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Whats the big deal with SSDs?

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Yeah theoretically they're more reliable but in the real world they're just not. I work at Ebuyer, a big UK based PC components retailer and we get SSD's returned as faulty constantly. Especially the Corsair and OCZ ones.
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They are so much faster than mechanical HDD's that its not even funny. It took me a while to bite the bullet and get one but now that I have one I can never go back to mechanical, it is sooooo slow by comparison. Its like comparing a Yugo to a Bugatti Veyron.

Some people have issues with them but most do not, generally it is usually a compatibility or firmware problem more than anything else. That's relatively normal and expected given the infancy of the technology, especially when we start pushing speeds that are maxing out SATA3 bandwidth as is the case with some of the high end drives.

I picked a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240gb and have had zero issues with it in the month I have had it.

I just bought a 128GB Samsung SSD from newegg.com
I think as long as you're welling to pay a little extra and get Crucial, Samsung or Intel then you're good with liability.
I was tempted by OCZ sales prices, but after seeing some comments on newegg I realize I rather pay a little extra than dealing with the headaches.

You won't see more FPS in games, but level loading and general programs loading and lunching will be much faster. The OS will also benefit from the speed of a ssd, faster boot time and faster write/read speeds for general and heavy use. But the price/storage ratio is a big con. The best deal right now is to get a SSD as a boot drive for OS and programs and the largest HDD you can afford for storage. If money isn't a problem, the you could buy a larger capacity SSD which would also perform better.
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I just got an M4 256G. It installed Win 7 64 in about ten minutes. I couldn't believe it. It boots in about half the time of my SCSI 320, and it shuts off in about two seconds. Programs come up practically instantaneously. It's silent. Other than that, I can't tell it's there.

BlackHawk91 said:
You won't see more FPS in games, but level loading and general programs loading and lunching will be much faster. The OS will also benefit from the speed of a ssd, faster boot time and faster write/read speeds for general and heavy use. But the price/storage ratio is a big con. The best deal right now is to get a SSD as a boot drive for OS and programs and the largest HDD you can afford for storage. If money isn't a problem, the you could buy a larger capacity SSD which would also perform better.


You said I could use one as a boot drive and the other for just storage. How does that work? And also, how would that benefit overall system performance in the long run?
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Contrarian view. I have an intel 320 in my laptop. For my server I run two spinning drives in RAID 0 (intel MB support) and wouldn't go to an SSD. Why? The improvement in boot time for the laptop was good, but my server flys on boot anyway. And I don't need to worry about a small c drive. And two great spinning drives give 3 TB of space at $150.

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Damarius said:
You said I could use one as a boot drive and the other for just storage. How does that work? And also, how would that benefit overall system performance in the long run?


You could buy a small ssd (a 60 GB minimum is recommended) let's say a crucial M4 64 GB for like $115, and install Windows on it (16 GB of space for 32 bits version and 20GB for the 64 bits) you would have around 40 GB for the programs you use the most (MS Office, Photoshop, web browsers, video editor, even games). And for an extra $50-60 you could buy a 1 TB hard drive(NO OS installed) and storage your music, videos, files, games, etc. on it. Since windows is in the ssd, the overall performance and stability of the system will be a flawlessly experience (fast loading, fast booting, etc). For further information about SSDs you could look at this thread . Always remember that if your main purpose is gaming and you are on a budget, then a ssd won't improve your FPS, that $115 could always buy a better GPU. Hope it helps.

BlackHawk91 said:
You could buy a small ssd (a 60 GB minimum is recommended) let's say a crucial M4 64 GB for like $115, and install Windows on it (16 GB of space for 32 bits version and 20GB for the 64 bits) you would have around 40 GB for the programs you use the most (MS Office, Photoshop, web browsers, video editor, even games). And for an extra $50-60 you could buy a 1 TB hard drive(NO OS installed) and storage your music, videos, files, games, etc. on it. Since windows is in the ssd, the overall performance and stability of the system will be a flawlessly experience (fast loading, fast booting, etc). For further information about SSDs you could look at this thread . Always remember that if your main purpose is gaming and you are on a budget, then a ssd won't improve your FPS, that $115 could always buy a better GPU. Hope it helps.



Excellent, thanks for that man, very informative.
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Aside: There are pieces of programs that MUST be installed on the C drive. There are programs that are buggy if they are installed other than in the default directory which is always on the C drive. There are many programs that store data on the C drive (photo edit, temp, etc.) most of these can be changed with effort. Having lived on a small C drive (in the win98 thru winxp era) I'll stick with large C drive. 64GB is not big enough for care-free install of programs. (Note, using 64GB as a CACHE a la the intel z68 MB software is different).
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