The Basic Guide to Buying SSDs

Quote from dadoody : Good info. I stick to regular magnetic hard drives. My own experience with Flash memory has been a nightmare. Sudden I/O device errors, finding high rates of corrupted bits after a file transfer that I can't even use the file anymore, and the fact that is hard as hell (near impossible) for me to recover deleted data. Thats just all from my experience with them USB sticks, maybe things are better on a dedicated SSD, but I am a multi purpose user - games, multimedia, trading, reading, writing, etc., and my drive has been fine. Might not load as fast as I want sometimes, but its fast enough for me. I use one of them Dell XPS8300s that was on sale here last November. Great machine.

Data recovery is virtually non-existent on SSDs and that's a good thing IMO. With TRIM enabled, once the file has been marked as deleted it's, for all intents and purposes, gone. Yes, some researchers have been able, on some controllers, to retrieve some data directly from the chips themselves, not through the SATA interface. Once you empty the trash I would consider it gone forever.

I'd rather have a six year old laptop with an SSD, than a brand new one without an SSD.

SSD's are THAT fast!!

Computing power has doubled every 18-24 months. Hard drives are stuck in the 80's.

Quote from TheMightyQuinn : would this be a worthwhile upgrade even on a $300 laptop (fujitsu lifebook lh531) purchased last year?

Night and day difference...

Quote from jhooper : Night and day difference...

Ditto that. Put one in a basic intel core i3 laptop running windows 7 and it made an amazing improvement in boot time, downloading updates, restarts, and shut downs. The machine seems to operate faster in general even when not doing the above tasks.

thanks for this information...
nice job

Quote from sonthan00 : SSD is perfect for photo processing also. People have used it as scratch disk to speed up Photoshop. Lightroom can also benefit from SDD.

Very true. I went from about a 30 second load up time on photoshop, to about 6 seconds with the upgrade to an SSD.

Please back up your SSDs at least weekly to a magnetic drive.
My Corsair F120 failed twice.
All my saved games are gone.

Quote from lanshark : Please back up your SSDs at least weekly to a magnetic drive. My Corsair F120 failed twice. All my saved games are gone.

True...one thing the article does not mention is that SSD cells have a limited shelf life. Meaning they can only be overwritten a certain amount of times before they die. The SSD keeps tracks of these dead cells and uses other fresh cells to take over their spots. Eventually the whole drive will die and be useless. SSD's are built quite a bit bigger than advertised, say 800G for a 500 G drive, those extra 300 G of cells will be used to replace dead cells. I think the manufacturers are banking on everyone moving their data to larger SSD's at some point before the old ones fail.

Quote from Pacolypse : True...one thing the article does not mention is that SSD cells have a limited shelf life. Meaning they can only be overwritten a certain amount of times before they die. The SSD keeps tracks of these dead cells and uses other fresh cells to take over their spots. Eventually the whole drive will die and be useless. SSD's are built quite a bit bigger than advertised, say 800G for a 500 G drive, those extra 300 G of cells will be used to replace dead cells. I think the manufacturers are banking on everyone moving their data to larger SSD's at some point before the old ones fail.

That's why they implemented wear leveling so cells are written to on a consistent and even basis. The actually lifespan of these writes is unclear though for consumer applications. It could last 5 years or 10 years or more. People doing constant writes to their SSDs should definitely keep a close eye on whats going on.

Quote from brbubba : It shouldn't but it's a good idea to check with mac users on a commonly used SSD since there have been problems in the past. Also you will need to take extra steps on OS X to get TRIM enabled.

I just installed 256GBV4 from Crucial. It's screaming fast on my mid-2009 Macbook 15 inch Pro. Well worth it.

Several years ago, ever since Apple released Snow Leopard, I thought that if I installed 8GB of Ram and I upgraded my regular 250GB HD to 500GB Hitachi Tristar, that I would not run into anymore problems of the rainbow wheel of deathspin. I ran intense programs such as Lightroom and Photoshop. I also used my Mac for videos and Lossless Audio conversions. WAS I WRONG.

SSD has been a great upgrade. The Mac is REAL quiet. I don't know if it's one half the time anymore. The cooling fan is never turns on at all. The heat from the computer is not even there. Amazing. I will never go back to HD anymore.