Solid State Drives

[ShovelsWorkWellEnough]

This board has me snared.

 

So I might buy an SSD to complement my half-terabyte hard drive. Is it worth it? What should I be putting on it? The OS (windows 7)? My games? What's a cost-effective one?

[Axeldeath]

Just don't buy one unless you have some money to blow, and if you do get one just use it for your OS.

[Humin]

A cost effective one right now would be a drive that is a dollar per gigabyte or less.

[Chuckthe2nd]

Yeah, solid-state drives are great for installing your operating system on. Makes it WAY more responsive.

[Alyxx Thorne]

I only have a 1TB SATA drive myself.

[Obsidian]

As far as particular drives go, I'd recommend the Crucial M4. In most of its variants, the M4 costs less than $1 per gigabyte, with the 128gb having the lowest price to storage ratio at the time of this post. Plus, Crucial is a reliable company with good standing in the memory (and now storage) markets.

 

SSD's are great for storing your OS (aka, as a boot drive) as well as productivity and creativity programs. Games, from what I can tell, don't benefit much from being stored on an SSD versus a 7200rpm HDD.

[BTGBullseye]

Yeah, OS and video/sound editing programs benefit immensely, but games only moderately.

 

I actually recommend the Mushkin brand Chronos drives... About $1/GB and you can go as high as 480GB, or get a 128 and have one of the 15 highest performing drives out there.

 

If you're thinking of gaming, I would highly suggest getting one of the newer Seagate 1TB/platter hard drives. They beat out all but 180 of the best SSDs in existence for about $0.10/GB.

[Ross Scott]

If you're thinking of gaming, I would highly suggest getting one of the newer Seagate 1TB/platter hard drives. They beat out all but 180 of the best SSDs in existence for about $0.10/GB.

I haven't looked into those, but unless it's a hybrid drive, I can't imagine them coming to close to SSDs in terms of random writes and reads, which really is the biggest bottleneck of mechanical drives anyway.

[Humin]

Yeah, mechanical drives are in the 15ms range while ssd are like in the 45ns range. At least I think that's what I've heard. It's either that or in the µs range.

[BTGBullseye]

If you're thinking of gaming, I would highly suggest getting one of the newer Seagate 1TB/platter hard drives. They beat out all but 180 of the best SSDs in existence for about $0.10/GB.

I haven't looked into those, but unless it's a hybrid drive, I can't imagine them coming to close to SSDs in terms of random writes and reads, which really is the biggest bottleneck of mechanical drives anyway.

Mine performs at only about 5x the seek time of a high-end SSD for randoms, but nearly matches the transfer rate.

 

Of course, if you keep your drive defragged, the effect of random read/write gets almost completely negated.