So the wifey and I checked out BestBuy because she wanted a new laptop. She found one she liked, but when I checked out the specs, it had a 128 GB solid state drive. Explain to me what a solid state drive is? What's the difference between that to a regular hard drive? I tried Googling, but didn't understand anything.
pros: speed, not sensitive to vibration cons: cost, size limitation (A quick look on Newegg....I see them approaching 1 Tb now, but well over a grand, and even some closer to 4 grand) http://www.newegg.com/SSD/Category/ID-119?Tid=11692 I have an 80Gb SSD as my primary drive in my Desktop. Makes for fast operation (18 seconds from POST to Windows 7 login). But it probably cost me as much as the 4 other hard drives in the computer (Granted...I got them all used, but there's over 2 Tb of storage between them) I will probably be getting a SSD for my laptop.
Or a fun thing that I did on my Mac is install the OS and all the Apps onto a solid state drive (have an express card slot in the side of my computer), and kept the internal disk hard drive for storage of files. Boots up in 7 seconds to login screen. Apps open almost instantaneously. Only had to buy a 48 gigabit SSD that way. If you hold your laptop at angle or run around with it on, the disk inside a normal hard drive can bounce up and down and scrap itself. I've had sisters who have killed a few hard drives this way (probably a little dropping too).
Ok makes sense. Never knew that normal hard drives can move around and break down. Learned something new today. Thanks for the replies fellas.
Its the same idea as the XBOX 360 disk being destroyed cause your moved the console to the side why its running a disk. The platters are spinning at a pretty high rate of speed, Rotating the hard drive or moving it up and down while its accessing the disk can shorten the life of the drive. On that note, alot of newer Laptop hard drives have sensors that will park the heads if it is moving to much. I say get the SSD, and a external HD for storage. Currently running a 60gb SSD in the desktop for an OS drive. And have 5 Tb for storage.
other pro's are the SSD uses next to nothing for power, so it will keep your battery alive much longer and almost no heat output. Russ
It should also be noted that SSDs have a a limited lifespan. Shouldn't be a problem if you're a typical user (as in, not filling and emptying the drive every day), but it's still a con, nonetheless! http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-maximize-the-life-of-your-ssd
Don't be concerned about day-to-day movement, HDDs are designed to account for shock, even while operating. Now, if you drop one while operating...different story. An operating HDD should still be able to withstand 20-30 G, but when not operating, it is about 10x greater. Most pros/cons have already been listed. I personally run a SSD cache drive and a big HDD. You get 80% of the benefit without having to worry about reinstalling anything or failures (it is only a cache, so it doesn't hold any important data long term, that goes on the HDD). New hybrid drives should be on the market later this year, as well. They will even be able to fit into an Ultrabook (read: cheap Ultrabooks). (My job involves development/manufacture of components for HDDs, and we (different department) also make the Sandforce controller for SSDs)
Ramdisk is something that utilizes your excess RAM (I have 32GB of RAM and using 4GB as a Ramdisk). These are acutally quite a bit faster than a SSD while in Windows (will not help boot time) because it is utilizing the speed of your memory bus rather than the SATA interface. Note that you need to be performing high speed I/O to see the difference, though. A Ramdrive is a good thing aside from having to give up the memory available to Windows and the setup. A Ramdrive will also save some wear on a SSD as you are not reading/writing the temp and frequently used files all the time. Not sure if this is actually addressing your question as you mixed terminology a bit.
I like the idea of solid states in desktops especially, but I would only get a small one for the operating system partition and then keep what ever files you use most whether it be games or programs. Then put all of your other files on regular drives. The longevity of SSD's for now is kind of hit or miss within brands, and the thing with SSD's is that the cells inside of the hard drive can only be overwritten so many times before the cells will die. This doesn't happen right away, but in the future I can see it becoming more common. They are extremely fast and efficient. Boot times are almost instant. Just my two cents working in the IT world.
Bottom line is that on most any new computer, if you have a spinning disk with the OS and all programs stored on it, that is the performance bottleneck. More RAM or a faster CPU is not going to result in a noticeable performance increase for boot times, app startup, etc. Swapping to an SSD, however, will net you a huge performance increase in terms of every day usage, launching apps and booting up. I recently bought a macbook pro and swapped out the spinning disk for a 250 gig SSD which is 169 on amazon and I could never go back to a spinning disk. Don't pay Apple's (or any other MFG charging > $250 for an SSD upgrade) absurd markup for upgrading to an SSD, do it yourself or find your favorite geek buddy and buy him a case of beer to do it for you.
Also on the newer macbooks, they have built into the firmware an option to reinstall everything over the web when you put a new drive in it, so you don't need a recovery disk or anything besides an internet connection to reinstall everything it came with. Bootcamp it and put windows on it and you now have both operating systems running on your sweet SSD.
