My Intel SSD bit the dust two months before the three year warranty expired. I had to send it back at my own expense and I am still not sure if they will replace it. I used it to replace a Western Digital Raptor.

Maybe there was a very slight improvement in speed, not really sure, but I have never had a primary drive go bad as fast as that SSD did. Never again.

John

I would think the main advantage would be that, with no moving parts, they would last pretty much for years. So I'm especially saddened to hear your story, craftech.

Even still, I'll wait until they're as cheap as traditional drives are now. I like fitting a terrabyte on a $100 drive.

So far I have more luck with the SSDs in my system then with the mechanical drives. I have replaced two WD drives in my NAS and 3 Seagate in my server in past 18 month.
The place where SSDs really shine is in laptops because mechanical drives have a low tolerance for G forces caused by drops and so on. I was one of the early birds and replaced my HDD in my laptop in 2008 at a very high price for a 120GB SSD. I have changed my laptop twice in the meantime but still use the same SSD. I guess the laptop is only used a couple of days a week and hence the drive does last much longer.

+1 old smoke

ssd's as primaries in ALL my computers....

Photoshop CS5.5 opens in 3 seconds, Vegas 12 in 5 seconds. 7200rpm drive in my laptop.

Paying 5 times more for unreliable technology that doesn't really speed things up much either, just makes no sense. What would I be saving? 10 seconds per day?

These drives don't do anything else really.

SSDs do more then just speed things up. Lower power consumption, less heat and weight are major factors for laptops and servers. The average user certainly can't appreciate SSDs that is why the are mainly bought by those that do. For me, reliability seems to swing slowly in favor of SSDs as mechanical drive quality in my opinion has dropped in the past 5-7 years by a lot. As mentioned in my earlier thread, I had bad experience with mechanical drives but I do have 4 Maxtor 80GB drives from 2005 in my home server and they are still running 24/7.

talking totally from my a*rse here....

i've had a few hd failures, rarely seagate drives, but they're not exempt either. i think old smokes OLD 80gbs might still be running after all this time cause they're running all the time.

most of my failures have been in computer's that were turned on / of regularly and in NON air conditioned environs - my studio in the house, and my wife's in a converted stable are not that well insulated and the ambient temps can range from -6c upto 30+c - heck, i stress out with those temp changes, why shouldn't my hd's?

Running a HDD 24/7 is certainly better then switching I on and off which is why a SSD is preference in a laptop. Heat kills a HDD, not so much the drive but the controller. In fact, 90% of failures are controller failure nowadays. My laptop got really hot where the drive is located until switched to a SSD; no more heat, no noise, no vibration and a longer lasting battery... you can't ask for more.

Vegas needs to support 3 TB USB 3 drives for wav files. That is a huge oversight & a big PITA. I'm surprised more people don't use these drive & all the attention goes to SSD which in not cost effective in my view.

Well, I have never had a hard drive fail, and i do hear a lot about SSD problems and how quickly you can wear them out if you actually push them hard enough.

Speed gains are negligible, power consumption and weight, don't know what to tell you, weight is definitely not a factor. I think the whole thinness fad with laptops is ridiculous. I'd rather carry around something 1/2 a pound heavier that actually works and has a decent screen than some macbook air garbage with a crappy screen.

Besides anything under 15.6" is a toy anyway.

When they cost the same as regular drives and are made to last fine, but until then and at these prices SSDs are ( to use that cliche ) a solution to a problem that does not exist.

The life of a SSD is defined by the number of write cycles it endures.
Load levelling is used to mitigate that but it's certainly a good idea to not use SSDs in places where they'll be subjected to a lot of write cycles.

By comparison a mechanical disk has no finite limit on its life. The other issue that can arise with an SSD is the load levelling can cause them to slow down slower than a mechanical disk.

A lot of that though depends on what you pay for your SSD, the cost difference per GB between the cheapest and most expensive is very significant. If you want very high sustained data rates then an array of 15K 2.5" SAS drives would be the go.


Bob.

While there are quite a few very knowledgeable users in this forum I have to say that many are very reluctant to any type of change. I remember similar threads when the industry was moving from tape to solid state storage for cameras. We were seeing comments like...
"I want ALL my original footage on the tape I shot them on"
"Solid state memory is not as reliable as tape"
"It's way too expensive and will never be as cheap as tape"

and on and on. I wonder how many people are still using magnetic tape?

The garbage collection routines built into the current SSD's is so good that you will most likely never notice a slow down unless you fill the drive completely. Of course in a slo-motion spinner when you fill it all the way it'll slow to a crawl and defragging (which you NEVER have to do with SSD's) takes forever.

I could NEVER go back to the dog slow mechanical disks. The overall responsiveness of my systems with SSD's just allows me to work faster and more efficiently.

Most of the bottlenecks with storage devices is the small 4k or so files and in that regard no RAID array with mechanical disks could ever approach the speed of a single SSD.

Well said Hulk! Well said.