Does anyone have any experience with SSD drives.....

[wandy]

I am currently thinking.
Crucial M4 CT064M4SSD2 2.5" 64GB SATA III
This would be part of a system upgrade.
I know 64GB sounds a bit small however it's a 'big open field' compaired to a 36GB WD raptor.
System would start life Win XP Pro 32 bit. The old MB / Processor will become a LINUX playground so depending on how that works out the new system may migrate to Win 7 or wait for Win 8. If Win 7 is anything like Vista it may be time to learn some new tricks.
The drive would hold the OS, apps, paging and such. As in current system 'work' areas will remain on 72GB WD raptor.
Any thoughts?

[Turbineguy]

1. I have a similar system

I have a Crucial M4 128 that is about 40% filled with the OS and programs. Then a Raptor 300GB for data. It works great. This is my second SSD I use W7 64 bit. Before, I had an Intel 35GB SSD with a 72GB Raptor setup.

We put the older SSD and Raptor in my son's computer running WXP 32 bit.

These SSD's work great. DO NOT DEFRAG THEM!

[wandy]

2. Thanks for the input.

[HopeHoops]

5. Agreed - DO NOT DEFRAG.

[wandy]

18. I'm not going to try it, but ya got to wonder.....

Brings back to mind first week in collage.
In the lunch area, by the microwave, their was a big sign that said.....

DO NOT PUT EGGS IN MICROWAVE!

300 Engineering students and you're going to put up a sign like that?
No I'm not going to do it but other than the 'life cycle' and the fact that it's not necessary; got to wonder what happens.
And what about VISTA. That fool thing is running a full time background defrag.
Of course that brings us back to XP good. Vista bad.
And as I'm learning. UBUNTU / Firefox isn't all that shaby either.

[steve2470]

3. SSD's are great, however....

An SSD I bought only 14 months ago died on me. Looking at buyer comments on Newegg, this was a common occurrence. I wasn't doing any kind of heavy duty database work either. My point is, you may want to check out longer-term reliability data unless you don't care about that issue.

[wandy]

4. In the end I went with a.....

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR120GB 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
I expect the rest of the parts for the new system to 'swim home' later this week.
You can get by with a 36GB raptor for the res drive but even for XP it's tight. 120GB sounds more reasonable. Mushkin has a good rep but I have no personal experience with them.
I'll post any interesting experences including the hoped for...
It just worked.

[HopeHoops]

6. SSD's are best for the 5 1/2" screen minis, mostly for weight. They will take over physical drives.

To put it in perspective, your 64GB drive up against my C=64 with 64K of memory (SSD, if you will) and an external 5 1/4" floppy that held a whopping 156K. Yeah, seems obsolete, but the fucker still works, still comes on and IS on immediately (no boot).

My HP Linux mini came with Ubuntu pre-installed on an 24GB SSD drive. I hold it in one hand and type with the other when I'm in bed holding it over my head. You can't even bother with price/volume on SSD/SATA drives. It's not just apples and oranges here. We're not even in the same orchard.

SSD will win out over time. Thumb drives are perhaps the largest driving force for that. Physical drives eat a lot of power, are slow (relatively speaking), and far more prone to damage if you drop them. SSD drives have a "meh" attitude about being dropped. They cost more now, but you usually don't need as much if you think about what you are using them for.

Good luck!

Tom

[wandy]

7. Went with the Muskin.

At the moment it's kind of hard to get around the house with out tripping over a box. Christmas! Not all that worried about weight. Hell the case is a Lean lee, yeng and yan. Sort of a desktop walk in closit. Plenty of room.
AMD 970
ASUS MB.
Let you know how things work out.

[HopeHoops]

9. I beat the crap out of mine and haven't had any troubles.

None of the thumb drives have failed either. They're definitely more reliable than floppies!

[HopeHoops]

11. It's where we are going, like it or not and it has all of the advantages.

Hard drives aren't as fragile as they once were, but when they crap out, they do it with attitude. Floppies served us well, as did ZIP drives. Magnetic tape, card readers and paper tape are all in the "nope" category. I've had 24x7 requirement systems I've had to administer remotely. I'd rather just give a command that says "go to SSD34 instead of SSD27".

I'll agree that the push for acceptance is currently a liability for reliability, but it won't be for long. The first hard drive I used was a 5MB Corvus that weighed 40 lbs. I've got about 15 TB of storage on my desk right now (just counting hard drives). The reliability will come with time.

[HopeHoops]

13. I remember a discussion about how a 176K floppy disk could be compressed to...

...get this, actually store A FULL MEGABYTE! We of course exploded in laughter at the silliness of our thinking. Two years later, it was the case. Moving parts are a problem. Most hard drive failures aren't due to the media, but the parts that spin them and try to access them. I'll agree that the write limit is a current problem, but I don't expect it to stay that way. Solid state is all there will be in ten years. They'll solve the write limitation - and magnetic isn't infinite by the way.

[HopeHoops]

15. First, the wear out - that's physical.

Hard drives keep a nice thin barrier between the head and platters, but floppies and tapes do not. The biggest problem with a hard drive is impact while it is spinning. If the head is parked, you're usually safe, but knock one off a pile of books onto the table while it's reading and say "good bye". You can throw an SSD at a wall and not hurt it.

As for "flash" drives, I don't think the long-term will be based on the current technology at all. They're already manipulating "bits" at the atomic level. It isn't even close to a commercial product yet, but it will be. The beauty of technology is knowing that no matter how fascinating what we currently have is, somebody is already working on stuff that will blow it away.

I'll agree that flash isn't up to the job of running a server, but for a PC it works just fine. My mini is so light I can hold it in one hand and it is on in less than a second after I open the lid. That beats the hell out of a laptop with a hard drive. The tablets are all flash-based. They're doing fine. My server has 9 TB of hard drive space. Even if I wanted to run it on SSDs I couldn't because they don't exist in anything near that capacity. Yet the server has the same amount of memory as the mini has in SSD space - 24GB.

Different job, different tool. And by next year, today's stuff will all be obsolete legacy hardware. I've got machines going back into the mid 70's and I get them out every once in a while to marvel at the technology of the time. I'm not sure if being a geek is a blessing or a terminal disease. Either way, I like it. My middle daughter (18) was out at her grandparents' house last week and Gramps was trying to configure a new laptop to hit the router. I walked her through finding the security key and then just said "Okay, make the connection," and she knew what to do from there. Saved me from having to get out of bed and go look at a Win7 box.

[HopeHoops]

17. LOL! Yeah, but they used to have their own beer coolers!

And no, none of said technologies are even close, but then again flash drives have only begun to hit reasonable sizes for laptops (and I wouldn't try running Windows on one). Besides, while you were talking about commercial data-processing centers, the OP was talking about 36 and 72GB drives and that's not exactly commercial volume. I've got 9TB of full-time storage on my main home server and I wouldn't use that puppy for a major system (and I don't even want to THINK about what 9TB of SSD would cost right now).