Solid State HDs - worth the cost?

[Jamon Camisso]

On 01/15/2010 06:01 PM, ted leslie wrote:
> i have the top of the line intel 32gb one, it does 220mb / second r/w approx.
> and i belive is 1M+ writes cycles.
>
> it was about 550$ and is about 450 now (as i have had it for about a year)
>
> for loading openoffice, yes its way faster, and booting is fast,
> about 15 seconds faster.
>
> having said all this, i can say that the 550$ would have been better
> spent on ram, i.e. buy another 8gb or ram, and over all it would
> have been a better improvement for the system, however,
> since the drive can last for ages , ....
> i am going to wait until the price drops more, and they are
> sata3 based (or whatever that new sata standard is)
> then attach 4-8 of them to a 3ware card on raid 6,
> and then we're talking,
> but for now, the money is better spent (i think) on other improvements,
> unless you have popular tasks that work within 32 gb (or 64) that
> have alot of seeks, and you value benifit in that.

Intel certainly is at the top of the pile for SSDs. That said, I have a 
60GB drive with an Indilinx controller (that's important in the 
non-Intel/consumer range) for my boot and root partitions and I'll never 
go back to SATA.

I still store data like music and movies etc. on an internal sata raid1 
array, but read and seek times aren't an issue there so much.

Interestingly, costs for good performing SSDs seem to all be 
consistently in the $3-4/GB range for sizes over 32GB. That must be 
related to the actual cost of the flash memory chips themselves.

In terms of desktop use, I think and SSD does make the most substantial 
perceived performance improvement above and beyond any other upgrade. 
There's no sitting around waiting for a program to load or nearly as 
long for a machine to boot. I do agree that more memory never hurts too.

My $0.02

Jamon
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