Less than 5% of laptop users use SSD?

I'm not sure of the correlation there?

 

When I can get a 256gb SSD for ~$250 I will jump on it. That's the lowest capacity I can have and still be moderately comfortable storage wise. So basically, $1 per GB.

Then again, if I could get an HDD caddy in my optical bay, I would be all over a 120gb X25.

 

I've been on SSD since when the Samsung RBX SLCs were the fastest thing you could get

 

LOL well your "source" edits quotes from Toms Hardware and somehow manages to evade Google as your exact quote does not return any records.

And I can't find a solid website that says having 4GB of RAM will damage your SSD. There is speculation on a few websites (mainly forums) but nothing has been solidly proven.

I'd be interested to see where you got your information from and what major websites discuss this.

You're right as far as 4GB not being enough. 4GB is the minimum I would put in a Vista or Windows 7 system. It'll get 90% of users by without any issues, but for gamers and anyone doing any intensive applications its very likely not to be enough. That being said, many applications are still 32bit (including most video games) and will not see more than the first 4GB of RAM. So having >4GB of RAM isn't necessarily going to help you out either.

Also, Gracy123.. I'm not saying your wrong about the pagefile on SSD's, but I just can't see any legitimate research having been done on the topic.

I see ALL sorts of people on forums saying not to do it, but I don't see a single person actually provide any evidence or research to that effect.

Also, the MSDN blog says its safe to put your pagefile on an SSD:

Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

So we have two options here. Trust all the hundreds of forum posts from random people all over the world that say putting your pagefile on an SSD will damage it. Or trust Microsoft who have done research to say that it actually won't damage it due to the fact that most pagefile activity is small reads and large writes.

I guess if you don't have the money to replace your SSD, I'd go with the "better safe than sorry" route and not put the pagefile on the SSD. If its not a big deal to replace your SSD after several years, then its your gamble on whether or not it will actually do any real damage.

 

That's exactly the point - there can't be any legitimate research for a creation that new! You call me in 2-3 years and tell me your SSD is still fine and as fast as it used to be - there's the best research that can exist - user experience!

For now and for the unrealistic amount of money required - I ain't taking that risk. 7200rpm works great for me.

 

Had to delete a few posts because of disinformation.

Please include links to off site quoted material. Not merely the quote.

 

Oh please, you won't lose the data on a HDD from moving the PC 4mm. Don't lie about the facts in order to support your argument.

Mobile hard drives often have stabilizers or even remove the head from the drive while it's idle, even further higher end HDDs even park the heads when they detect a fall (not an issue with me because I'm not a klutz but accidents do happen I suppose).

Honestly while if magically someone popped by and offered a 320GB SSD for free I'd gladly accept, I'm not exactly tossing and turning in my bed upset about having a regular 5400 RPM HDD in my VAIO given that I'm getting the exact performance and storage I need.

 

Me, what is the issue?

 

Oh please, you're better than that. 4mm, you say? Means nothing, as I am sure you understand. I might be "moving" my laptop by thousands of miles while traveling in an airplane, without any ill effects, obviously.

The question is, what was the acceleration? Your typical modern laptop drive will survive operating shocks of several hundred gs. If you need it, get a laptop or hard drive with an acceleration sensor, then you'll be good up to almost a thousand g. So, yes, maybe you did move your laptop by only 4mm, but you accelerated and decelerated it really, really fast. That's called "whacking it", not "moving", in case somebody asks you...

 

While direct research hasn't been done exclusively with pagefiles, SSD technology has been around for decades in non-consumer fields and even if MLC writes is 10+ times less than SLC NAND, it's still much longer than most users use their HDDs for. And I run 3GB on my current laptop just fine under Windows Vista and 7. Most consumer users will never utilize more than 3-4GB of memory.

 

What disinformation have I posted ?

 

4mm, I think it is deliberately expressed that way and cannot be read literally as is.

 

I have tested my lappy doing normal work on my Scorpio Black vs. my Corsair Nova 128. On a test doing a partial amount of my daily work, I showed a time savings of about 1/3 on a photo editing and FTP transfer (17 minute 40 second on Scorpio Black vs 12 minute 28 second on SSD). That was just using a partial, controlled test of my workload. And just on one type of work I use my computer for. Because I work out of 2 offices and my home each day, if I were to add in boot times, program loading and all the other uses for my laptop, the savings in time would be even greater. I usually work between 40-45 hours a week at work, and another 10-12 at home. Now I am not trying to say that an SSD is for everyone. If your main usage is browsing and email, I think you could find better ways to spend your money (sending donations to Abidderman's kids is one) but for my work useage, it makes a lot of difference. Time is money, and for me, saved time is saved money. And off of my controlled test, I estimate I save over 20 hours a year just on this one example. That is half a normal work week for many. That alone pays for the SSD, and then some by a long shot. In one year. So if it lasts me 3 years, I can justify buying a bigger, better, faster one when I need to. Oh, and since I backup religiously, data recovery is no more of a worry to me than on a normal HDD. It is not for everyone. But it is a godsend to some of us. Well worth the money I spent on it. Also, knowing the nature of Nand, and that it has a finite life, I have taken some steps to prolong the life. But the steps I have taken are one time tweaks, and the time to set it up in total is less than just having to wait to defrag, disk cleanup, wait to boot, load programs... etc. in less than a months time on any of my HDD's. Again, it's not for everyone, but just because it may not be right for you, don't think that many of us do not see every day time savings, and in a big way. PS... I also have a lappy with a Momentus XT, and it is also faster for much of my work that the Black. But it is not nearly as fast as the SSD. Disclaimer: in my lappy with the SSD, I also have a 2nd HDD (a Black) for data storage. I have a minimal page file on that lappy, just because some programs require it, but 6 GB of ram is more than enough to do anything I need to do. Sorry for the TL,DR post. It is late, I am just finishing work, and saw this on here.

 

SSD actual performance increase over HDD was the original thread I posted my results in.

 

By that time, prices, speeds and sizes will be far better.
Anyone springing for a decent SSD today, is probably the same type who won't be using that same drive in 2 years.

Do I really care if my tiny drive lasts 2 years?
Not really.


As for the earlier comment about them failing when you least expect it...
HD's do this too... It's why we use backups.

And yes there is plenty of technical data on SSD's, it;s the same memory that has been used for quite a while. It's not a new technology. The only new part is how large the chips are.

 

Spot on Pitabred, how many average users using TBs of hard disk, IMO the manufacturers are shoving down our throats unneeded hard disk space, all my life I've never used more than 50-60GB.
I don't thing that I'm going to hang on to my SSD all my life, may be in a couple of yrs time I might get another one due to upgrade of my system or something.
SSD is a consumable item and it'll go down in value and will be cheaper in future but that shouldn't stop us trying the new technology.

 

which might have failed on electronic just as well.

which is why one has to have a backup.

an ssd has LESS unexpected failure points, and no physically affected failure points. that, especially for a laptop user, means a massively reduced chance of failure.

which is the point. but as people have a hard time understanding that, i have to repeat it since years now.

 

i lost two harddrives like that. i would be happy if it would be a lie, having killed one of my main development systems (before i did automatic backup to winhomeserver as it didn't exist back then).

it is a spinning disk, something that can easily be killed any time (hint: rotate it quickly around each of the axis while in use. i can kill about any hdd like that in seconds).

i killed one which dropped from 3cm, i killed two by moving the pc case 4mm with the foot, i killed one by having a usb port with a bit to less power to power the external drive up, resulting in a spin-up then powerdown circle that it quickly did, killing it.

physical drives can die any time. they don't need big force to do so.

we killed some server harddrives on server reboot. just powering them down after years killed them. we killed others when we had a power outage, and the usv kicked in in milliseconds. enough of an issue for the disks.

in zero of those situations, an ssd would have died.

 

Ah, sorry, let me explain. You should buy 8GB of RAM before you buy an SSD. Much better ROI. With 8GB of RAM, I don't load stuff off my hard drive; it's already loaded. My system really has no more lag, and I'm running on a 2 year on 5400rpm 2.5" HD. Yeah I guess it is still slow when you first load something, but once it is there, it ain't going nowhere. I can switch between any of a zillion browser tabs, a couple of games, and other programs and it is right there instantly. I don't have to wait several seconds or more for it to load from the HD. Most of the HD lag I still have would not go away with an SSD anyway because it is all files that would be on a slower storage HD anyway. Now I think an SSD would be the last thing I would ever spend money on for a computer. Most of those times I was thinking "It would be neat to have an SSD" no longer happen for me.

It was likely just disinformation in the eyes of the forum's advertisers, and not truly disinformation in the dictionary sense.

You sound like an extremely unlucky fellow. I'm surprised you haven't been zapped by lighting, twice. Maybe you are talking about the old days when Intel manufactured wheels for covered wagons? I've never dropped a drive on the floor, but I've purposely dropped drives, some of them spinning and hooked up to the computer, small distances onto a hard table. The worst that ever happened was that the computer froze and had to be rebooted.

Oh, and I can't even tell you what I've done to my laptop with the hard drive in it both spinning and powered off.

 

it was very lucky it happened. based on this, i learned to backup, and started to deploy backup solutions to friends and family.

if i lose my stuff, it's lost, and i'm pissed off. if someone else loses it who trusts in me, then i'm in big trouble.

by now, quite a few other hdds from friends/family died. thanks to my experience, normally, never data is lost.

 

You know, my memory might be getting foggy, but in the late 90's I recall HD's being a lot more fragile than they are today. I distinctly remember one time I jarred the computer and I had to reinstall the OS because the drive had bad sectors. I have a feeling that modern drives are far sturdier and reliable than they used to be. Since '04 when I started to collect lots of drives, I remember plenty of rough handling, but few drives biting the dust, regardless of reason. A good example is throwing an external drive into my checked luggage. I also frequently move operational drives around my desk, both in external cases and ones that just have the wires hooked up to them. While I have some reservations about handling running drives, when they are off I have no qualms about manhandling them.

 

I've seen 3 dead drives during 2010. one was a 3.5" one, two where 2.5" ones, used externally.

yes, they're more sturdy, and have more "shut-down-when-moving" style savety. they're still more fragile than an ssd/usb stick. you can wash them, then dry them, and they still work (done more than once with my usb sticks), you can throw them around, drive with your chair over them, drop them, stand on them, etc..

 

i use 7200 rpm but am going SSD the second the G3's or new Sandforce drives are out.

 

I answered SSD because that is what I boot from (and did not select "Hybrid" as I thought that referred to the single drive with both technologies in the same case), but that would not be workable for me if my laptop did not have dual drives. An SSD alone would not have enough storage for me at a price that I can afford, but I would seriously consider a hybrid drive as a single-disc option.

But as to the number of people using them, this forum is far above average. How many users ever upgrade a laptop at all? While it is common here, in the wild it is rare. SSDs are entering the market for most people in PC-like devices (tablets, PMPs, netbooks, and Air-clones) instead of as replacements for spinning drives in their notebooks but those devices overlap with low-end notebooks in terms of performance.

 

LOL.

Where do you guys get these conspiracy theories from? I have yet to see an advertiser give a take down order on this forum.

Chimp, your posts were deleted because they quoted and responded to disinformation. For the sake of continuity, getting rid of just the disinformation would make the resultant posts look out of place.

 

Oh and to answer the poll... I use both. All my notebooks (5) have SSDs as main. Some have HDDs in secondary bay. Some I have modified the optical bay to hold a HDD.

I've had 1 SSD failure due to my brother using CCleaner's secure erase feature inadvertently (set to 3 times erase of files). I've had the same SSDs for 2 years now. No issues other than the aforementioned. All running 4GB RAM and a 512MB swap file. Only I use Firefox with disk cache set to off. Pics, music, data on the SSDs. Movies, Acronis backups, and other large achive files go on the HDDs.

I have about 80% write life remaining on all SSDs except for the newer one which has >90%.

 

Uh, SSD's are WAY too expensive to be practical upgrades considering that most people don't buy performance laptops.

 

Have SSDs on my work related systems - as mentioned earlier - time is money, booting,loading and general access times count up over the work week. BTW - leaving them on is not an option, so booting does factor in daily.
Granted for personal use - it is an expensive upgrade. Can't say they are for everyone - the price precludes that. Given time, they will come down in price and then become more mainstream. (remember RAM prices a few years back...)
I will mention this - try a SSD system for a while, then switch back to a normal hard drive. You'll want a SSD.

 

Absolutely correct on all points. Especially the last one.

What would be nice while transitioning to SSD only is either more hybrid drives or marketing systems that use SSD as OS drive and HDD as aux/data. Can easily get away with a 30GB as an OS/APP drive and 500GB+ for games, media and data. Though, to be user friendly, it would have to be done on the OS level. Say, when it detects a game about to be installed, it defaults to the HDD for installation. But when it detects, say, an office app, it defaults to SSD for installation. Further, the OS would automatically default data from such office/productivity apps to the HDD.

That sort of thing.

 

I still think a hybrid drive with a good amount of space, say 60GB (even 32-40GB for OS would be fine), and have it seen as two separate drives is ideal. Not sure if there's room to package that in a 2.5" drive htough. 60-64GB drives are becoming fairly inexpensive, and would work great for those wanting the benefits of an ssd but space of an hdd in a single slot notebook. One big drawback though would be is if your SSD or HDD failed then you'd have to replace the whole unit.

 

Like I said, I have done just that on my M4500. The Momentus XT is a bit slower than the SSD, sure, but not enough to make a big difference, for me. So, I don't really miss the SSD much. I think in general the benefits of SSDs regarding system responsiveness, let alone increase in productivity are way, way exaggerated in this forum. Let me emphasize that this assessment of course strongly depends on your usage pattern. If you have work that involves very substantial amounts of disk I/O as one poster here reported, then things may look very different.

 

I agree. I put an SSD in my M11x primarily for battery life, added performance is just a bonus. I'm putting an SSD in my new laptop because I already owned it and was in my desktop. Otherwise, the biggest improvement as an "average" user and PC gamer I've noticed were fast boot times.

Not to mention two of the four SSD's I had (one OCZ, one Kingston) bricked after a couple months (replaced under warranty of course). Is that statistcally sound? No, but of the dozens of hard drives I've purchased over the years, no laptop HDD's gave me issues, only a couple of desktop ones.

 

So are you able to go to a business trip or on a holiday without a charger now?

I'm sure the extra half an hour is of great importance to you, I wonder what you did without it.

P.s. An extra battery pack costs 50-100 bucks and doubles your existing battery life There are also extended batteries (150-200% more power). Even they cost less than a SSD...

So many ways to invest those 200-500$ better...

 

Not everybody's useage patterns are the same you know.

I go to my parents over a weekend without a charger.

Went from 6.5 hours HDD to 9 hours SSD (using Intel GPU).

I can go a day without need for a recharge too, even if I leave it on, use it frequently.

And the battery in the M11x is not that easy to swap out. Need to remove screws and bottom panel.

Not to mention the benefit of no vibration. A 7200RPM in the M11x or the Hannspree that I'm selling will translate into noticeable vibration which puts my hands to sleep. Not as much an issue on my regular desktop because vibration is isolated.

So I use SSD for different reasons than most is all I was trying to say.

 

The sarcasm! The judgment calls! The condescension! The intrigue!


Love to know your opinion on peeps who spend $3000+ on gaming notebooks.

Anyway, seriously, yes, the economics of an SSD isn't for everyone. But should we disparage and spread false information about SSDs? It's just a tech product.

Need it, like it, buy it. Or pass. *shrug*

 

I did and I switched back to an HDD just fine.

 

But but but (everyone's got a big but), rumors and false information is what we strive for. Life is boring without it. I heard your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries... (+1 if you can tell me where that came from)

 

LOL. MP and the holy grail!

 

Dang. You're repped.

On topic, I do believe the 5% use though. It's still an expensive tech for most, except us techies and early adopters, and of course those that make full use of its overall benefits of super fast sequential read/writes.

 

Thank you!

Yes, it is likely true, that 5%. SSDs really aren't ready for prime time in my opinion. There are still do's and don'ts with SSDs that oridinary HDD users wouldn't expect. Though they have come a long way in just 3 years.

But having to update the firmware of many of them via IDE mode, leaves notebook owners in the dark unless they can gain access to a desktop or one of those rare notebooks that can switch to IDE mode in BIOS.

That practice has got to stop.

 

Again I mentioned not for everyone. Based on how/what required for my work/activities, the SSD is a worthwhile, time-savings upgrade.
Does not and may not fit everyone - now or into the future.
To each his own. That's the nice part of choices we have available.

 

Yeah, that, along with a utility (bootable USB or CD) to secure erase instead of having to resort to getting ahold of a linux build and hdparm.

There you go being all reasonable and stuff.

 

Well some laptops/desktops in AHCI mode are flaky, as in htwingnut's case. You can also do the registry hack from IDE mode to AHCI mode later. Alot of modern notebooks can change IDE/AHCI. Even my 3.5 year old Dell Vostro can change between ATA and AHCI mode..

 

Indilinx drives require BIOS switch to IDE mode. I had to put all my SSDs into a basket and roll up on my neighbor to flash the new firmware on his desktop. Twice.

I have 5 notebooks and not a one allows you to change IDE/SATA in BIOS. Though an elitebook I had did.

Back in the days of destructive flash, you could do it from within windows. They still have destructive flash available for the latest firmware, but to identify the NAND for the proper destructive flash file, you need to run a program in IDE mode from startup. Hassle-city.

When the state of things mature, firmware flashes will be mostly unnecessary. That is when SSDs will be closer to prime time. That, and when the price per GB nears parity with HDDs.

 

That is my #1 criteria for a thing like HDD/SSD given the difficulties it involves.

 

Yeah, this thread is turning all boring now, with people dropping the outrageous claims and name-calling. Time to close the thread

 

But they still need to make firmware flash compatible with AHCI.

Plus I don't think we'll ever see price per GB near HDD's at least the direction they're heading now. Smaller fab processes result in shorter write cycles for the NAND. I wouldn't doubt if MLC is eliminated altogether and replaced by SLC, jacking up pricing again. But what do I know. I'm just a Monday morning quarterback.

 

Very odd, though I have only owned Dell business oriented notebooks, every single one has allowed me to change ATA/AHCI mode, though not all mine have an SSD installed.

I believe even my older Dell Inspiron E1405 allowed changing the SATA mode between ATA/AHCI..

When SSDs go closer to the GB/price ratio of a HDD, I will buy them for every single computer I own. Even my mom's desktop!

 

Bus powered 2.5" HDDs are defective by design.

Michael

 

Dell's BIOS as far as I know is the least restrictive based on my experience, not to the point of a desktop but better than all other brands of laptop I have. All my other Notebook's don't allow me to switch between ATA/AHCI even though they are using SATA capable chipsets.