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

[HEXUS]

Or are you playing the waiting game?

Read more.

[krazy_olie]

Went half way and bought a cache.

[directhex]

Paid £132 for a 240G HyperX. Feel like I got a good deal - wife's 120G Agility 3 was about the same price last year

[atomictom]

i got a 60GB OCZ Agility SSD and wishing i had waited just a month as for just £5 more i can now have twice the capacity. already on my final couple of GB's.

[george1979]

Just recently bought and installed a Crucial M4 128Gb as a boot drive for £80.
They way prices are going I will get another 240Gb game/app drive in a few months i think.

[crossy]

i got a 60GB OCZ Agility SSD and wishing i had waited just a month as for just £5 more i can now have twice the capacity. already on my final couple of GB's.

Same deal here - although I got the 64GB Vertex2E - and I'm down to about 4GB free space on that drive (Windows 7 boot drive). Just paid £80 each for a pair of Samsung 830's (128GB), one's in the Ubuntu laptop I'm using now, the other will replace the Vertex, (when I can be bothered to figure out how to get into that desktop PC!).

Way prices are falling I think come Christmas I'll be able to afford a 256GB+ drive to replace the app drive in the desktop which is currently a partition on a 1TB HDD. And Christmas 2013 I'll probably be able to replace that 1TB drive with SSD.

To answer the question - "whenever you have the money" is the right time to buy an SSD. Price per MB will continue to fall I suspect as we get on that spiral of folks buying them because they're getting cheaper, and the price falling further because of economies of scale.

[Terbinator]

Samsung 830 256GB currently £140 on Scan's TO page...

[Strawb77]

"The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides." Amiel.

Or, to put it in the vernacular, Piss or get off the pot.

I stopped beating myself up by finding better deals days after purchases, as you always will find them.

I regret prevaricating about SSDs, got a cache drive, and wonder how I managed without that speed.

[djpc]

I got a Intel x-25m G2 80gb about 18 months ago, that cost me 160 quid. The difference in size and speed of the latest drives is incredible and im thinking about getting a new ssd in the autumn or christmas. Has anyone made a similar leap, do you notice a difference?

[CK_1985]

I got bored of waiting and bought myself a cache drive. Was fantastic for a little while... fast forward a week and I've had no end of problems with it - never managed to get it aligned with the HDD and to add insult to injury my HDD has now completely died on me (no idea if it's related, but seems like a big coincidence...)

The irony is that i bought a cache because i was too lazy to start from fresh with an SSD boot drive, and i've ended up having to do a fresh install anyway as a result of HDD failure. Only now i'm stuck with a WD green as my HDD, instead of the (considerably faster) Samsung spinpoint.

Now is the time to buy an SSD, but if i had my time again i'd buy a 256GB drive and do it properly.

[Whiternoise]

And to put it in wider perspective:



Based on that I think waiting out another drop to 50% of the current prices is reasonable, after that the waiting time is going to get exponentially longer for the sorts of gains we want. It helps that now notebook companies are moving towards SSD-only laptops that are widely available.

[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.

[Terbinator]

I got a Intel x-25m G2 80gb about 18 months ago, that cost me 160 quid. The difference in size and speed of the latest drives is incredible and im thinking about getting a new ssd in the autumn or christmas. Has anyone made a similar leap, do you notice a difference?

I think you'd be hard pressed to notice a difference tbh give you're coming from a very respectable drive.

[pp05]

With mechanical hard drives prices quite high from last year they are tempting. However their reliability still makes me cautious about installing it in the main rig.

[EasterEEL]

By coincidence I just pressed the button and purchased 2x 256GB Samsung 830 Series @ £137.99 on Scan.co.uk Thursday one day only offer. Three year warranty, full copy of Ghost. Seems a great deal.

[kalniel]

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.