Anyone familiar with Solid State Drives?

[jamesrage]

Anyone familiar with Solid State Drives?I heard that due to the fact there are no moving parts that data access is near instantaneous.But I was wondering if there is any downsides to ssd.

1.How long do they last? I do plan on keeping this for 4-6 years.

2.If there is a black out and I got a crappy surge protector will I be reinstalling my OS or worse getting a new drive?

3.Are these really good with games? I like my 3rd person shooters, will this have better performance?

4.Is there a limit to how much I can download and erase over and over again? I download and delete a lot of stuff and I use programs like ccleaner to wipe free space clean.

5.I have carpet in my house am I going to have to worry about static electricity touching the computer case?

6.Am I going to get less and less use overtime?

 

[Rainman05]

Anyone familiar with Solid State Drives?I heard that due to the fact there are no moving parts that data access is near instantaneous.But I was wondering if there is any downsides to ssd.

1.How long do they last? I do plan on keeping this for 4-6 years.

2.If there is a black out and I got a crappy surge protector will I be reinstalling my OS or worse getting a new drive?

3.Are these really good with games? I like my 3rd person shooters, will this have better performance?

4.Is there a limit to how much I can download and erase over and over again? I download and delete a lot of stuff and I use programs like ccleaner to wipe free space clean.

5.I have carpet in my house am I going to have to worry about static electricity touching the computer case?

6.Am I going to get less and less use overtime?

SSDs are basically the next gen HDDs. The only downside a SSD has to a normal harddrive is that you get less gb for the same price. I mean, this isn't accurate math but think of it this way... for the money you need to buy a 100gb SSD you could buy a 1TB HDD.

1. Yes, the will last you for that time, even longer.

2. the SSD can fry like any other component that fries... like your video card or motherboard or whatever. So if something comes in that can fry your SSD, it'll surely fry you video card or your motherboard or something.

3. Yes. Yes. Yes. Everything is better with an SSD in terms of speed.

4. Yes and no... I suggest you invest 2-3 days in taking good, close looks at reviews on multiple sites of the SSD you wanna buy. Take only those that have been rated very high across multiple sites. Also, don't buy the latest and greatest SSD. Buy the tested and tried ones... older versions that get good reviews and good scores. So like, if a new SSD would come out tomorrow, don't buy it thinking it's better... buy last years' version that many said it works fine.

5. No.

6. Not likely for the time span you plan on keeping it for.

Lifehacker has a very good article on SSDs.

The Complete Guide to Solid-State Drives

 

[Simon W. Moon]

How long it will last depends on how you use it.

If you do a lot of writing to it it will wear out much faster than a regular hd would given the same amount of use.
But the question really is whether the ssd will last until at least just after you replace it.

Increasing your RAM can prevent some of the need for your machine to use the drive to cache memory. Decreasing that writing can help prevent wear and tear on the drive.

The thing to avoid is writing to that disk very often. You want to slap some stuff on there and then just read it. That's what makes putting the the swap file on it such an issue.

 

[jamesrage]

How long it will last depends on how you use it.

If you do a lot of writing to it it will wear out much faster than a regular hd would given the same amount of use.
But the question really is whether the ssd will last until at least just after you replace it.

Increasing your RAM can prevent some of the need for your machine to use the drive to cache memory. Decreasing that writing can help prevent wear and tear on the drive.

The thing to avoid is writing to that disk very often. You want to slap some stuff on there and then just read it. That's what makes putting the the swap file on it such an issue.

Would setting your internet browser to delete history when you exit it and programs like CCleaners, anti-virus programs and disk defragmenters effect the longevity of it since they do delete and write data often?

 

[RedAkston]

Would setting your internet browser to delete history when you exit it and programs like CCleaners, anti-virus programs and disk defragmenters effect the longevity of it since they do delete and write data often?

Clearing browser history doesn't really have an impact since it's so small an amount of data. Cleaners are fine as well as anti-virus. You rarely if ever need to defrag an SSD. The SSD's are basically big memory sticks. Much more reliable and much faster than an HDD. I've been running a SSD for months now and I can tell the difference. I do just have my OS on the SSD and I do most of my writing to my HDD's.

 

[Stewart]

You won't get better performance in terms of fps. But you will see a nice decrease in loading screens. Of course with some games now over 20gb, can you afford to put them on an ssd?

 

[American]

I have a 60GB SSD and a 1T HDD, and the SSD is almost full. Don't buy one that too small.