Features - QOTW: Is now the best time to buy an SSD?

[MrNeil]

During the week i was lucky to buy a 240G HyperX with bundle kit for £95
So hell yea its a good time to buy if you find the right deal !!!

[Terbinator]

During the week i was lucky to buy a 240G HyperX with bundle kit for £95
So hell yea its a good time to buy if you find the right deal !!!

Where from?

[Dark Knight]

I think I could hold out another 6 months and get one for Christmas, who knows might get a super mega deal lol.

[MrNeil]

oops

[MrNeil]

Where from?

Posted early this week ! Sorry you missed it

http://forums.hexus.net/current-barg...bundle-ki.html

[Jonatron]

I'm running with a ImDisk ramdrive instead - load the game's image into ramdrive and it's much faster than ANY ssd - even the pci-ex x8 cards and I store the images on a conventional 1.5tb drive.

Sounds like something interesting, I'll have to have a look into it!

[KeyboardDemon]

I think now is a great time to buy an SSD but I also think the technology will get keep getting better, prices will continue to drop for a while yet and pretty soon it will be possible to get a 500gb SSD for the same price as a 1tb HDD, or maybe that's just wishful thinking, but I'd love to see that day.

[MrBozack]

There's quite a few SSD selling cheap at the moment.... However the ones I've been seeing are lower tier products. The top performers like (the fantastic) OCZ Vertex 2 series aren't dropping as much in price as the Agility series, for example.

Vertex 2. Yum.

[voxstream]

I took the plunge with a SAMSUNG 256GB 830 Series SSD for £150. I hope it's as good as the reviews say it is, especially the reliability. A colleague of mine has gone through three SSD's in a year and they were Intel! I hope I have better luck. OK they were all replaced in warranty, but it's the fag of rebuilding the OS and software. I think I will keep an image of the SSD on another drive just in case.
Is this the right time to jump in, well as someone else said, "when you can afford it" It should arrive by Tuesday next week, I'll let you know how it goes.

[Scribe]

£166 exVAT on scan AKA 65p per GB, Vertex 4 256GB with firmware upgrade... yes plz

[zaph0d]

I'm running with a ImDisk ramdrive instead - load the game's image into ramdrive and it's much faster than ANY ssd - even the pci-ex x8 cards and I store the images on a conventional 1.5tb drive.

But you have to load it in each boot right? Not much different from superfetch.

It's much faster than superfetch, you load the image from HD>Ramdrive in about 30s for a big game like Final Fantasy XIV which is 12Gig and then that's it, constant 7 Gigabyte/sec transfer rates.
With superfetch it only caches so much at a burst and you still get HD thrashing while it tries to load parts of a game and cache more to superfetch.
Plus you can run the ramdrives as ntfs-compressed without penalty so games take less HD space and it actually speeds up the read/write speeds by 0.2%, weird but true.

Only downside is you need a whacking great amount of ram, I've got 6&4gb sticks for 24Gig total, for SB/IB you'd need 4x8 or 2x8 & 2x4. SB-Ex 4x8, 8x4 or 8x8(shudder). Not sure about the ram limit on AMD boards atm.

[Hicks12]

Have had a few SSDs, none failed so far and was on 64gb m4 boot and 128gb m4 for games/programs, now moved the 64gb out and used the 128gb for boot (faster writes and more space!) and put a 256gb samsung 830 (£136 from novatech with quidco) in as the new games drive, 128gb was getting a bit small. Would keep my 64gb but it seems pointless as my asus p8z68 only has 2x sata6 ports, basically no need having them in the others id say!. Got a 64gb in my laptop to and this now spare m4 may find its way into my dads new laptop, 64gb arent worth much now so not worth the hassle to sell unfortunately.

Is it worth it? Yes its damn silent, the HDD were the loudest in my system, everything now zippy as EVERYTHING is on SSDs and even all my music is on a 32GB Corsair survivor GTR . I have almost 3TB of storage in external drives for when i do need space, i have actually enabled an interal 1tb (forgot i had it in there!) and just have it off when not transferring things.

People talk of reliability but SSDs are more reliable than HDD, its just pot luck if either type die (or you have a sandforce ). I cant see prices going down much further, flash drives have stalled at around the 50p per GB mark for along time now, it seems like a relatively fair premium considering the performance difference, its much more than going from a single core to a dual core --> quad, seriously .

Buy now is the best time, if it goes down it goes down but youve had the time using the new speedy system. Cant spend to much time kicking yourself with tech prices, they always change and the "best" time to buy is when you have the money/when you need to upgrade.

[bing_raga]

This may not be a perfect time, but this may already be a good time to start ditching low-capacity HDDs. I've never bought a single SSD, patiently waiting for the prices to drop, but I'm not expecting them to drop any further any time soon. So, right now, I'm thinking of getting one, or maybe two.

[krsboss]

I bought my first SSD for $400 Au, 120 GB...since then I have bought maybe 8 other SSDs and currently have a 240 GB Revodrive & 256 GB Vertex 4...with prices as they are at the moment I'm very tempted to buy another Vertex 4 to RAID0 them up...however realistically, I'm not sure I would notice the difference in speed but cheap SSD is cheap

In summation, I happily bought a 120 GB SATA 3GBPs SSD for $400 when the technology was quite new...I would buy a 256 GB Vertex 4 for $315.00 tomorrow (if I thought it would make things that much faster)...so for anyone who hasn't bought a SSD yet...DO IT!!!

[raspute]

this isn't the perfect time. the point of the price war is for the main 4 oems to squeezer out competition. unfortunately the competition is keeping step and lowering prices to stay alive. the prices won't stop going down. besides, several very promising new flash drive technologies are just around the corner (planned release this or next year) that claim faster speeds, and infinite write/erase cycles. i'm going to wait.

[Jimbo75]

I've already got a 60GB but it's a tight squeeze fitting even one large game on it now. I'll probably wait until the 240's are down a bit more before getting a new one.