SSDs

[Sabre]

While Im a few years away from building myself a new PC, I've been hearing alot about Solid State Drives. The build up hyped them up as amazing. However, from this forum and a couple of other people, they apparently didn't live up to promised protential.

However, with the ever forward march of technolagy, and the promise of next wave of OS' being optimised for this stuff, do you think we will finally get the super reliable, instant data access future we were promised? The main concern from what I read is the limited write amount.

[YJH1995]

well solid state drive for me reads uncompressed Avi files very well. There is a Quad SSD which transfer files in 400MB/s.  Sometimes I really think that it might used up the motherboard's SATA bandwidth(I dont think it's possible). SSD does not have any spinning parts therefore if you drop it it is still usuable (I dont think it survive a drop from an empire state building).

There are some good side effect though, like how fast an application load or how fast your computer start, It have no spinning parts so even your computer is completely fragmented the time to open a file is still the same on a HDD (Hard Disk Drive) the Head need to move around so it will take longer

There are quite amount of disadvantage like how much the price cost Or how do you reduce your life span of the drive (That you should worried if you defrag a SSD very frequently) or will your Computer support it

oh yeah i am just typing this out of my head some of it might not be true

[Sabre]

Why would you need to drag at all? I thought that the reason you defraged HDD was so the head had less dictence to travel?

[DZComposer]

You don't need to defrag an SSD.

The thing with SSDs is quality. High-quality SSDs can have a nice performance gain, but lower quality ones I have found actually underperform a hard drive.

I would say at this point there there are only two reasons to use an SSD: 1. You need as little latency as possible (use a high-end one in this scenario) 2. You need shock-resistance. No moving parts means shock is less damaging.

The only application I see for #1 is real-time disk streaming. You don't see that much outside of audio production, and the capacities on SSDs aren't where they need to be for that application (sample libraries are many many gigs). The performance gain you get for the cost is not worth it in non-real-time streaming applications. So, at this point, the only viable reason for using SSDs is shock-resistance.

EDIT: Maybe database applications can benefit form the performance as well, but once again capacity is the issue.

You can get much better bang for you buck if you target your performance increases elsewhere.  A 7200-10000 RPM HDD will do you fine, and will be a lot cheaper with more capacity. You can then use the leftover cash to buy a better CPU or graphics card.