Solid State Hard Drives

They are very fast. However, at this point, I usually advise people not to get a huge one. SSDs have a write limit to them, so use it for the OS. That's what will make the biggest difference. Unless you have lots of cash to get a bunch and raid them together. Although I've seen problems with that. Also, check the specs on them. Some SSD speeds can vary quite a bit. I'd go with a slightly smaller size, but faster read/write anyday.

I have a 128Gb SSD, works great! Also 2 x 1.5Tb and 1 x 500Gb regular drives for games, documents and back-ups.

I'm hoping they find a way to get over the limited writes. After they do I might get one for my notebook.

So what are the write limits? 1,000 times?

I was going to ask the same question. What do you mean my write limits? As much as Windows is always writing to the HDD, wouldn't that be a problem? Or is it just a limit on how many times you can wipe it and start clean?

I believe it is how many times you can write to the disk. I'm not sure what the limits are.

Last I heard it was 10,000 writes minimum per sector. 1 Sector = 4 KB of disc space. They typically balance it out so that each sector gets the same amount of wear.

Good topic! I was actually JUST wondering about this myself. My question is how do you implement a SSD for things other then the OS: gaming, for example. If I want to play something like Elemental or Sim City or Civilization 5 on a SSD because of it's super fast load speed how do I do that? Does it work? And is it worth it? Also, what SSD would someone recommend for that?

'expected' life-span for 'writes' is equivalent [or better] to the mean failure/expectancy for the life of a 'standard' drive.

If you don't worry about the life of your platter drive then there is no need to worry about the life of a SSD [other than replacement cost vs size]....;)

You will want to look at the random access speed, as that is the real bottle neck for disk speed. I heard Intel SSDs were far beyond the others in this area, but it has been awhile. Windows is suppose to not use SSDs for various tasks that would wear them out quickly, such as caching. You will want a normal drive to store data on, and if possible set it up to be used for caching.

The other option if you want speed is to set up RAID and uses multiple drives as one (making the random access speed better).

My Windows 7 Experience Index score for hard drives (SATA@7200RPM) has always been 5.9.

I bought a 64Gig SSD (Kingston ssdNOW series) for about $169US from Dell and installed it as Disk 0 (System Drive), then reinstalled Windows 7.
My Windows 7 Experience Index score is now 7.1.  A nice jump!

Start-up speed seems to have improved considerably, the drive doesn't get hot, is very quiet, and overall, my Windows 7 system runs better than ever.

Of course, having the SSD on a new Dell StudioXPS 435T/9000 helps some, I'm sure

My System:

Dell StudioXPS 435T/9000
Intel Core i7 920 @2.7GHz
9GB DDR3 @1066MHz
ATI HD5770 w/1GB on-board memory @2048x1152
Kingston ssdNOW 64GB SSD (System  Drive)
2xSATA-II-300 (500GB, 750GB
e-SATA External RAID Array (2x1TB)
2x SATA DVD (1xDVD-ROM, 1xDVD-RAM-DL)

Donald L McDaniel

I've never tested out a SSD yet, but I hope to get one for Christmas.  Just a 40 gig though. (That's $100+ right there!)  Enough to (re)install Windows 7 and make it my boot drive, along with a new PC which I hope to buy sometime after the holiday (if I get my SSD that is).  I never want to go back to the annoying mechanical grinding of  a HD ever again.  (Let alone the slowness of it.)

If they were sold at brick-n-mortar stores, I would of bought one a LONG time ago. (But they're not.)

Any modern SSD (second generation and over) is no longer plagued by "write limits". I've had my Intel X25-M 80GB for just under a year now and it simply blows any mechanical HD out of the water in terms of speed.

I'm still on the SSD sidelines myself, but I suppose anyone who has one can mitigate the write-limit by moving the temp folder and swap file to the old-style HDD.  I *guess* the swap file is the worst thing to have on a write-limited drive.

I think they still have limits, but they try to be smart about writing new stuff to a place that hasn't been written to many times in the past so no single spot gets over-worked.  At work we routinely keep old PCs running for 5-8 years without HD problems, so 1 year on an SSD doesn't reassure me much.

I especially wouldn't put my anti-virus on an SSD because of of the frequent updates.  Or Elemental 

Based on the op, this is slightly off topic, but I want to throw this out there.  I was in a similar boat to yours - I had an opportunity to upgrade and I had to decide, fast mechanical or SSD.  I did some research, did some price point analysis, and came to the conclusion that I wanted to stick with mechanical.  I'm referring to a desktop solution, btw.  Anyway, I managed to pick up 2 300gig velociraptors for about $100 a piece 2-3 months ago (at a best buy clearance, no less).  I set them up in raid and the performance is pretty great.  So, I was right on the fence, but for $200 have 2 10,000 rpm 300 gig hds in raid and that put me over the top.  However, if you have a laptop, then I think SSD is easily the best choice.  Honestly, if you are a computer enthusist, I REALLY REALLY REALLY doubt the life span of a SSD due to writes is going to be a problem.  But for me, the extra space and very comparable performance (better in many places, weaker in others), the drives I picked up was a better deal for space and performance. 

I've got an Intel X25-M 80GB 2nd Gen SSD and it's superb! Lightning fast and a nice size for my OS and most used apps. Def get one...you won't regret it!

regarding the write time, Intel has claimed that the X-25 80 GB version will last for 5 years, assuming you deleted and rewrote 100 GB each day. That's much more data than an average user will use each and every day and in 5 years you'll want to get a newer and faster SSD anyway. 

Even if it is exaggerated by 5x, 20 GB each and every day is a lot. As long as you don't like... reinstall Windows everyday and move off your paging files you should be fine. Even if you don't move off your paging files, if you're considering an SSD, you are either a labtop user, or you're an enthusiast desktop user who will probably put in 6-8 GB of RAM anyway... so the paging file won't be used that much. 

Even if Intel exaggerated by 100x, and it would only last 5 full years if you only did a full 1 GB of writes each day (something you might expect from a "power-user" who installs lots of games, downloads and deletes a lot of movies, and spends a lot of time in general doing stuff on the compter), 5 years is still a good amount of time. I doubt that you'll see it last less than 2 years, because that's how long the first generation SSDs were lasting when put into a server. 

Hint: don't RAID SSDs. Last time I checked, TRIM doesn't behave properly when RAID'd. That was part of the issue with the first-generation SSDs when put in servers. They weren't playing nicely. This was 2 years ago, about, however, so that may be very wrong today. 

I really think that getting a 40 GB SSD is the way to go. You can get them for well under $150 and you'll realized most of the benefit (put your OS, your 1-3 of your favorite games on it, along with a few small applications like Chrome/Firefox). The major reason to bump up to 80 GB is just so you can install more games on it (: (3-5, easily). 

A big thing to do if you do get an SSD + normal hard drives is to make sure you set up some symbolic drives changing your C:\Users\___ folders onto your D drive. There is a windows utility to do it (forgot what it was), you can also setup the sym links by hand, if you're not afraid of the command prompt. Finally, you can use Stardock's Tweak7, It's under the "Profile Location" section and it'll move any and all existing files for you too.

You may not need to move the AppData\Local or Roaming folders onto your D drive. They typically don't get THAT large and they'll give a slight performance boost to all your applications, whether or not they are on your C drive. (AppData is like a persistent "cache" for programs, allowing them to quickly load low-level information on startup. Things like Cookies and your web history for your web browser would typically live in AppData). 

Thanks all for the Help. Going to get one. But I could use some more help.  How (exactly how) do I move the temp files, swap files, and other active data transfers from the SSD Hard drive to another regular hard drive?

pagefile

Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Advanced > Settings > Advanced > Change 

Toggle your C drive to have no paging file

Toggle your D drive to have a system managed file

Reducing the size of shadowcopies

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=5 GB 

(or whatever you want)

For creating symbolic links (basically on-disk "redirects". If you have a symlink on C that points to a folder on D, if you do a copy to C:\MySymLink\MyFile it'll live on D)

mklink /J target name 

You say "Don't RAID SSDs...".

I put two 64GB Kensington SSDs in my box, created a RAID 0 Array, and installed Windows 7 Ultimate, Office 2010 Professional Plus, and other software.

As a single-disk installation (whether SSD or HDD), Windows 7 scores 7.1.  However, with the RAID 0 Array, disk operations are now  scored at 7.5.

Not had any problems with the Array, either with reads or writes.  never  gets hot, chugs right along, can be in any position: upright, or turned upside-down, on their sides, so good to use for modded boxes.

I prefer SSDs for the OS and other software over mechanical HDDs.

OldCelticHippy

you don't RAID them because they have bad performance. 

You don't RAID them because TRIM doesn't work with RAID. This means that if a particular sector is rewritten over and over (paging file) it will cause those sectors to fail much much faster, unlike with TRIM which will balance out the sectors. 

I'll think about it when they make at least a 500GB SSD with unlimited writes and fast speeds.

For $150 or less .