10-15-2009, 06:45 PM
I just got intels new g2 ssd for my two year old laptop. Runs beautifully and the user experience factor in doing multiple things makes me breathless or to put it a different way, my swear jar is no longer being filled from aggravation with the mechanical hdd.
Price is always an issue but as for performance and experience this is the way to go. As for reliability and longevity my hdd's are generally either precluded from hitting the 1-2 yr mark from immediate (fails within first 6 months) or mechanical failure (read dropping it), or I expect them to start failing past the five year mark, at which point they have been long replaced. There is, for me, no getting around eventual failure and replacement, especially with more hdd's. So I expect these drives to last up to five and by then there will be a replacement lined up. Current estimated ssd write time was already mentioned but that is limited by use and not mechanical failure so for me traditional hdd's are just as bad or worse in terms of reliability. The more heavily I use my hdd's certainly I've had them fail more from it due to heavy mechanical spin and the associated friction heat and eventual failure.
So for me while price is certainly a concern, performance and reliability are far greater in favor or equivalent. I am using hdd's for storage certainly but all these applications, even video (since I had a slow laptop hdd) run much smoother via ssd. I am not going back for my OS / app drive. I'd rather wait to save more money and watch prices drop even further. No sense in going orders of magnitude slower and bakc to added stress in my impatience expecting immediate response an feedback from a computer that should handle it's computational load with ease but held back due to hdd as consistently the weak link.
Price is always an issue but as for performance and experience this is the way to go. As for reliability and longevity my hdd's are generally either precluded from hitting the 1-2 yr mark from immediate (fails within first 6 months) or mechanical failure (read dropping it), or I expect them to start failing past the five year mark, at which point they have been long replaced. There is, for me, no getting around eventual failure and replacement, especially with more hdd's. So I expect these drives to last up to five and by then there will be a replacement lined up. Current estimated ssd write time was already mentioned but that is limited by use and not mechanical failure so for me traditional hdd's are just as bad or worse in terms of reliability. The more heavily I use my hdd's certainly I've had them fail more from it due to heavy mechanical spin and the associated friction heat and eventual failure.
So for me while price is certainly a concern, performance and reliability are far greater in favor or equivalent. I am using hdd's for storage certainly but all these applications, even video (since I had a slow laptop hdd) run much smoother via ssd. I am not going back for my OS / app drive. I'd rather wait to save more money and watch prices drop even further. No sense in going orders of magnitude slower and bakc to added stress in my impatience expecting immediate response an feedback from a computer that should handle it's computational load with ease but held back due to hdd as consistently the weak link.