What is faster? 7200 rpm drive or solid state

What is the faster for a notebook the 7200 rpm drive or the solid state. Is there a major weight differance between the two. I understand the solid state should be more reliable is that correct. By more reliable I mean it can take more bumps etc.

What is the concensus about the prices of the solid state drives. Will they come down in price soon.

 

Try this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=196354

After that, I would simply look for threads with Les' posts in them. I beleive he tests SSDs for a living.

P.S. I'm pretty confident that SSDs are faster

 

Solid State drives are way too much money for me to recommend to anyone. I'd stay away from them until you can get a good one with at least 100GB of storage for under $300. Yes, they will eventually become the standard for laptops and you will see mechanical hard drives eventually disappear. But that time is not now. Today, your still best off going with a traditional HDD.

 

Here is the link I intended:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=183474

 

I heard Samsung is developing affordable SSDs by the end of the year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJMGAdpCLVg

 

7200 rpm is not necessarily faster than a 5400rpm drive either. Read some tests and see for yourself. 7200 rpm will make more noise and suck more juice too. Things worth considering in the portable world.

 

No contest. SSDs will absolutely burn money faster than a 7200 rpm drive.

 

The latest 128 GB SSDs are $480 on Newegg. I am waiting for Dell to add them to their lineup. They beat even 10k Velicoraptor drives. And with their fast random access they destroy traditional hard drives in multitasking. The benchmarks I last saw showed a 5x performance increase in multitasking.

 

Remember, all the "cheap" SSDs are MMC, meaning that their lifespan is up to 7 years before it dies versus the real SLC SSDs which last for many many years. When you buy a "cheap" SSD, remember that you are sacrificing lifespan for speed.

 

Traditional laptop hard drives have a lifespan of 4 to 5 years. Also, now with 128 GB of cells, unless you are constantly writing and erasing, it will last longer than 7 years. Also it's MLC, not MMC. SLC has a smaller capacity and that is why Samsung is using MLC to get to 128 and soon 256 GB.

 

Isn't it true however, the SSD do not fragment . . . they actually 'shrink' over time from constant read / writes / erases?

 

Yes, but the effect is noticable with the "cheap" MMCs, not the SLC based SSD.

 

They have 'fatigue' but it would take a lot of data to be written to them to notice it. And they don't fragment because it takes the same time to read data in any cell. Whereas a traditional hard drive has to seek fragmented data.

 

I'll get SSD when 256GB is less than $128
I'll just make sure my next notebook has a SSD.