

You can see the effects it has easily without installing anything.

If you open task manager (Either press ctrl+alt+del and click task manager, or right click the task bar and click device manager) and then click the performance tab, then click resource monitor you will see graphs for your CPU, memory and hard drive (labelled Disk). If you open something up, you will notice all of the resources increase, however disk will always be at 100%.

This shows hard drives now are massive bottlenecks. They always have been, and probably always will be, but with technology now, platter disk drives are hindering the performance massively.

they are expensive now, but completely worth it. you don't get a huge capacity for what you pay, however you pay for the performance. At the moment SSD's aren't meant for storage, unless you spend thousands of dollars on the 500+ GB drives. Let's assume you are on a C2Q system. You can spend money on a new motherboard, memory and CPU to go to an i5 or i7 system and you will indeed see a performance increase. However if you spent the same amount of money on an SSD, the performance gain you notice would be many times greater.

If this is the only drive you will have in there though, go for a hard drive because of the extra space. Like I said, unless you get one of the larger, and much more expensive, SSD's, you can't really use it for an every day drive to store things on except for your OS and programs. A hard drive, although much slower, will be better for a single drive though
 
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