Looking for a Viable SSD

SSDs have always been an area of interest for me however, I am a heavy space user but anything more 500GB. I was absolutely astonished by the difference they have as opposed to 7200RPM drives as I have always been an advocate of prime performance. Are there any drives out in the market that meet my requirements? Ideally I would like to replace my 500GB/7200RPM with a Solid State Drive of the same size, does anyone know about where I could get such a drive?

 

If you can afford to wait for the Intel X25-M G3, then you're in luck for some big spaces e.g. 80/160/300/600GB.

 

That's really good, when do those come out? I was looking at the 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid but I hear that it's better to just stick with a pure solid state drive.

 

Apparently Q1 2011 is the speculation of the new G3 drives. I'm not entirely sure myself.

And the Momentus XT is also a good choice (I have one myself). But this hybrid drive is a bit different than your conventional SSD/HDD. It has adaptive learning, meaning that your most used programs (e.g OS), gets cached inside the SSD, leading to increase in performance. Other data however still suffer from the slower 7200RPM disk platter, and there is only 4GB worth of SSD inside.

It may take awhile for the disk to learn your usage patterns, but once it gets going, it's an amazing substitute for the SSD. However, an SSD is always going to be much faster than the hybrid.

If you're a frequent user then go for the SSD (or wait for G3). If you do not mind the hybrid then go for that I have both, because I'm greedy hahaha.

 

Rumors the 600 GB G3 is ~800-900 dollars.

 

Yeah, I think I'll wait for an actual SSD, I wanted to see how the Hybrid would be but let's just say I understand why it's selling for about $95 on E-Bay right now. I'm not really the type of person to spend a lot of money something that's half as good, I guess (not to knock you or your drive), just personal preference I guess. They say it was 80% faster than a regular HDD and I'm sure it is but I don't know, something about this seems like I'm getting a pit-bull neutered.

F.M.L., much?

 

It's quite costly to buy large SSDs, as I'm sure you've noticed. I'd suggest taking a look at what data you actually need on a regular basis and what you don't really need. If you can trim your space requirements down to ~150GB, you're looking at far more reasonable prices. Ways to do this include using a portable 2.5" HDD for data you don't always need with you, using a 16GB+ SD card that lives in your SD card reader for bulk supplemental data storage, etc.

 

Oh, never thought about the SD card option. I might try that!

 

I mean in all honesty, that price isn't horrible. I remember when Alienware first put a 64 GB SSD it was a 1000 dollar upgrade option for a 64 GB. Now we can get 10x the storage and ~same price from just a few years ago.

I would just get like a 120-160 GB (they aren't awfully expensive, like 185-200 dollars for the 120 GB) and just get a HDD caddy or an external HDD for storage.

 

To be honest, I think I could live with a 256GB but eventually I'll run that into the ground. The real issue is that I house maybe easily 160 GB of design work on laptop alone and that doesn't leave much for me to play around with. Now when you factor in the programs I have installed, CS5 Bundle: (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash Builder, Flash Professional) and that's just the CS5 doesn't include Pinnacle Studio 7, VideoWave 5, LightWave, Xara Photo/Graphic Designer) and etc. Especially now with HD-quality designs and video, I tend to eat gigabytes very quickly...

The worse part is I tend to run at least two programs at once, some how I've managed til now, but I definitely believe that SSD is an option that I should be considering. Even with that, the processor upgrades I will be making shortly should help to. But size is exceptionally important to me, I hope to see that larger drives than just 600GB enter the line soon. I was honestly going to try the Seagate Momentus XT, but I think a full SSD is the way to go.

 

Well, 600GB for a 2.5 is great, the biggest i seen atm are 750gb mechanical drives (1tb i seen are 12.5), but also a 600gb is going to cost a lot, im expecting at launch $1000+, a bigger drive.... maybe next gen, in a year or two, i dont think there is big enough market to produce such expensive drives.

 

Well, at the very least I could still get the 600GB, but I hope somebody makes a breakthrough and releases 500GB SSD's like hotcakes...

 

Probably won't happen all that soon--I got my X25-M 80GB for $190 used a bit less than a year ago, and now the same drive still goes for ~$150. High quality and high speed flash memory such as the type used in SSDs is still expensive, although price is going down with downscaling.

Also, demand for SSDs is higher than ever as general consumers begin adopting them (previously, only power users really considered SSDs), so I wouldn't expect prices to fall dramatically.

 

Can't catch a break any where these days, I hope I can get a decent size SSD (256GB-500GB) by next-year this time. I don't know, I'm going to treat them like cars, once the new model is out, you can shave off about 30% from the original price or more. I bet that 80GB isn't going to be $150 for very long once they unveil the 600GB and etc.

 

You can maybe pick up last generation (G2) for uber cheap once G3 stock levels fill up. Man I should have picked up that 160 GB Intel G2 for 200 during the Big Deal...

But you are gonna at least spend 300-350+ for a 256 GB SSD, and the downside to those huge capacities is the use of 25 nm flash NAND chips, P/E cycles go down dramatically..

 

I really hope you were right, but the 600gb is going to the at least $800+, more like $1000 at launch (pure speculation), this wont draw down the price of the smaller ones, its just an elite drive.