SSDs versus hds?

Laz123

Is there any marked improvement in having an ssd instead of the usual hds? All I know is you don't have to defrag an ssd.

TIA

spud17

Laz123 wrote: »

Is there any marked improvement in having an ssd instead of the usual hds? All I know is you don't have to defrag an ssd.

TIA

Much faster at loading programs/quicker boot.
Lower power consumption in laptop = longer battery time.

Others will add to the list.

You don't have to defrag a conventional drive, it's no longer the requirement it was in the days of small HDs.

All I know is you don't have to defrag an ssd.

You should never defrag an ssd. It uses un-necessary read/writes.

thescouselander

Yes - get an SSD - you will be wasting your life waiting if you dont. They're considerably faster and since I went all solid state on my computer I've never looked back.

RobTang

spud17 wrote: »

You don't have to defrag a conventional drive, it's no longer the requirement it was in the days of small HDs.

You still have to defrag conventional HDDs, just these days the OSes is a bit better about locating your data and will auto-defrag your drives for you.


Personally from a moneysaving point of view I'm not entirely sure its worth it, maybe in a laptop for the boot times, but if I needed to keep costs down id rather have 2 HDD's raid-0 rather then an SSD.

Having said that all my computers run SSDs as their primary drives...

Laz123

Maybe I'll change as my 10 year old Dell is slowing down a bit now.

Thanks to all.

John_Gray

Nobody seems to have pointed out the downsides that SSDs cost huge amounts of money for a comparatively small amount of space, are less reliable, and have a much more limited read/write 'life' than do mechanical Hard Disks.

davehills

John_Gray wrote: »

Nobody seems to have pointed out the downsides that SSDs cost huge amounts of money for a comparatively small amount of space, are less reliable, and have a much more limited read/write 'life' than do mechanical Hard Disks.

Also, they appear to be less tolerant of temperature variation.

Weird_Nev

Yep. I'd only use an SSD where very high performance was the top of my list of priorities.

They have much smaller capacity, data integrity is still "suspect" and they do actually "wear out" over time.
Bloody fast though.
Only to be considered in addition to a conventional HDD, or perhaps on a laptop which is backed up daily or at worst weekly.

You can get hybrid drives, with a small SSD portion (like 64Gb) and a conventional main portion. That's a nice solution for a laptop.

thescouselander

John_Gray wrote: »

Nobody seems to have pointed out the downsides that SSDs cost huge amounts of money for a comparatively small amount of space, are less reliable, and have a much more limited read/write 'life' than do mechanical Hard Disks.

I don't know if thats true. I have seen many mechanical HD's die before their time - especially in mobile applications where they might take knocks. Others have just proven to be generally unreliable.

The read/write limits sound scary but the drive controller will take steps to even out the wear and in practise, you'd have to be completely re-writing the drive for years and years before it becomes a problem.

SSDs are very expensive though.

frugal_mike

At work I use an SSD for the operating system and an HDD for data. It boots up, boots a virtual machine and loads my IDE in about the same time the previous machine took to reach the login prompt. Overall it is much less stressful using the new machine as things tend to happen much faster, but bear in mind the processor and RAM changed too so its not all down to the SSD.

On my home pc I decided not to pay the extra for an SSD, and its still very fast. It's a little more noisy though since it has to spin the hard drive.

thor

I too use an ssd for my op and a conventional disk for my data. The ssd only has a 125GB capacity but that is more than enough to hold my dual boot Win7/Winxp plus the hundreds of other software apps I have installed. It is waay faster than my old system which had no ssds.
I also do a load of video encoding and as this involves very intensive sessions of data manipulation, I suspect this would get a tremendous speed boost if I had stored them on my SSD but I am wary of using up too much of the drives read/write cycles so I have chosen not to.