SSD Drives - something to consider before taking the plunge

[JavaJones]

It's worse than you think Deo! If you assume it takes about 10 seconds to get "partially undressed" (try it, it's a reasonable estimate) and about 30 to get fully undressed (remember we're talking about typical speeds here, not "I'm trying to get undressed as fast as possible), then the following is true (at a minimum):

You waste 80 seconds per day undressing.

In 1 week, you have already wasted more than *nine minutes* of time.

In just 1 month you waste 40 minutes.

In a year, you waste 8 whole hours!

In an average life of 75 years you would waste *23 and a half days*!

This is clearly a vital issue. Surely we need legislation on this, amiright?

- Oshyan

[mouser]

you people are wasting your life posting!!!!
just think it took you 20 seconds to post this.. you could have spent those 10 seconds installing an ssd drive!!!
you are wasting your lives!!!!!

[Deozaan]

you people are wasting your life posting!!!!

-mouser (June 18, 2011, 08:28 PM)

You heard it straight from the cat's mouth! I guess it's time for us all to give up DC. Just think of the hours you'd save every week!

[Renegade]

Imagine the time you waste actually doing things! You could cut it all out! Save even more!

If you cut out everything, in an average life of 75 years, you'd save 75 years!

[40hz]

you people are wasting your life posting!!!!

-mouser (June 18, 2011, 08:28 PM)

You heard it straight from the cat's mouth! I guess it's time for us all to give up DC. Just think of the hours you'd save every week!

-Deozaan (June 19, 2011, 03:49 AM)

Hmm... In light of that (considering the amount of posting I've done) maybe I'd better take a closer look at this DC involvement of mine. Especially since it comes from The Cat himself.  

[phitsc]

Thanks.

But I still don't get it. He really expects the average person to go out and spend $1,000+ for a 600GB SSD?

-Deozaan (June 18, 2011, 03:43 AM)

I can remember a time when I was thinking about spending 1000$ for a 20 MB hard-drive

[cranioscopical]

I can remember a time when I was thinking about spending 1000$ for a 20 MB hard-drive

-phitsc (June 19, 2011, 04:26 PM)

Yes, and didn't it seem a staggering amount of storage?

[Deozaan]

Thanks.

But I still don't get it. He really expects the average person to go out and spend $1,000+ for a 600GB SSD?

-Deozaan (June 18, 2011, 03:43 AM)

I can remember a time when I was thinking about spending 1000$ for a 20 MB hard-drive

-phitsc (June 19, 2011, 04:26 PM)

Yeah, but at that time I'm pretty sure they didn't have 70MB drives that were a bit slower for $100.

Over three times as much storage space at one-tenth the price.

[Renegade]

I had a TI 99/4A, and the hard drives at one point were dropped  from $2k to $1k. My parents weren't going to spend that much on it, so I was stuck with a tape drive. Those were slooooooooowwww...

http://en.wikipedia....Instruments_TI-99/4A

[phitsc]

Thanks.

But I still don't get it. He really expects the average person to go out and spend $1,000+ for a 600GB SSD?

-Deozaan (June 18, 2011, 03:43 AM)

I can remember a time when I was thinking about spending 1000$ for a 20 MB hard-drive

-phitsc (June 19, 2011, 04:26 PM)

Yeah, but at that time I'm pretty sure they didn't have 70MB drives that were a bit slower for $100.

Over three times as much storage space at one-tenth the price.

-Deozaan (June 19, 2011, 05:21 PM)

Agreed. I think it was actually the *only* one available

[mateek]

You are wasting your life if you aren't a nudist!   ...   

-Deozaan (June 18, 2011, 05:29 PM)

I've decided to strip the case off my six month old OCZ SSD so it'll be faster!

My other SSD is in a laptop.  If I strip the case off that one will it still be faster?   

Has anyone seen any forum posts on stripping outer cases off SSDs and making them nude for speed yet?

I use one computer for all my TV, all my live streamcasts in language, scanning, as a NAS, to transcribe audio files, and to occasionally edit a video, so startup was getting excruciating.  I bought my first SSD for that PC, 60GB, and I'm very happy I did.  I didn't shift my Windows system files, but I moved all the music and data onto another drive.  I moved a bunch of programs onto the other drive too, and install them there whenever I can, although sometimes I end up putting them back on the "C:" due to install problems.

My laptop on my nightstand with a chair on the other side also running all day is an old Thinkpad T23 in a real bad spot in this fourth floor apartment of mine of twenty months.  The window toward the main road is high up on the wall and I need to look out a lot to watch the excitement (hawks on the church roof across the street, ambulances for the elderly in the building here, buses stopping, traffic accidents, carnivals when they close the road, etc).  I have an old very sturdy speaker stand tucked in I can stand on, between the bed and the laptop.  I kept bumping the laptop, and this round of drive replacement was coming way too early. I think I was about to buy a fifth drive for it when I realized how happy I was with the first SSD.  I found an IDE interface SSD for it about three months ago.  This all broke the bank, but I expect I'll get long life out of them.

BTW, I've got another screen from my PC to my bedroom for TV, video, etc, so I can walk around and not lose my concentration, hooked to the laptop by Input Director.  Actually, this is the home of the 'triple double.'  I've got the PC in a central location, with one pair of wires to the bedroom for double screen there, and two in the other direction for the entry room. 

Now I'm going to go back to the top of this forum and read the article that started this.  I'm not scared....very.

[retfar]

I am running my laptop on a puppylinux 2gig kingston usb flash drive for 6 months 2/7.Paid $5 3 years ago for it. No problems yet.
 

[40hz]

you could have spent those 10 seconds installing an ssd drive!!!

-mouser (June 18, 2011, 08:28 PM)

BTW: You left out the part where they'd also be spending $200-300 "just doing it." 

(@25$/hr that would be like wasting 8 hours of your working life if SSD didn't perform for you.) 

[johnk]

I've been using an SSD as my OS disk for 6 months or so, and I agree that it's a "transformative" experience, particularly with Windows: for example rebooting is no longer something I avoid at all costs, because reboots are so quick. The use of TRIM in Win7 should reduce SDD failures.

Like most people, all data is on an HDD, as are temp files, cache files etc. But I wouldn't go back to an HDD for an OS disk.

[f0dder]

Bringing this thread a bit back on track...

I've got a 64GB Intel X25-E in my workstation, installed around... May or June 2009, iirc (stupid ambiguous American date format on the invoice! - probably have the precise date scribbled down somewhere). Not a single hiccup, and (still) great performance after a fair amount of abuse. That is the ridiculously expensive SLC-flash enterprise-level SSD, though.

14. Mar. 2011 I got a 120GB OCZ Vertex2 for my laptop. Seemed like a nice drive, pretty fast etc. Less than a month and a half later, with very light use, the drive went AWOL. I had done a (clean) shutdown of Win7 the night before, and upon powering up the machine the drive simply wasn't recognized by the machine - nor any of my desktops. Tried leaving it unconnected for 24 hours as per forum recommendations, still no go. Status LEDs on the drive were green.

Dunno what happened to the drive, but apparently it's sorta normal for (some?) sandforce based drives to go into a panic state when resuming from standby (weird that mine bugged out from a shutdown+start and not standby). That's veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery encouraging. Fscking retarded firmware, or a hardware bug? Dunno. And apparently some of the current-gen Intel drives have had problems too, wonderful.

The current situation really sucks. SSDs were supposed to fail 'gracefully' - memory cells that have reached their lifetime and can no longer be written to (well, erased), but are still readable... or at the very least, only a few blocks of memory with corruption compared to the sometimes spectacular HDD failures.

In reality, we get drives that fail without any warning, with moderate use, within a few months? Eek.

That said, I still like SSDs. Call me a motörhead if you will, but the speed is simply too delicious. Just gotta have backups, as always.