A mechanical disk is not en the same ballpark when it comes to R/W speeds either. They are not in the same ballpark... they are in different worlds! But you must make sure the SSD you buy supports the TRIM command.

Reliability , in a 'disc' with bits that die when you've written to them a relatively low number of times ?!

I know the internal subsystems are supposed to mitigate this by cleverly automatically shuffling the data to new locations, but I'll hang off for a while until this proves not to be a real-life problem.

geoff

>> A mechanical disk is not even in the same ballpark as a solid state device

This is correct. A mechanical disk is orders of magnitude more reliable than an SSD. SSDs have fairly short life spans by disk standards. I would not recommend using them for anything but the boot disk and software installations. Do not store stuff on your SSD that you can not afford to lose. If you store data on SSDs back up VERY often.

Here's my opinion. And I have both SSD's and mechanical drives.

I use a 128GB SSD for the OS and applications. They load instantly. I could never go back to a mechanical drive.

I use a 128GB SSD for editing. After the editing is finished I output to a mechanical drive and move the project to the mechanical drive for archiving until I delete it. 5400rpm drives are fine for me since it's really only a storage/backup drive. All the work is done on the SSD's.

I would never, ever consider spending money on a "fast" mechanical drive. They are all just variable degrees of slow once you've used an SSD.

As for the lifespan of SSD's. Before writing about the suspect lifespan do a little research and you'll find that unless you're looking at an enterprise server situation you'll likely get 5 years or more out of the SSD and that's if you're writing quite a bit to it on a daily basis.

So you're saying you're running two SSDs, one for OS and programs and the other for editing, and that a 128MB drive is adequate for your editing projects.

I'd add a caveat to that. If you're working with less heavily compressed HD footage then you might need a lot of storage space and a lot of throughput.

One other thing I'd add is that if you're restarting Vegas or rebooting the entire OS a lot then a fast SSD would save a lot of frustration. Back in the days when PPro CS2 was taking down our edit systems every 20 minutes we could really have used an SSD to boot from!

Rob

Thanks to all that replied. Since a majority thinks the SSD is the best solution, at least for the system disk (OS & apps) I am willing to change my mind.

When I researched SSDs 1-2 years ago, Corsair and Intel were condiered very good. Is there a brand folks here are happy with. I would like 200GB SSD, 160GB minimum.

thanks,
Rich