Is it time to buy that SSD?
Summary: Perhaps you noticed that SSD sale prices are dropping to $1/GB and even less. Is now the time to buy?
Here's how to tell if you are ready to take the plunge.
You prefer quality to quantity. The biggest knock against SSDs is that the cost per gigabyte. The easiest way to fix that is to know how much data you are currently using. Then add 15% to allow for some limited growth and swap space.
For example, if your notebook's 320GB hard drive is only 1/4 full - not uncommon for primarily business use - that's 80GB. Add 15% or 12GB to get to 92 and then round up from there to the next largest SSD. Instead of a 300+ GB SSD @ $300+ you'll be fine with a 120 at ≈$120.
Don't buy unless you plan to buy for all your systems. Once you get used to an SSD on one system all your other systems will seem maddeningly slow. Happened to me.
Battery life is a problem. Notebook drives are very power efficient and a small part of total notebook energy consumption - screens are much worse - but unless your sleep mode is very efficient you'll find that you're also chewing up battery life doing nothing.
SSD bootups are so fast that you won't mind shutting down for lunch - or booting up to check something for a couple of minutes. And an SSD will add 15%-20% to your battery's current life - not a strong reason to buy - but it helps.
You back up regularly. SSD reliability varies a lot by by brand. And even good brands have failures - which with SSDs tend to be sudden - that aren't preceeded by clicking noises. So back up your data regularly
You'll do it yourself. Install costs make an expensive proposition that much worse. SSDs are carefully made to install just like disks. But you also need to migrate data and that is trickier on Windows.
You use it for business. Your notebook will be noticeably snappier and you'll be happier. That should make it a no-brainer.
Here's why NOT to buy now. My friend Jim Handy of semiconductor research firm Objective Analysis notes that flash prices have
. . . been declining at a pretty steady 60% annual rate for a whole year now.
That means that today's $1/GB SSD will be next year's $0.40/GB SSD.
Which is the best reason I can think of to wait.
The Storage Bits take Don't obsess over performance numbers when comparing SSDs: they all do small I/Os so much better than disks that you'll love whatever you get.
If now isn't the right time for you, then wait a while. Prices will only get better.
Comments welcome, of course. My first notebook SSD cost $400 for 10MB back in the early 90s. Maybe that's why $1/GB sounds good!
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Talkback
SSD is the Way to Go
still buggy
I'll try againw when I purchase a new mobo and the prices come down a bit more.
a local big box store had a certain brand of 120GB model SSDs for 40% off
ORLY? 160GB SSD is still around $250+
160 minimum?
That's a lot of space
I've got, in a XP VM, Office 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010, Visual Studio 2010, but not SQL Server, for 40GB (with roughly 10 to spare). A VM server 2008 w/SQL Server I connect to is about 50 as well.
Net size for all is 90GB, but if I didn't use Server 2008 I could use SQL on the same XP VM and be 25~30GB ahead. For testing for certs, one needn't have a 50 zettabyte database. Just the structure and a handful of sample entries to prove the DB works as intended.
Bare bones configs, of course, but when saving to the host's partitions it becomes a moot point.
Yes I want one!
Yes, please wire me the money.
Wire?
SSD's \ Wire . . . LOL!
Awesome
The problem with laptops is that they usually only have one drive bay which means you'll have to buy a larger drive. On desktops you can add the drive and move your C partition onto the SSD and have your system boot off of htat drive and programs load off that drive, but you can use cheaper sower space to store you files, et. VEry cost effective
mSATA
migrating
Migrating is not so easy...
Personally, I think the optimal solution (not for a laptop, but for a desktop) is the SSD caching capability (Smart Response) in the Z68 and later chips from Intel. Put in a reasonably sized SSD (say, 60GB) in front of a relatively large rotating dive, and you get most of the best of both worlds. And the SSD decaying over time (in capacity) is a performance issue, not a functionality/data loss issue. It makes me crazy that they haven't put the capability in lower-end chipsets where it would be more useful to more people, but... it's Intel.
Shrink the existing partition to under the new SSD size
You'd like to believe that works, but it doesn't ...
My point is that if you're going to do the move to an SSD, you should get your ducks in a row and assume the cloning process won't work the first time - because it likely won't. That said, I love the speed of my SSDs, but will be addressing the wear issue for SSDs by moving to the Smart Response capability in Z68 and Z77 motherboards.
Have RELIABILITY improve?
I haven't heard of any improvements to the technology .... so the answer is probably a huge NO. It is still a expensive gamble.
See the Warranty...
mmmhhhh
Flash memory used in SSDs has a limited write cycle count.
When a cell becomes defective the SSD builtin algorithm assigns a new cell to replace the defective one, but the cell spare area has a limited size and when it's exhausted, the drives fails.
If your swap file is located on the SSD, expect a high failure rate if you're heavily using your computer with a lot of programs runing concurrently.
Warranty doesn't cover the lost data
Write exhausted drives do not fail. Reads still possible
The write elsewhere scenario is not just for write-exhausted blocks, but is what the wear-levelling algorithms do ALL the time.
Server grade SSDs are typically the more expensive SLC type, with 100,000 writes per block, rather than the 10,000 for consumer MLC devices.
As for swap files, MS telemetry data shows that while there are lots of tiny reads, writes are 1MB and relatively rare, due to write caching, which in their words makes SSDs the 'perfect' swap drive!
Too many here are still spreading a lot of FUD and misunderstandings about SSDs.