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Solid state hard drives

mookaloid - 13/5/10 at 03:49 PM

My lappy HDD has just gone west......AGAIN

Has anyone seen 2.5" solid state hard drives with the old IDE or Parallel ATA connection as I can only seem to find SATA ones.

The lappy is still good and I would like to extend it's life further with a SSD drive.

Cheers

Mark

brianthemagical - 13/5/10 at 03:59 PM

I'm pretty sure you can get them, might have to be an ebay jobby though. There were a few on there when i was looking for my SATA SSD about 6 months ago.

TBH there's little point. They're expensive for the storage size with little benefit unless you've got the hardware to notice the difference.

mookaloid - 13/5/10 at 04:10 PM

Ah I see - I hadn't looked at ebay.

So its a 16GB SSD for Ł60

or an 80GB normal one for Ł40 mmmmm

Not too tricky a decision then

Cheers

Mark

02GF74 - 13/5/10 at 04:17 PM

^^^ take a look on amazon and digitalfusion web site - found them to be cheaper than ebay.

Humbug - 13/5/10 at 05:00 PM

SSDs are not cheap are they!

MikeRJ - 13/5/10 at 05:02 PM

quote:
Originally posted by brianthemagical
TBH there's little point. They're expensive for the storage size with little benefit unless you've got the hardware to notice the difference.

It's probably single largest speed increase you can make to a PC, the difference in boot times and application loading is amazing.

Charlie_Zetec - 13/5/10 at 05:30 PM

Working in the IT industry, we regularly have the SSD debate. They are good with marginally better boot times, use less power and keep cooler, but their life expectancy is less than that of a moving part HDD, and as the technology is still in its early days, they are still expensive and IMO now worth the additional money. Some of the public sector organisations have swapped on a larger scale to cut carbon footprint and CO2 emmissions, but when it's not their money they're spending, they seem to care less!!!!

Werner Van Loock - 13/5/10 at 05:48 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Charlie_Zetec
but their life expectancy is less than that of a moving part HDD,

in a static environment, but in a lappy they can withstand bumps, regulars don't unless you have a expensive lappy with built in gyro that freezes the HD when g-forces are too high

MikeRJ - 13/5/10 at 06:17 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Charlie_Zetec
Working in the IT industry, we regularly have the SSD debate. They are good with marginally better boot times,

Marginal? If you compare it against the typical 5400RPM hard drives used in most note books the differences are major, more than 50% faster in many cases. The more clogged up your OS gets the bigger the difference as well. A quick Google search will show plenty of tests that prove this.

Unfortunately they are expensive for the storage space you get (though getting cheaper), as always it's a trade-off. However, with the development of MRAM, FRAM and memristor technology SSDs will only get faster, larger and cheaper; the days of hard drives are numbered.

iank - 13/5/10 at 06:22 PM

Life expectancy issues (in a tower rather than a laptop admittedly) are easy to fix* by putting the OS and applications on the SSD and user data and the pagefile/swap/whatever windahs uses these days on a regular disc.

The difference they make to boot/application load times is far in advance of what you'd expect from most of the throughput benchmarks. I've got friends who claim boot times for w7 down from over 2mins to less than 50 seconds (from on-button to ready to use.

The intel cheapy was probably the best price/performance last time I looked.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/190701

*as it's file writes that cause lifetime issues for flash, reads don't cause problems.

RazMan - 13/5/10 at 07:18 PM

SSDs rock!!

I am using a 60Gb SSD in my twin quad processor (yes, 8 cores) workstation. It is just for the Windoze system files and I use a 2Tb data drive.

The difference in speed is fantastic and my system boots up in under 20 seconds now (was about 50 secs) I will probably wait until the larger drives come down in price and then transfer the 60Gb SSD to my netbook which should really benefit from the speed, lower power consumption and safety from bumps while on the move.

stevebubs - 13/5/10 at 10:24 PM

They still exist - this was the second link from my google search

stevebubs - 13/5/10 at 10:26 PM

quote:
Originally posted by RazMan
SSDs rock!!

I am using a 60Gb SSD in my twin quad processor (yes, 8 cores) workstation. It is just for the Windoze system files and I use a 2Tb data drive.

The difference in speed is fantastic and my system boots up in under 20 seconds now (was about 50 secs) I will probably wait until the larger drives come down in price and then transfer the 60Gb SSD to my netbook which should really benefit from the speed, lower power consumption and safety from bumps while on the move.

Enabled readyboost on my work laptop yesterday after a Win7 upgrade had slowed it down to a crawl. Can't believe the difference...

Used one of these babies...clicky

ChrisW - 13/5/10 at 10:59 PM

SSD's rock for laptops, especially if you're upgrading from a 5400 rpm.

Much quicker boot time, lower power consumption, far better resistance to shocks, much quieter.

Even on my 4 year old Vaio it made a big difference to speed of the system and battery life.

I know they're expensive for big capacities, but who really carries that volume of data around with them on a laptop? Besides, if you must have all that pr0n with you, 128GB usb sticks arn't expensive from China!

Chris