Solid state drives

[Terbinator]

I'd rather wait afew ms more and have more space/money.

You'll be waiting for ever in that and every case. im currently running 280GB across a 120 & 160 HD's. This is small and the 1TB drives around the 50-60 mark are very tempting, but guess what theyre not big enough so im going to have to wait some more for the 2TB to come down by which point they may not be big enough also... - you get my drift don't you ?

[sammorris]

Exactly - if you keep waiting for something better, there's always something better around the corner, so you'll never actually buy anything. To be perverse though Terb, 1.5TB drives are under £100 now, and quite a tempting buy

[shaithis]

The "worth" of any peice of hardware is relative.

To put things in perspective, I paid £250 for my first hard drive....all 20 MB of it!

[MoonPig]

No, i didn't mean that. Basically, look how much SSDs have reduced in price since they were released. Then, look how long we've used HDDs. Give it a year and SSDs will be as good price/GB as HDDs are now.

I'm an enthusiast, i tend to buy new things all the time. But i wont buy something if it's completely pointless to me. I'd much rather have afew HDDs in Raid0 and loads of spare money / space, than an SSD with little space and a hole in my pocket.

Take Raptors for instance, they seemed fast awhile ago, now normal 3.5" HDDs are beating them all over. HDD will keep getting better and the gap between HDD and SSD will get smaller.

I feel the same about all components, whether it's the GTX295 (pointless for the money, SSDs or i7. I wouldn't upgrade, yet.

[Terbinator]

To be perverse though Terb, 1.5TB drives are under £100 now, and quite a tempting buy

Ya they are quite good for the price i suppose, but 1.5TB seems odd, bit like the Tri-core CPU's. Oddly enough i don't have a problem with Hexa-core wtf !?!?!? But yeah the reason ive not looked at the 1.5TB is becuase it really is too small, i must be one of the lucky sods on here who surpass there VM connection - 27Mb on the 20Mb package . 2TB is probably what im going to buy if my pocket isnt pillaged by one of those spiffy new Intel drives

[shaithis]

Take Raptors for instance, they seemed fast awhile ago, now normal 3.5" HDDs are beating them all over. HDD will keep getting better and the gap between HDD and SSD will get smaller.

Maybe, maybe not.

I personally see the market going the same way as the monitor market......hard drives will be rarely seen new within the next year or 2 as SSD replace them for good, just like LCD replaced CRT.

Also, don't forget that HDDs are limited by the laws of physics, mechanical devices are not what you want......

[kalniel]

No, i didn't mean that. Basically, look how much SSDs have reduced in price since they were released. Then, look how long we've used HDDs. Give it a year and SSDs will be as good price/GB as HDDs are now.

Yes, and HDDs will have a fraction of that price/GB

[MoonPig]

Yea, i totally agree. Every once in awhile, a market gets replaced:

PCI > AGP > PCI-E
HDD > SSD
CRT > LCD
Serial > USB
IDE > SATA

But, i'd never buy the replacement straight away. That's how you waste money. Give it a year until it becomes standard, then upgrade. Getting an SSD upon release would of been very, very silly. Getting one now wouldn't be great.

But, all this is overcome by: Being incredibly rich and getting everything straight away... lol. Pity im not

I think SSD's are amazing, i've seen HDTach results with a constant 900MB/s! (3 x 120BG Vertex with Raid Card)... But that's costing nearly £1000... i wouldn't dare...

[dangel]

It's as shaithis says - it's relative worth. For me the 80gb intel sits right in price/performance and for what i'll use it for (the OS essentially). Yes it's a toy, but then this is my hobby and that's kinda the point. It's not an investment, computer hardware never is
Then again, this HD will probably be with me a few years (i'll inevitable RAID 0 it with another tho) as compared to most components which get replaced a good deal more frequently and cost more too! I'll keep my RAID 0 mechanical array for data of course

[MoonPig]

Yea, i've heard that many times. Especially when people were pitching to me why a £1000 Asus Mars is worth it.

Don't get me wrong, i'd absolutely love to buy afew SSDs for my computer, and i find myself trying to justify it. But i never can, at least for me. I game, ALOT, but my computer loads things fast enough...

When the prices drop, i'll buy one, or two, for definite. Just not now.

I hope you have fun with it, and i hope you are satisfied

[sammorris]

It's all relative, but not to the age, but more the personal use. I would get a great deal of use out of the better performance an SSD would give me over my current 36GB Raptor, but I can't afford it, pure and simple. To other people they would see hardly any use out of the extra performance, so it's worthless to them even if they could afford it - two separate scenarios.
Terbinator - funnily enough I know exactly what you mean about the strange number, but I didn't have a problem with it when 1.5TB was the largest available size, in much the same way as I didn't have a problem with 750s when they were the biggest available, but now seem a rather odd size (but that's probably because it's so cheap to get a TB drive instead).
You have of course realised that the solution to storage is to buy MANY hard drives right? I have 9 hard drives in my server, as that's the most the case will fit without having to remove the fan controller I think. My current plan is to get rid of the pair of older 500s and the old 250 (that's basically filling in as the third external drive in my USB, since it's the only drive I don't network share and it has random crap on it) with a single TB and then hopefully replace the pair of 750s with a 1.5TB - that leaves only 6 drives with each a minimum size of 1TB, then I can fill in the other three drives with whatever can be afforded. Problem is, right now I can't even afford the initial replacements - damn there not being any jobs
I only have 4Mbps at York, and 6Mbps down here, but often it spends 12 hours or more a day downloading to get all the stuff I have off torrent sites, it's slow but it gets the job done, and with no seeming fair usage limits it's decent enough. On top of needing to do all this to my fileserver, I need to get a new drive for my main PC, hopefully a WD1001FALS, since it's so full I've installed half a dozen games already over a network to my fileserver - not so bad when it's at gigabit, but if the network drops to 100Mbps, loading times leave a lot to be desired :S
As for the HDD/SSD argument, CRTs only disappeared by majority when LCDs equalled their price and performance. The early LCDs had such huge response times they weren't great for gaming, and they cost a fortune, in 2004 it was £170 for a 19" CRT at 2048x1536 versus £320 for a 17" LCD at 1280x1024 (20ms I think). Needless to say, at this point I chose the CRT. Since I typically go for the 'if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well' approach, my first LCD wasn't until 2006, a Dell Ultrasharp 2407FPW, at a not-inconsequential £640. Ouch!
Right now, You can get up to 1.5TB drives at the competitive rate, and 2TB if you're rich. SSDs top out at what, 256GB for the remotely sensible ones? (let's forget about the £3000 Terabyte ones with internal RAID for the time being). 1500GB for £95 versus 256GB for £515 is a substantial difference. mechanical drives will outsell SSDs until the price is worth the change. I can see it being at least 3 years before my fileserver starts containing SSDs. Were I not so poor from previous expense, however, you would soon see an SSD in my gaming PC, a second gen Intel 80GB.
One thing that did shout out to me was how SSDs perform in RAID. Using the cheapo OCZ Core series ones, my friend Jon has excellent performance using three of them in RAID0. On their own they're damn useless. Of course, to do RAID properly it needs to be hardware. Hardware RAID cards, once again, much expense (Though SSD or not, I do desperately want hardware RAID in my fileserver).
As for the MARS295, that's less a performance product, more a collector's item

[dangel]

@Moonpig

Cheers - me too From what i've read it makes a big difference to responsiveness - i'll be interested to see what it'll do to at the desktop level, particularly when windows is struggling to load tray apps which really thrash things. I'll probably have a smallish partition for the latest game i'm playing - purely for scientific purposes

Actually it's Deadlight's fault - if he hadn't of bought one i probably would of held off!

[sammorris]

I'm also keen to see what difference it makes. The early SSDs load windows faster but are much slower loading tray icons - they also can't play youtube videos (because they can't read and write simultaneously) I'm assuming the intels can...

[shaithis]

Tray app load times disapear, it was the biggest thing I noticed....Typing my password in and then having the desktop (virtually) instantly load and be 100% responsive was a massive "wow" factor.

While not so big or important a change, doing things like "My Computer > Manage" you notice how the window pops up instantly, rather then taking a second or so.

Things like Photoshop load times are another huge "wow" factor. A freind who works in media was sold instantly when he was CS4s load times on my rig.

And that was with 2 of the cheap Samsung 64GB drives (in Raid 0) vs 4 x 1TB F1 SpinPoint (RAID5) array.

RAID performance does scale almost linearly as well which is a huge difference to conventional HDDs, although RAID controllers add some latency, some people feel this effects performance noticably and use the on-board ICHRs instead......mine are currently running off of on-board but I will be trying my Intel drives on both the ICH10R and the Areca 1680i before making a decision.

[sammorris]

On XP, instant response at login is something even my old Raptor can do - once you stack it high with programs it slows a little but not much. I find the biggest drag is loading the OS itself, not the actual HDD time, but all the device drivers :S I'm interested to see how they perform on an Areca card, my friend gets good performance off one of those from eight Seagate 1500GBs in RAID6.

[TheAnimus]

I'm also keen to see what difference it makes. The early SSDs load windows faster but are much slower loading tray icons - they also can't play youtube videos (because they can't read and write simultaneously) I'm assuming the intels can...

I was using a first edition X25-E intel drive, windows was much faster, and the tray icons, where instantantious, so damn fast. Things like visual studio opened instantly, before it would take a couple of seconds! It was a quantum leap. The same is true of the 1.8inch MTRON drive i have at home.

On XP, instant response at login is something even my old Raptor can do - once you stack it high with programs it slows a little but not much. I find the biggest drag is loading the OS itself, not the actual HDD time, but all the device drivers :S I'm interested to see how they perform on an Areca card, my friend gets good performance off one of those from eight Seagate 1500GBs in RAID6.

No its not, not the number of apps i have that have to activate from logon. The OS that is XP itself is absolutely tiny, its all applications that slow it right down.