SSD hard drives

[Panrider]

Has anyone used solid state drives in their pcs?

We just bought a fanless pc for use in one of our labs and it has one fitted.

It boots much faster than a pc with standard hard drive - Windows Desktop appears about 20-30 seconds after switch on.

I'm thinking of putting one in my home pc as a system/program files disc but have no experience of their reliability.

Mark

[Fonefixer]

I have a 256MB SSD in my main pc.. got it cheap through a rep that came into work. Makes a hell of a difference.

Ive heard stories about them wearing out, but traditional hdd's have that problem as well. Ive never had an issue with mine. The only tip I can give you is not to defrag it, apparently it causes undue wear.

[Panrider]

Lifespan (number of write cycles) has been my main concern about them, although I've read that they are now getting comparable to normal hard drives.

I wouldn't defrag them as there's no head movement to make it worthwhile.

Which brand is yours?

Mark

[Fonefixer]

Mine is western digital silicone edge blue

[Panrider]

Thanks.

Mark

[Diego]

They are great to run the operating system from. Some will put their applications there too, but you shouldn't do so with any application which insists on saving it's backups and cache in it's installation directory. You can get a base-line performance boost.

But never use one as an active drive, a drive you're reading and writing from constantly. Don't put media on it or anything like that, and don't put anything on it you can't take loosing.

[JimmyW]

SSDs don't perform well on windows-based systems as windows uses small file chunking, which SSDs are slow at, they perform much better with large chunking which linux uses.
Do not put SSD drives into RAID...AT ALL! they orphan themselves like you would not believe.

[pig]

Got a OCZ Vertex 32GB SSD in July 2009, as the system drive on my main PC- used XP until I installed Win7 64bit in Jan 2010.
Been rock solid- gave a quantum leap in performance. Highly recommended.

[Panrider]

Bought the OCZ 60GB Vertex 2.

Should be fitting it on Saturday after pruning my boot drive down to just Windows, Program Files and temp files.

Mark