SSD hard drives - worth the extra money for basic office tasks?

I gather the main benefit is speed, kinda being a halfway house between your typical hard drive and RAM.

Are they worth it? Should every PC have an SSD hard drive for running programmes and an old style one for storing large files? Perhaps the latter's not necessary if you've got a server for that?

SSD drives have plummeted in price recently and may continue to drop. 128GB is now £80 and I can thoroughly recommend the Crucial M4.
The difference one of these drives makes to any computer is unbelievable.

I have a 128Gb Crucial M4 as a boot drive and a 1TB 7200RPM data drive, coupled with a good motherboard that supports 6 Gbps SATA, an i7 CPU and 16GB of memory (Windows 7 64bit).  It doesn't seem to matter how many programs I have open, the system just responds instantly - and I use some hungry programs.

I did see that the new version of Windows will boot in 7 seconds with the current generation of SSD. (2 or 3 seconds of that was the motherboard booting up)

That means if you want to boot in to safe mode you have to be really quick

My OS is on SSD and PC boots in 12 secs it's over a year old now too and the bootup performance has never changed :)

Keep everything else on a normal drive.

That's the point SSD are less reliable so only use it to store programs that you can reinstall - As Matthew says put all your data on a normal (large) drive.

If you can afford to go for SSD it’s well worth it. Speed is one factor but they are also more reliable (no moving parts)

The only thing is laptops are tending to get shipped with 128Gb SSD’s as standard and it’s not huge, if you can get a machine with a second disk as the other say it’s the best option, if not you should try and get 256Gb

SSD's have been dropping in price massively atr the moment and Ebuyer have them at just over 50p/GB

http://www.ebuyer.com/268244-ocz-120gb-agility-3-ssd-agt3-25sat3-120g-agt3-25sat3-120g

Yeah Darren it's ebuyer emails that made me wonder if they're now viable for more low end users.

Paul "That's the point SSD are less reliable"
Lee "Speed is one factor but they are also more reliable"
Hmmm...!

We've got offsite backup etc...but of course it's something we have as a last resort, not something we want to use a couple of times/month when the hard disk plays up.

What I had in mind was potentially having each computer just with an SSD drive.  It'd have operating system, internet browser, probably MS office and a couple of other programs...but not much.  All the data files would be held on a server.  Just trying to figure out if that's a good idea or not.  Speed and reliability are two key factors.  Price has come down, and disk space shouldn't be too important as it'll just be a few programs.

Chris

As with all technology - there are advantages and disadvantages

With SSDs - they are based on NAND flash memory which has a limited number of erase cycles (but something like 100000 cycles is norm now). After which they do become unreliable.

So current best recommendations is to use SSDs for quick access to data that changes the least - this means that ideal for storing your programs on and Operating System, but use other storage for your data that changes frequently.

Another disadvantage with SSDs are that when they fail - you have no warning and it will be a catastrophic failure ie. you will loose access to all data not some like HDDs. Also, due to the nature of the controllers of SSDs, data recovery is very difficult.

They are, however usually more reliable than HDD and defintly have quicker access times so can improve the usability of your computer.

Regards

But is this the way it will go anyway dispite SSD problems. As it has been said, I have not seen them, but if some laptops only have ssd's.

I installed 256gb SSD from Crucial on my Core i7 laptop, I use for mainly design tools, photoshop, illustrator, indesign etc, windows 7 booting time is doubled if not more, all programs load very quickly, and most importantly design tools are much more faster to work with as they are able to access massive temp files more faster than before.

And by the way, batter time have increased as well by 20 to 30%.

Like one of these two?  (Apple MacBook Air which have SSD's)

I had a Dell Mini 9 netbook with an early SSD, 8gb in fact!

It was certainly quicker. But the drive failed within a year. It was replaced by Dell FOC but then failed again after another 14 months. By wich time I'd changed the Netbook.

It has sort of put me off using SSD's in the future. I'd rather have a longer boot time and know that if the drive fails I've more of a chance of recovering data.

Hmmm...that is concerning.  Though I imagine the reliability will have improved, as I can't see Dell replacing that many hard drives before clobbering the supplier to improve reliability!

It always worries me when I hear that people are concerned about drive failures and loss of data and using this as a reason to choose SSDs or not. The simple fact is that there is no excuse for losing more than a few hours or at most 24 hours of data if a disc fails as your backup cycle should have already taken a copy of your precious data. If that period of data loss is too large then you need to look at a more robust backup cycle.

Before trying to optimise your system speed, please take a little time to look at how your system stores and backs up your precious data. Backups should be automatic and ideally not require ‘human’ intervention apart from plugging in a disc or tape. The best backups for laptops are normally online automatic backups which require zero activity from the user apart from ensuring a network connection.

Back to SSDs, yes it is horses for course, but if they are used in the right environment they are excellent pieces of kit. There are issues with the inherent write cycle limits on the NAND flash, but the built in wear-levelling software should take this into account and ensure that no particular groups of cells get hit more than others. In a past life I can remember projects on set-top-boxes where we had to implement flash filing systems and our own version of wear-levelling. It’s not tricky just a little difficult to test!

An alternative to a full SSD replacement for your standard HDD is to use an SSD cache such as the Crucial Adrenaline system. http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/ssc.aspx . With this you do not need to re-install windows etc., just plug it in and install the special caching software. Ideal if your laptop or desktop has a spare SATA connector.

Personally I have not yet moved to SSDs, but have installed them for customers. I am simply waiting for the price of the 256Gbyte parts to fall a little more before jumping in for my laptop and I will probably never go that way on my desktop as it runs permanently and to be honest is fast enough. 

Gary