OT: Should I use SSD drive for new PC?

Rich Parry wrote on 5/24/2010, 6:54 PM

I'm putting together my ultimate PC for Vegas Pro video editing. I've selected everything but a boot drive. I am thinking of using a 128GB SSD (Solid State Drive) for boot and apps. The data drive with be a conventional 2TB HD.

I have no experience with SSD, but find it has many advantages. The only technical disadvantage I find is that performance decreases over time. Small drive size and high cost are not relevant to my decision, performance is what concerns me.

I will be running Windows 7 Pro 64bit and considering the purchase of the Crucial 128GB or Intel 160GB SSD.

Anyone have experience or thoughts on SSD? Comments welcome.
Rich

Comments

ushere wrote on 5/24/2010, 7:21 PM

can't comment on ssd drives, other than i would probably wait just a little longer till everything is sorted out regarding their long-term reliability....

however, i would be more inclined to have a smaller second drive - say 1tb, and keep projects on external drives for safety / practicality.

perhaps i'm just safety conscious, but losing 2tb of data at once would worry me!

Chienworks wrote on 5/24/2010, 7:32 PM

The only thing we're using SSD for is to obtain nearly instant boot times of our RAID servers. The only thing we put on them is a mirror of standard OS boot image, which we can replace in a few minutes if we need to replace the drives. We won't trust them for any data whatsoever.

And even then we're not convinced that they're working out. After all, a regular mechanical platter drive boots these beasts up in 45 seconds. Is shaving half that time off really a big deal, especially considering that reboots tend to happen only once or twice per year?

Byron K wrote on 5/24/2010, 8:13 PM

Here's a pretty good thread on the subject:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=700779

LReavis wrote on 5/24/2010, 8:31 PM

Since the time that I participated in the above thread, I've accumulated a bit more experience. My SSDs have stopped slowing down - the G2 drive reads at 66MB/S; the G1, 67. These are not earth-shaking numbers, and the write speeds are even slower; but at least they've been stable for a couple of months now. However, the big advantage of SSDs is their near-zero seek time, resulting in unusually fast boot times and fast opening time for programs.

I think the SSDs still are a bit unreliable. Every time I install or change a program, I make a new image of the C drive. Once or twice I have had to restore the image because the OS won't boot or something else seems to have gone wrong (but I restore more often than that in order to go back to, say, a previous version of Vegas . . . most recently, from 9e-64 back to 9c-64).

That's especially easy to do now that I have Paragon Hard Disk Management on both my Win7-64 SSD and on my G1 SSD for WinXP: I merely boot to the other SSD to restore the faulty image. Takes just a few minutes of my time (maybe 50 min. of machine time), and always has worked flawlessly.

I'm still 100% sold on the value of an SSD for a boot drive - I can't imagine putting together a new system with spinning disk boot drives.