Pros and Cons of SSD?

[mtb211]

Hi everyone, I wanted to know what the pros and cons are of a Solid State Disk vs a normal 7200 sata II drive. As I have looked around online, it seems that SSD's only con is the price per gigabyte is much more expensive.. Would it be harder to permanently erase data on a SSD, is it a security risk?

 

[Aastii]

you are right in saying it is just the price that is the only con. You can use killdisk on an SSD as well as a hard drive, so eraseing data on an SSD isn't any more or less of a problem than it is on a hard drive

 

[diduknowthat]

Pro: Blazing fast, silent, lower power consumption

Cons: Expensive

 

[Bacon]

Doesn't their performance slowly degrade over time?

 

[diduknowthat]

Not that I've seen. Maybe in older drives, but newer SSDs has all the necessary commands (such as trim) to retain its performance.

 

[tremmor]

Im curious also. What size are some of you buying. these big ones are expensive. Im just wondering because im looking.
maybe 80gig. do i need higher for operating system and a few immediate programs i might use. then maybe put everything else on a internal secondary drive. How are you using it.
thanks

 

[diduknowthat]

Im curious also. What size are some of you buying. these big ones are expensive. Im just wondering because im looking.
maybe 80gig. do i need higher for operating system and a few immediate programs i might use. then maybe put everything else on a internal secondary drive. How are you using it.
thanks

I have a 60GB drive and I'm only using 30 gigs of it. I currently have windows 7, photoshop, MS office and MW2 installed. All other programs I install on my secondary drive. All my documents and folders are mapped to my secondary drive too (Pictures, Music etc).

 

[tremmor]

Ok thanks......count me in. i will get one. take my time shopping.

 

[Aastii]

Doesn't their performance slowly degrade over time?

I don't think so, but to be fair on the consumer market they are relatively new. Although it may not have been shown yet, it could be that they degrade very slowly and the rate of degredation increases rapidly over time. I think they have probably been around long enough to show that now though

 

[mtb211]

All our new laptops come with a 256 MB SSD inside of them, my boss wanted to know what their flaws are

 

[mtb211]

Do you need any special utilities to run a SSD , can you still just use the normal windows defragmentation?

 

[tremmor]

good question. didn't think about it. do ya defrag it?

 

[diduknowthat]

There's no point in defragging an SSD because the seak time is practically instant. And the cons of a 256MB SSD? Well, it's 256MB...

 

[Aastii]

Do you need any special utilities to run a SSD , can you still just use the normal windows defragmentation?

good question. didn't think about it. do ya defrag it?

you don't defrag it. It doesn't work in the same way that a stardard HDD does. Because fragmentation is just data spread around the platter, so it takes longer to get the bits together because you have parts moving, and because an SSD doesn't have a platter or moving parts, it doesn't get fragmented, so no need for defragmentation

 

[Shane]

Pro: Blazing fast, silent, lower power consumption

Cons: Expensive

+ low storage capacity on cons.

They're worth it though imo,You dont have to wait for anything to load...its usually instant or a few seconds at the most,I dont think i could ever go back to using a Standard 7200Rpm drive again,Thats how big of a difference it really is.

 

[Twist86]

I would like to add to the cons.

Cons
Power Consumption Higher (every labtop user I met with one admits to lower battery life after upgrading)
Price $2.25 to $4 a GB vs HDD is .10 a GB.
Limited Writes
New Tech with new bugs/issues (limited now but still there)

The biggest issue I have is the max writes on a SSD. They give us numbers such as "40GB a day for 10 years" but I have seen poor souls plagued with this issue within 6 months of buying one.


Sadly I tried to justify the cost but I am waiting for the next generation to come out and drop the prices. The only real benefit a SSD would give to me is faster loading on video games. BTW Anyone have any news on the new 3rd Generation Intel Drives? I heard Q4 this year was going to be a lot of 22nm drives out dropping prices by 30%

 

[bomberboysk]

SSD's have finite read/write cycles. The biggest con though is the price, even the cheapest drives are over $1.50/GB, many are over $3/GB.

 

[mtb211]

I read about that, I read random writes are slower, then I read they are much faster... Out of all the articles Ive read on the net... seems solid state is the way of the future, no moving parts, no special utilities needed(no need to defrag_, Many articles say they break less but HDD can write more.. so its a bit confusing

maybe HDD's break before they can write their max ammount of times, lol hope that makes sense, im like 4 IQ points above from being down syndrome

thxx for all the input

I would like to add to the cons.

Cons
Power Consumption Higher (every labtop user I met with one admits to lower battery life after upgrading)
Price $2.25 to $4 a GB vs HDD is .10 a GB.
Limited Writes
New Tech with new bugs/issues (limited now but still there)

The biggest issue I have is the max writes on a SSD. They give us numbers such as "40GB a day for 10 years" but I have seen poor souls plagued with this issue within 6 months of buying one.


Sadly I tried to justify the cost but I am waiting for the next generation to come out and drop the prices. The only real benefit a SSD would give to me is faster loading on video games. BTW Anyone have any news on the new 3rd Generation Intel Drives? I heard Q4 this year was going to be a lot of 22nm drives out dropping prices by 30%

 

[tlarkin]

Pro: Blazing fast, silent, lower power consumption

Cons: Expensive

This is 100% correct. I don't think SSD is quite worth the price versus performance boost at the moment. It is not like it gives you leaps and bounds performance over your standard SATA2 drive doing every day usage type stuff.

 

[tech savvy]

IMO and alot of others, the SSD is the best thing that hit the PC in a long time.The bottle-neck of the modern PC was the HDD. I have a OCZ RevoDrive 50GB SSD, which is blazing fast.I will list some pro's/con's.

Edit- RevoDrive reads at 550MB/s and writes at 450MB/s($239.99) The OCZ Vertex 2 reads and writes half of that, at $169.99. point, the extra $70 is worth the extra 200MB/s read and write speeds.

pro's-
Waaaay faster
longer life span
more reliable
no need for maintenance
lower power consumption
silent
no heat

con's-
people say price, but IMO...well worth it.