Question about SSD drives

I have been reviewing the many helpful posts on the topic, but had a pretty basic question if you had a moment. Given the capabilities of the Samsung 64GB drive (which I understand is what Dell uses?), would you expect a significant performance improvement over a regular HDD? I am looking in particular at the Dell D430. From reading through the posts, it seems like it should be faster for the most part (particularly with the read speeds), but little or no advantage on write speeds. Is that correct? Any other views on what to expect and/or whether an upgrade makes sense? Any major downside other than the price? Thanks in advance for any guidance.

 

There is a great improvement from any SSD including the Sandisk with the horrible write speeds that are only in the teens. The reasoning for this is because of the disk access time. A normal HD requires 15ms to search out and find a piece of information. This is consecutive so if it takes several passes to pick up a file or program, each takes 15ms.

It only takes 0.1ms for an SSD to do the same. That is a speed increase of 150 times faster. This is why such things as startup, finding information and starting programs is almost instant. One needs to experience it to believe it.

A typical example is with MS Office. With an HD in a speedy system, it normally takes 3-4 seconds for the program to open. With an HD, its almost instant and leaves one with the feeling like the system knew what you were going to do before you did.

The concern many have is with write speed and, quite honestly, the average user wouldn't even notice with this Samsung SSD as it is an improvement over the Sandisk. Previously, with the Sandisk, you would experience very slow disk download speeds and it would take an excruciating long time to put your system to sleep. As I said though, most would never even notice these in their normal everyday functions unless they are downloading tons of video.

Great question!

 

It would take a very speedy connection to tax the limits of a 10 Mbyte/Second write speed. That's 80 Mbits/second or > 1 T3/OC-1.

OTA NTSC is 2.5 Mbytes/second maximum.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray top out at ~4 and 6 MBytes/second maximum.

So it would have to be multiple simultaneous streams connected to an OC-3 (about 165 Mbits/second) to be in a position to worry

I'm assuming compressed video here. Raw video is stupidly bandwidth intensive. It takes an OC-48 to handle full bandwidth HDTV.

Cheers,