Just bought a 32GB SSD drive did i do the right thing?

I just wanted to get some of your opinions of this in this forum.

I got back some compensation money from Dell and i bought myself a 32GB SSD drive the SSD drive cost £207/$414. I am starting to wonder though today if i did the right thing. .

Lol, i only use this computer for web browsing, word processing mainly these days.
I will have around 10GB of space left after i install the drive. I will have to turn of things like system restore to have more space. Vista takes up such a lot of space. I sometimes got by with only using 10GB in all with XP. I will keep my other drive as an external.

If I can gain in battery life then that will be good. I don’t use it without it being plugged in that often. Currently I can get about 3 hours 25 mins with my 6 cell battery. I am hope that the battery life will not just be like 5 or 10 mins gain.

Should i have just taken the money which would have reduced the price overall i paid. The prices in the UK have dropped just yesterday for this model or was getting this SSD drive a good move do you think?

 

Personally I can't justify the cost of that. Especially if you are just web browsing and word processing. Even if you were a gamer, or someone who needed fast read/write time, I still couldn't justify it. Just like I can't justify the cost of 10k and 15k HDs.

Just my opinion though, but you could probably spend your money better somewhere else.

 

In My opinion you just flushed the $414 that you could have used elsewhere.

You have 0 need for SSD, you dont do heavy processing, you're not always moving the notebook around, you have it plugged in most of the time.

If it was like $150 upgrade or something MAYBE< thats a big maybe but at $414? dude.........

 

It's pricey. You could have gotten two 250GB hard drive and yet still have some leftover money. Then use one as internal and the other as an external drive.

 

Yeah you could have got the normal 160gb hard drive and it would still be MUCH cheaper.

 

i have 10k raptors and raptor xs but i dont think i will buy ssd at that price. maybe one day i will buy the 64gb one when it drops to 99 dollars.

 

manzi i have the 160 HD already in my computer i bought the 32GB SSD as extra.

I am starting to think that this may not have been the best move.

Thank you all for your help i do appreciate it.

 

Rachuk.....

Because of the size and cost your going to get a million people telling you how much better you could have done.

The unfortunate part is not one will understand the sheer speed that you will experience in moving the everyday operations of your system. Not one will understand what its like to sit there waiting for your system to execute a command only to find out it already has, or the complete silence and lack of heat associated with the SSD.

The best way to describe how and ssd works is to try and imagine that your system knows what button your about to push just before you push it.

It is a step up even as a 32Gb. if you need more space, get an external for the files. Your speed is not affected whatsoever.

The 64Gb will never drop to 64 dollars and I will doubt you will ever see it at $500. To do this would force hard drive manufacturers to shut down HD making and jump into the SSD market, a market that presently is reserved for those RAM device manufacturers such as samsung and sandisk.

Enjoy my friend...although many would never jump to such a small storage medium, they all wonder what its like and there is alot of envy around.

 

Yeah....I'm very much a proponent of size in the hard drive debate. You could have bought a 250 GB drive and might have even had enough to buy a desktop 750 GB drive with a 3.5" enclosure. 1 TB vs. 32 GB. *softly weeping at the thought of so much space*

 

32GB is too small for me, but it sounds like it is not too small for you. An SSD is a good choice in your case. You won't even notice how nice it is until you have to use another machine and realize how silky-smooth yours is by comparison.

Remember to turn of System Restore (fills up the hard disk) and auto defrag (not needed for SSDs because there's no moving head)

 

I can agree that people want the SSD and may "envy" you due to the benifits, but the main problem is price AND the size of the HDD. I would have considered buying it, but at the price they were asking and for only 32gb its un-economical for 95% of laptop buyers at present.

The hdd manufacturers need to work out whether to make the SSD bigger in size or make them cheaper. Hopefully they can do both.

 

Thank you all for the help. I think that I will let the drive ship and come to me and see what the SSD drive is all about. I hope that I really like it. I am going away for 5 weeks soon so I may possibly use the battery more than I do now but I don’t know for sure.
If I am not pleased with the drive then there is always Ebay.
I will keep my 160 HD and put that in an external. I don’t tend to keep much of anything on my computer anyway. All my music I keep in my MP3 player and burn backups on a CD.

I can be pretty indecisive sometimes.

 

I agree totally with turning off system restore...see my tweaks below as it is in there.+ If you use Ultimate, make a complete PC backup. If not, consider a program which does just that if you play around alot or very least, use the backup and restore center.

Tips to gain back lots of SSD space...

1. Turn off system restore completely.
2. Reduce your pagefile.sys. (Start/control panel/performance information and tools/Adjust visual effects/advanced/change (600 initial size/1200 max)
3. Go to C:/dell and delete drivers directory. Its useless once installed.
4. Turn off indexing.
5. Follow my tweaks as there are a few more there.

Without my personal files I have just under 16Gb left. Remember, your drive isnt exactly 32Gb because of the way it is partitoned and you cannot control that. Its more like 29Gb.

 

*mental flashback to 1999*

 

512K is enough for anyone, eh?

 

i saw SSD's transfer rate for writing is only 25% of regular disk, is there any actual noticeable improvement for overall performance?

 

The performance increase has much to do with the disk seek time, which is ~.2ms compared to ~10ms for a regular laptop disk drive.

 

The write transfer rate is horrid but I have to say I cannot tell on daily activities. I tried to find a way to measure this (download fm Internet (cable), download from SSD, download from DVD) but could not. The difference was not noticeable from the HD to the SSD.

Where you see the difference is the everyday functions and appearance of the general system.

Start your email client. now when you start it from an SSD its instant, like a flash.

Im going to believe it has something to do with prefetch accompanied by the access time of the SSD but, as you sit at your computer, things seem to get even faster as you open or close them.

 

It's not so much that people don't understand, it's just that not everyone has the casual $400 to throw at such a minuscule amount of storage space. Take away the heat, take away the moving parts, take away the slow read/write speeds, be as poetic as you want with its features, and it's still not worth 32GB for four hundred bucks. To me, it'll never be a justifiable deal.

 

I agree with you totally there. I would never have paid that much for it simply because of the price itself.

Others are creative, realizing the SSD is a huge performance increase and an external drive can make up for the space...

A very good point is, especially with Dell, deals can be had to offset the price of the SSD.

 

Well yeah, but even with deals, I don't think THAT level of luxury is required. None of us are in enough of a hurry that we can't wait a few extra milliseconds for Outlook to load. I don't really count it as a huge performance increase. And having to hook up an external drive to supplement as a (pretty much) primary hdd would take the "mobile" out of "mobile computing", so it really depends on your views.

 

And I may have taken that view ....before I actually experienced the difference that is. Its noticeable in all aspects of my laptop use.

And look at it this way with respect to the external drive...
If you have only 2 gb memory and require pagefile.sys through disk caching, this automatic disk caching is now done with an access time of about .2ms and the speed of ram.

Its a huge performance increase.

 

i don't understand why it's so expensive. today one can buy 8G flash drives for $40 where i live so a 32G SSD should be less than $200 for my money.

 

Different things; those cheap usb drives are VERY slow.

 

and those cheap usb drives are far more mass produced..and thus less xpensive to make

 

Dell was offering this drive as an upgrade of £376 in the UK when i ordered my notebook.

I could always sell my 160 HD to part of set the cost and use a 30GB HD that i have at home for storing things. I can sell the 160 drive and not void my warranty as I bought the SSD drive from Dell in the US so it is covered for 4 years the same length of time as my notebook is under warranty for. If i sell my 160 HD i will end up paying no more than £156/$332 for the SSD drive.

As i will be travelling soon a worldwide theft warranty would have been handy to me also.

The point that i have been mainly thinking about is that was i wise to invest more money in this notebook after I had it compensated and now the price has fallen for this model.

Like i said i think that i will still keep the order and decide when it arrives. It seems like most people are saying that i did the wrong thing and that it was way to expensive for the price but that it is a good product.

Flamenko thanks for the tips I will come back to this thread when my drive arrives.
Also thank you all for your help and advice.

Edited to add:
I just checked my email and my drive has just been shipped so it is to late for me to cancel it now anyway.