ssd?

[brian_johnstone]

ok so im looking at ordering an ssd, installing it for my os and programs and keeping all of my music on my existing 500gb in an caddy in place of my dvd. from searching similar threads i understand that i wont really see any improvement in read times for the music but will the ssd improve system stability, have any of you noticeed any improvements?

cheers in advance

[basspenetrator]

i bought a ssd mac some time ago and put a 500gb harddrive in place of the dvd.
i never want a normal harddrive ever again for my os..

[brian_johnstone]

meant to say the drives im looking at are OCZ AGILITY 2 and Crucial m4

[brian_johnstone]

i bought a ssd mac some time ago and put a 500gb harddrive in place of the dvd.
i never want a normal harddrive ever again for my os..

without sounding dumb could you elaborate i'm running windows, i know the bootup time is immensely better but will the laptop be any more stable, as thats what im after more so than speed really.

[basspenetrator]

without sounding dumb could you elaborate i'm running windows, i know the bootup time is immensely better but will the laptop be any more stable, as thats what im after more so than speed really.

well, i cannot really comment on that. my first mac had a normal drive and went pretty well. the new one is also pretty stable..

[brian_johnstone]

cool, well if anything i could just put it down to NEEDING it because i want it, r.g.a.s it is!!

[no_rex4u]

i bought an intel SSd over summer 120gb, off newegg, its great for programs.
ive been running it on my Asus (then dell ) laptops ever since. you all missed the black friday sale $1/gb

[MaxAU]

By stable do you mean like more sturdy and less likely to break and such? Because if so then yes as the SSD has no moving parts as opposed to a hard drive then it is a lot more stable.

[jimbrowski00]

i bought an intel SSd over summer 120gb, off newegg, its great for programs.
ive been running it on my Asus (then dell ) laptops ever since. you all missed the black friday sale $1/gb

Exactly what I got! And I picked it up on Black Friday

Anyhow... stability wont really improve imo. Resume from sleep is almost instant though and that makes your laptop much more convenient.

That being said... doing a clean install of your os with only necessary drivers and minimal proggies will improve your stability. A SSD is not necessary to do these things but its a damn good excuse

[SparkDogg]

I'm an IT guy by trade, and I justified buying 2 Crucial M4's, 2 Sandisk 120gig SSD's, and 2 Kingston SSD's ("Investigating methods to mitigate the performance impact of portable device encryption ;-)

I maxed the memory (8gb) and threw XP and 7 builds on the Crucial and Sandisk drives, and have been running some benchmarking utilities to get some legit results. Using Novabench, CrystalDiskMark, and DiskBench (along with a few others), and the difference between the SSD's and a plain SATA are INSANE

here's a report with the Crucial drive:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 224.968 MB/s
Sequential Write : 173.663 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 200.877 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 128.171 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 22.707 MB/s [ 5543.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 56.407 MB/s [ 13771.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 24.900 MB/s [ 6079.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 67.973 MB/s [ 16595.0 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 73.4% (87.5/119.1 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2011/12/01 9:09:23
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

I can't find my SATA results for CDB at the moment, but they were all ~5-15mb\sec throughput vs. ~200 or so on average for the SSDs.

And in actual usage I'll say that across the board every single operation is significantly faster than with a SATA drive. I don't see myself ever going back to a traditional disk for my OS.

One other thing to note, a lot of laptops don't have SATA controllers that will run any faster than SATAII, and on those machines the faster SATAIII drives like the Crucial aren't any faster than the cheaper SATAII drives. That means that ~$120 Sandisk drive will have the same impact as the ~$180-200 Crucial drive.

That was long winded, hope it helps. Peace