OT: 512gb SSD now $355… Good deal?

[Coronita]

My have prices fallen…

Once it hits $200 for 512gb, I’m gonna get a few and replace older drives on my computer…

[SK in CV]

I haven’t looked at them for more than a year. Can you do that? Are interfaces compatible? No issues with power supply? Fair to presume you’re talking about replacing in a desktop. Are form factors available for older laptops? (I’m guessing those would still be very pricy, if available?)

Prices on these things should be down a lot further by now.

[spdrun]

Not for me, since I can buy several TB of drives and backup drives for that price. But if speed and reliability is paramount, this isn’t bad. I’m thinking of going for a 128G SSD in my Macbook since the HD died over the weekend, and it’s about $90.

[Coronita]

[quote=spdrun]Not for me, since I can buy several TB of drives and backup drives for that price. But if speed and reliability is paramount, this isn’t bad. I’m thinking of going for a 128G SSD in my Macbook since the HD died over the weekend, and it’s about $90.[/quote]

Wait…Let me get this straight. On another thread, you hate steve jobs and hate apple…But you use a Macbook…What am I missing here?

[spdrun]

SK in CV — most SSDs use a SATA connector, which is the same in laptop and desktop drives. Drives are generally 2.5″, so you mount them in a 2.5-to-3.5 cradle in a desktop.

There are a few PATA SSDs for older computers.

Using them in a 3.5″ desktop bay would require an adapter cable, but would otherwise work.

[Coronita]

[quote=SK in CV]I haven’t looked at them for more than a year. Can you do that? Are interfaces compatible? No issues with power supply? Fair to presume you’re talking about replacing in a desktop. Are form factors available for older laptops? (I’m guessing those would still be very pricy, if available?)

Prices on these things should be down a lot further by now.[/quote]

These things are 2.5″ and are for laptops with SATA. Though you can buy adapters/kits to have them mounted inside a desktop. Still too expensive for using as a permanent backup solution. I mainly need them for compiling operating systems quickly.. For folks that do a lot of pro-video, imaging, it also helps for working on media… I wouldn’t use it to permanently save data though.That’s what a Raid 5 disk or cloud storage is for.

Power-wise…Should consume less power…no spinning parts no motor. I’m using a quad core mac mini for all my development, so having two ssd in a stripe raid would be nice…

[spdrun]

Wait…Let me get this straight. On another thread, you hate steve jobs and hate apple…But you use a Macbook…What am I missing here?

Apple’s desktop OS’s aren’t crippled like iOS is. I hate Jobs for his walled-garden concept, which OS X isn’t a part of (for now). I can boot up a clean install of OS X, go into Terminal, and do what I like, and it’s actually less burdened with authorizations and controls than Microsoft’s products.

[SK in CV]

[quote=flu]

These things are 2.5″ and are for laptops with SATA. Though you can buy adapters/kits to have them mounted inside a desktop. Still too expensive for using as a permanent backup solution. I mainly need them for compiling operating systems quickly.. For folks that do a lot of pro-video, imaging, it also helps for working on media… I wouldn’t use it to permanently save data though.That’s what a Raid 5 disk or cloud storage is for.

Power-wise…Should consume less power…no spinning parts no motor. I’m using a quad core mac mini for all my development, so having two ssd in a stripe raid would be nice…[/quote]

Ok, for a non-geek trying to understand geeky stuff, they need some power, right? And the original power connection is way more than they need, so do they have a built in step down transfomer so they don’t get fried? Don’t need it for some reason?

[spdrun]

Voltage is the same. They just draw less current. Kind of like you don’t need a different transformer for a 100W and a 20W lamp, both plugged into 120V mains outlets.

[SK in CV]

[quote=spdrun]Voltage is the same. They just draw less current. Kind of like you don’t need a different transformer for a 100W and a 20W lamp, both plugged into 120V mains outlets.[/quote]

Thanks, makes sense.

[Hatfield]

Before taking the plunge into SSDs, you should read this article.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

I’ve been using SSDs for about two and half years now. Three of the four SSDs I have owned failed suddenly. That said, I could never see going back to a spinning platter drive in my MBP. The key is to have a solid backup strategy (which you really should be doing no matter what drive you use).

With the old 5400 rpm drive, boot time from entering a password to having a fully drawn desktop was well over a minute. Moving to a 7200 rpm drive shortened this somewhat. With the SSD it takes about 5 seconds. Application launches are instantaneous. It sounds cliche but it really is a transformative experience. I also had one on an XP machine and the performance boost was similar.

SSDs only have a limited number of erase cycles so performance will degrade as dead sectors are abandoned by the drive firmware. Enabling TRIM supposedly will greatly extend SSD life. There is no TRIM support for XP but it’s built into Windows 7. It’s also available on Macs starting with Snow Leopard, but it won’t enable itself with non-OEM drives. You will need to enable TRIM manually. Google “trim enabler mac” for more info.

[carlsbadworker]

Why 512GB? I felt that is an odd size. I recently bought 240GB SSD from staples and I find that to be plenty enough room for the OS/routine storage. I still need to connect my USB drives in 1-3TB ranges if I need anything beyond that size. I believe I can live with 128GB SSD pretty well too.

Large size SSD will be a financial mistake as its price kept falling. I remember my first flash drive is 128MB (at that time pretty large size) for $100 from Fry’s. I just recently bought a 32GB flash drive for $15 from Amazon. You are going to throw away the “large” ssd drive in a few years…buy what’s enough for your data. There is no permanent replacement concept in the PC business.

That said, if you do process large data, 512GB might be helpful. At work, we run some hadoop job and it will be significantly slowed when you start to use hard drive (large memory size to avoid that would help). I have never tried SSD for Hadoop map/reduce ..but I believe it will help the map stage. But you need large hard-drive volume for Hadoop as well.

[joec]

Unless you really need that much fast storage for video/professional editing or what not, I recommend most people just go with a NAS and with a decent sized SSD for all their programs/OS.

This gives higher availability (mirrored/RAID drives), easier backup for everyone in the household (everyone stores stuff in their home directory) and you can even access it wirelessly with your cellphone, etc…

I guess if you have a ton of games, then maybe you do need a bigger SSD.

[joec]

dupe post

[spdrun]

What about a NAS using SSDs in RAID config? 🙂

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