Thread: Solid State HDD's

They make a big difference. Every laptop I've owned over the last few years I've run one in. Ideally I buy the laptop with the original manufacturers unit (e.g. in my Macbook Air or before that Lenovo ThinkPad X300), but in my Apple Macbook Pro 17" I have a decent Intel unit that I fitted. It was recommended on the Mac forums as being of good performance and compatibility.

As for reliability. I have had one unit die on me (out of 8 that I think I have or had) - it was a cheaper brand that was new to the market. Out of the three laptops I've owned with factory SSD's all survived at least 3 years with me without any issues - I'm currently typing on one and my mother has one other. All of the big name brand SSD's that I've purchased have been fine and reliable.
I have had both a Samsung and WD HDD die on me in the last 4 years though - so for my personally, at the moment reliability between SSD's and conventional HDD's is about equal.
My Macs primary HDD's are all backed up by Time Machine to a Time Capsule and the storage HDD's are RAID 10 and another is RAID 1, so I have some redundancy anyway...

I don't run one for my main desktop rig though due to the expense of them for large capacities and the low capacity limit.

Another option is the hybrid drives, such as Seagate Momentus XT. It is a typical 7200rpm traditional hard drive with a small SSD. I found this was a good unit in my Mac Mini. My brother and dad also run these and have been happy with them. They're cheap and faster than the standard hard drives in most laptops.

And for the comments on whats the big deal on saving 20 seconds on boot times, it's nothing. Your right 20 seconds on boot times is nothing. But if you save a second per process, and you do 60 processes in a day, after 60 days you've saved an hour of your time... It's also much nicer and less frustrating to use a zippy speedier computer. I've found that faster HDD's can put some more breathe into older machines!

I'm impressed that people have had such good experiences with SSD's, especially "at least three years" from laptops, because they were really only just starting to be fitted to laptops in late 2008.

I believe Intels first generation drives were announced in 2007, revealed in August 2008 and released shortly afterwards, so these units are only just three years old!

Originally Posted by Warb

I'm impressed that people have had such good experiences with SSD's, especially "at least three years" from laptops, because they were really only just starting to be fitted to laptops in late 2008.

I am currently sitting working on a 2008 Apple MacBook Air fitted from factory with a 64GB SSD (it's the original first model, I believe perhaps one of Apples first offerings with an SSD in it?), which I believe is non removable soldered to the main board. My mother has the exact same computer. It's 2011 now, so that's 3 years, perhaps with a little rounding up...