Is a solid state disk a good upgrade?

[mgt6910]

Are solid state disks a good idea to speed up a PC ? I see that (for example) the OCZ Apex 60GB SSD reads up to 230MB/sec and writes up to 160MB/sec.
Standard SATA 3Gb/s beats those times with a real speed of 300 MB/s. Is it the elimination of the 8 ms seek-time that gives the advantage to SSD? What proportion of a file-transfer is seek-time as opposed to transfer time ?

[Midknyte]

Not at this point in time. The speeds you listed are BURST speeds. The sustained speeds would be much lower.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=7
Enter the Poorly Designed MLC

The symptoms are pretty obvious: horrible stuttering/pausing/lagging during the use of the drive. The drive still works, it's just that certain accesses can take a long time to complete. It's a lot like using a slow laptop hard drive and trying to multitask, everything just comes to a halt.

You're going to spend a LOT of $$ to get a SSD. I'd get a Velociraptor and spend the rest on other components.

[Sterling_Aug]

To speed up a PC you need one or more of the following item:

1.) Faster processor
2.) More RAM
3.) Faster hard drive
4.) More efficient OS
5.) Less bloatware and running services on the PC

[cdroman]

They look pretty attractive, espescially once the prices come down. From what I've read the SSD drives smoke most regular drives in several disk intensive areas. The drives are more robust, have no moving parts, make less noise, and less heat. :)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/150771/intels_new_ssd_drive_delivers_blazing_fast_perform ance.html

edit; the link doesn't show what I read in the magazine. The SSD drive was tested against another SSD drive, a 4200 rpm drive, and a 7200 rpm drive. i.e. the Intel SSD drive took 266 seconds with Nero imaging, the other SSD drive 476 seconds, the 4200 drive 847 seconds, and the 7200 drive 579 seconds to do the same task. To copy 3.06 GB of files, the Intel SSD drive took 63 seconds to 177,258,152 seconds for the other drives. There were 5 test in all, the Intell SSD was quickest on all of them and used less power than all the other dirves.

[Train]

More on those SSD rigs.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/intel_x25m

And do not forget to read "Other SSD reviews in our roundup:" at the bottom.

They need years yet.

[cdroman]

More on those SSD rigs.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/intel_x25m

And do not forget to read "Other SSD reviews in our roundup:" at the bottom.

They need years yet.

For the way I use a pc those random write and read figures look very enticing. I can see myself with some of these drives in the near future. :)

[Train]

I would say come Dec you should be able to get a good one. Figure it will take that long to get things squared away.

[RaidCake]

In the case of a portable device I do recommend the upgrade. Lower cost SSD's that perform on the level of a 7200RPM drive will run faster and give you the following.

Low heat, your fan will barely come on.
Low power use, the combo of no fan and lower power consumption
Longer battery times, low power= more battery
Fast boot times, smoking fast seek times = fast boot and app loads.
No more need to defrag the drive, better performance.

I have 2 Transcend 64GB IDE 2.5" drives running in a Sony Vaio notebook and Fugitsu tablet PC. Great performance and they cost me $135 each.

The drives that are SMOKING fast are the 100+ MBPS Read/write but they cost upwards of $700 for 128GB.

~RC