Quote from SAxor :

The main thing that puts me off SSDs is the way they apparently slow down drastically as time goes on.

Is that apparently as in a buddy of a guy, who used to be a friend said that he knew some guy who was once told by this other guy that SSD's get slower over time?

Quote from gezmoor :

Just think it is going to be quite a long time before they become mainstream, (if ever), given the ridiculously low prices of traditional HDDs, (which are only likely to continue getting bigger/cheaper).

I think they will be mainstream in not too distant future. The prices have dropped dramatically this year. Speed has risen and features like TRIM have made drives more usable in the long run. As said, SSDs won't probably beat HDDs in size/price ratio any time soon, but they don't have to.

At this rate maybe year from now and SSD for system drive and HDD for storage will probably be quite mainstream already.

Quote from garph :

Is that apparently as in a buddy of a guy, who used to be a friend said that he knew some guy who was once told by this other guy that SSD's get slower over time?

how about apparently as in anyone whos remotely knowledgeable about ssds knows?
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=2

yeah, it's a well known thing due to well known reasons. however that same article talks about TRIM which eliminates this issue. i think i'm only about one generation before i buy one, price per GB is still fairly high, even though with TRIM I'd say it's worth it...

Quote from gezmoor :

This review might be of interest.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/611308/ ... -256gb-ssd-drive-review/2

Would seem that whilst technically there is a significant performance advantage for SSD in real world tests the difference isn't so big.

I'm not sure what the conventional hdd is the are comparing with. Usually its 5400 rpm or less which is usual for laptops, making this benchmark looking extra good for the ssd. Ssd's use also a lot less energy than normal disks. BUT with a complete system configuration, the difference is minimal. Normal desktop systems have 7200rpm and for the bootdisk it is possible to get 10K sata disk for less than half the price of a ssd. 15K disks are available too for years now, but they are not designed for desktop market and use only sas interfaces.

ssd' s are faster than conventional disks, but is it really worth the money to get windows boot faster? Unless you are on unlimited budget, the money is better spent on: cpu, memory, graphics card etc. I do recommend though not to buy a green-editions hdd's etc. Those energy saving models are a bit slower compared to regular 7200rpm disks for pc-systems. But the gained energy saving on a total system config is very small.

The harddisk is currently still the slowest part, but conventional disks have become faster too over the years AND microsoft windows vista/win7 with its pre-loading policy's makes loading of apps really fast. Starting a game which i didn't play for a long time, starts within a few seconds. call of duty 2, starts within 2 seconds, most of the time is spent by the game for detection of the hardware, disk is not 100% loaded while starting up cod2. MW2 starts within seconds, lfs within one second, firefox within one second. I have huge problems playing btf2 online however.. i kicked out on every map change, because my system loads the map faster than the server-side...
Openoffice first time start is really slow though, it takes a whopping 4 to 5 seconds to open openoffice-writer. Second time starting it takes less than one second. A SSD disk will most likely reduce these load times by about 25-40%, but best case these will be about 2 seconds and windows booting in about half the time.

For certain audio/video/photo applications it might be different. Also small databases will perform a lot better on a ssd, when using hardware designed for desktop systems. Remember right now, ssd is still 5 tot 10 times more expensive per Gbyte than conventional disks which are not really that slow. Adding more memory boosts overall system performance and makes you suffer even less from the high latency's of conventional disks.

So is it really worth your money to buy ssd just to get windows boot faster? I think not but... if you really get angry of waiting 45 seconds waiting for windows to boot after you have installed all your programs etc... than ssd will help you
You should not buy a ssd, if the consequence is you cannot afford anymore to buy at least 8gbyte of memory or have to start downgrading the graphicscard, cpu, memory with worse timings etc.

In the meantime, i wil too keep an eye on the prices of ssd' s. In the last 4 years nothing has changed though on ssd pricing compared to conventional disks but the performance of cheap ssd's are really improving over the last two years and ssd uses less energy. So maybe sometime in the future.....

I got my ssd's because i felt like having them , my last pc system was from 2004 so i fancied some extra's with this new system - Much like the g19 keyboard i got