Solid State Drives, WOW !

Bought a Crucial M4 SSD, with the "clone" software and cable. Cloned my C drive in 30 minutes, and am am now running off of it.

HOLY CRAP it boots up fast, i timed it on my phone, and from switch on to desk top took 17 seconds, with 45 running processes in Windows XP64. ( Yes i need to upgrade )

Its only 128 Gig, so i am still storing stuff on my other SATA drives, but as these go up in size, and come down in price I am going to swap to SSD's !!!!!


Are there any drawbacks to SSD?


My western Digital and Seagate SATA drives are getting old.

Seems the solid drives with just work, until they dont. Mechanical drives are limited to the life span of the platters, bearings and internal power pathways.

neat stuff.

 

The only down side I've ever heard is when they die, they're DEAD. As in, your odds
of data recovery are very small - unlike a mechanical hard drive that can more easily
be recovered of data after a fail.

Jedi

 

SSD's do get slower over time; I'm also hooked - SSD laptop & SSD desktop.

 

Everything wil be SSD in a few years when prices go down and capacity goes up.

I would encourage running a mirrored RAID or keeping your backups up to date in reference to what Jedi said.

 

Prices have really been dropping, 480GB on Amazon for $363. 1TB are still over $2-3k though.

 

Be careful with the really cheap drives, such as OCZ. They use the lowest grade of flash which in result has reliability issues. However, prices are coming down, do to the flash manufacturers shrinking the die. In addition, LSI/Sandforce and other controller companies are coming out with more robust and low cost controllers. This is just the beginning and in a few years rotating media will be a thing of the past. By the way, we just launched our own SSD client drive. I own the Monster brand( Monster Cable) for all electronic storage. My pricing is a bit high, but their will be a price adjustment which will be in line with the market. Here is the website. www.monsterdigital.com. Oh by the way our name was on Silicon Tech racing which runs in the ALMS. We were on the car at MOSPORT.

 

I just purchased an M4 as well (128GB). I have mixed results though. Boot up time for Win 7 Home Premium is about one minute, 30 seconds. The computer hangs on "Starting Windows" for about 45-55 seconds. This is before the colored spheres show appear. Reformat didn't work. Always hangs at the same point. It's on the latest firmware as well.

 

Honestly, I'm content with disks for now. I have a massive photo library so until prices drop and I can replace my 500GB main drive and 1TB photo drive I'll stick with disks.

Amazing the people you find on fchat. Will you be at Mid-Ohio next week, I'll be heading up on Wednesday and staying through the weekend, from what I've heard from friends it's a great race.

 

Price per gigabyte rotating media still makes more sense from a cost perspective. Most people who are buying SSD are either techies or people who just want to have an SSD. I won't be at Mid-Ohio as our deal is for 2 races, one was MOSPORT, the other will be at Petit Lemans.

 

For workstations I Raid-1/5 them. No drawbacks. Beware of cheap ssd's and do not mistake hybrid drives for real.

 

Sounds great for the next computer, but for now I'm going to replace the original 150GB HD with a 320 GB one for $69.95.

 

Older chipset, perhaps? I've got SSD's on all my boxes, of different ages. P55 chipset with Intel G2 120GB: takes about a minute to boot from cold. Z68 chipset is a little less than 40 seconds to boot from cold. Z77 chipset is less than 20 seconds to boot from cold. Z68 and Z77 have 128GB M4's without raid or any special drive configs, RAID cards or boot options on my Intel NIC's.

My two new Thinkpads with M4 128's take their time booting...30-45 seconds.

Chipset, BIOS, BIOS options (ie RAID), NIC's with boot options, and OS services all impact cold boot times...SSD can really only negatively impact boot times if they are faulty.

 

Timely backups over multiple devices in separate locations obviate catastrophic hardware failures and attendant loss of data. Choosing one technology over the other over perceived reliability is just asking for all your bits be flipped to 0 in a world that only understands 1's.

 

Yes, price per GB is in favor of platter drives, and this is why an SSD for the OS and Apps + Platter Drive for Data is the current way to go. SSD's are beneficial to nearly anyone that uses a PC on a regular basis for extended periods of time. Not only do SSD's destroy platter drives in read speed, but their latency is vastly smaller as are their IOPS. IOPS= Input/Output Operations per Second. A good platter drive can maybe pinch out a few dozen IOPS whilst a decent SSD can push 40,000+ IOPS no sweat. IOPS takes the lag out of multitasking and makes using an OS a joy.

Not to mention, setting up symlinks in an OS like W7 is simple, and makes having two separate drives (one for the OS and apps, the other for data) completely transparent to the user, as well as protecting the data from terminal OS farts.

 

Are you sure the drive is not defective or if you have malware on your computer? My 7200rpm HDD, which is a good 5-6 years old now and has suffered countless powercuts (the joys of living in Africa and part in spain where there was a power issue), and starts up in about a minute total. It's got about 15-20gb left.

 

Nah. Chipset + BIOS +BIOS options have the most impact on boot times vs OS stuff (assuming a clean PC). I had an old Core2 PC with a 7200 RPM drive that would cold boot to useable desktop in 35 seconds versus the minute + that my P55 chipset with 120 GB G2 Intel SSD.

 

Not sure about it being defective, but with only Windows installed (fresh install) it hangs at the exact same point every time.

I think the culprit may be that I have two 2GB HDs in RAID 1 in addition to the SSD. Boot sequence is SSD first, but I think there might be a BIOS setting that is fouling it up. This is on an Intel Z77 board by the way.

 

Withe the SSDD the POST that takes all the time.
The actual OS load is < 5 seconds