What is the general opinion on SSD's

I have read through the SSD post...

what is everyones general thoughts on SSDs, are they up to par now, i know there were some problems starting off...but im very interested in running a raid setup on them.

 

The general opinion of SSDs among most users is probably that they're very fast and more power-efficient than conventional hard drives in general, especially with newer memory controllers in the newer SSDs, although they are only available in small (relatively) sizes and are prohibitively expensive for most.

 

Im looking at popping 2 128gb in my desktop in raid 0 and another 256gb in my notebook for a main drive and then switching my other drive to storage duties..

Im hoping to get a good bump in speed

 

It seems like the best deals are currently are Intel X25-M or OCZ Vertex series.

 

F'n awesome!

 

they are awesome. You don't need to go for the best ones unless you are a real power user. I use an OCZ Apex and it's fast as hell just for everyday use. One more thing is, SSDs are not made for XP, so don't waste your time tweaking it. Pop it in w/ Vista and all you need is about 5 minutes of setup and you're ready to go.

They are still expensive, but I got my Apex 120 for $219, just gotta be patient for a good deal. But i can tell you that i'll never buy another platter drive for notebooks.

 

...

You got that reversed.

Windows 7 is supposed to be better than both though.

 

imo the general opinion is that everyone would like to have one. there's no competition with hdd vs ssd. hdd just win in price, nothing more.

 

For desktop, I dunno I would have a hard time not going with velociraptors instead of a SSD, cheaper, more storage and still very fast.

The SSD has the seek time advantage so lots of small random files are going to load faster on the SSD but for most work I would need it for its going to be large continious files (photoshop & video editing & most large game loading files) so the raptor is only going to be a tad slower in most situations but allow me enough storage space to work with and not break the bank.

Id be up for a 120gb Vertex when it cost like $200 or less maybe but the velociraptor is already under $200 for 300gb. Since your feeling like doing raid I think thats even more incentive to go for the Velociraptor as it has more to gain from it while the SSD is quite fine on its its own with already fast speeds and instant seek times.

 

If you're comparing high end SSD with regular hdd.. then SSD will be better in every way except for price and capacity.

If you're comparing regular SSD with regular HDD, HDD will have faster throughtput, more storage capacity, cheaper. SSD will have better access time.

 

Vicious, I know this comes up in every thread, but until you use an SSD you really have no comparison. For your individual usage you may need the extra storage space but SSDs do everything better than a Velociraptor. It's still a really slow mechanical drive for small reads / writes.

 

The X25-M 80GB is now "only" $400, and never more tempting.
Too bad I'm still a poor student.

 

SSD tech has really come along way over the last few years. I have not used any higher end SSD's, but when I compare my ramdisc to a harddrive. XP loads in 5 seconds versus 47seconds. Photoshop CS3 loads in about 4 seconds versus 35 seconds.

SSD's are finally starting to come down in price, so hopefully within a year they become more mainstream.

The access/seek time is what makes the difference in performance. This 7ms or whatever the Velociraptor has is much much slower than an SSD which has say a 0.3ms seek time. Its pretty much an order of magnitude difference

Even on the high end 15K Ultrastar's performance is insanely fast compared to a laptop drive which I am used to. However 4 15K147's in raid 0 are still not as fast as my 4gb ramdisc

K-TRON

 

The velociraptor is not a normal hdd its a very fast one, and one that I have worked with.

for my needs it did exactly what I needed it to do, it took away the hdd bottleneck I had when rendering video. It also booted the OS much faster even though that is not a need.

this is just a simple breakdown of needs/wants.

faster speed is a want, higher storage is a need, so is price.

I need to spend less becuase there are kids to feed and bills to pay.

desktop - velociraptor for sure, laptop SSD because you dont really have a choice.

I think SSD owners are too caught up in the placebo effect, instant click load everything is not really the end all best thing in the world, its a nice feeling but a few seconds here and there really doesn't add up to much.

I will have a SSD, but when the price is reasonable, also by that time the tech will probably be even better and the capacity higher.

We have plenty of people that have the ability to afford the SSD going around raving about them, so we need atleast one of me to argue the side of price vs performance and need for storage space.

My specialty has always been coming up with the best balance. Anybody can go look for the most expensive/best product and go buy it and say "I have the best" but it takes a lot more to look at performance numbers, current market costs, and then find the best product hiding among the rest as the best performer per the money yet still performs way better than just average.

Also anybody who has been following technology for more than a year should already know its a very bad investment to get thelatest and greatest as there is a huge premium on price when it will quickly be replaced with something better and then the price will drop on it.

Stick with bleeding edge instead of leading edge unless your rich.

 

I know this is a broken record but I read this time and time again on here, Xtremesystems, Anandtech, and many other places; you don't realize how fast and system changing a SSD is until you go back to a mechanical drive, even a fast one. And I've read that from people migrating from Velociraptors.

Yes, the compromise of storage / speed is needed for some, but very few. Especially in desktops when you can have a 60GB OS + apps drive and 1TB+ of file storage. I think you're conceiving of these drives in your mind from the wrong perspective, personally.

It doesn't fit your requirements of balance, but you need a balance the vast majority of users don't. Blazing fast OS + apps drive (Some games if you play a lot) and secondary storage drive will work for almost everyone.

 

I just had to buy another 1TB drive a few days ago

A important video recording I was doing with FRAPS got cut in half becuase I ran out of HDD space while recording. Uncompressed 1920x1080 video takes up a LOT of space.

Took advantge of the 1TB WD MyBook for $80 at Staples.

I guess a video worker is an exception as we need fast & large drives. A standard drive not in raid can bottleneck, but a fast SSD is not going to be large enough (plus you probalby dont want to be constantly writing to the entire SSD like that)

I need to start saving, my ultimate goal is to build a 8 or 10TB file server to store all my media and stuff on then from there my desktop will only need a drive for OS, Programs, and current working files.

SSD cost too much for the benefit to me simply, just one would be over half the cost of my server, and a quarter of the cost of my high end gaming notebook.

I think just the VR will serve me well as its big enough on its own for all of that and it will be faster than what I have right now.

later on the SSD move will happen.

Here is that video btw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKx1lXr3xwk&fmt=22

I lost the 2nd half of it, fraps ran out of room to record on my 640gb HDD.

Im surprised youtube let me get 10:12 last time I had one just a few seconds past the 10:00 time limit and it was rejected.

 

I have a friend who has the exact same computer as me, using 2 raptors in raid 0 and I have 2 seagates running raid 0. the speed comparision is very little. i think 2 64g SSDs in raid 0 would be much much faster than two raptors in every way. Storage is not a big deal for me as I only use the raid 0 system for my OS and programs. all storage is done on a seperate setup. I ahve 2 80s in raid 0 now for my OS and programs, so I think 2 64g SSD would be a huge upgrade in speed.

In my notebook, I would just put 1 128gb SSD in and put a 500 gb Platter drive in for storage of photos, docs and music.

thanks for the replys!

 

I've switched to an SSD in my slowest system. As it beat even my fastest pc in snappiness, boot time, general usage performance, i quickly switched all my systems to ssds.

Once you've worked with ssds, you can't go back. they're just awesome.

and vicious, you could just get a quite small one for your system, and for the rest use your tons-of-terabyte disks for the movie-data. my setup is similar, as i have a home-server on a gigabit lan connected to my main-pc. the home server currently has 4.5tb.

but the gain from moving the os and apps to an ssd is amazing.

and to Jlbrightbill, no, he didn't got it reversed. vista on an ssd is amazing and beating xp in about every case, then. because the only thing that vista really does worse, is performance on a slow disk. xp by default gains much less on an ssd, as it has less optimized writes. one can partially fix this with partition alignment to get close to on-par with vista.

and yes, win7 will even further optimize for ssd usage. still vista is absolutely great performing on an ssd.

i can really only suggest it to anyone. don't get a new system. get an ssd, pop in vista (best: install it directly from a usb stick. really easy to set up, and the usb stick is much faster than the dvd drive anyways). the system is up and running in 7-10 minutes (even tiny notebooks like mine), and from that moment on you feel like in a new world.

my next goal is to switch to all intel-ssd's. i'd like all 160gb ssd's from intel but i guess it won't work out (still can't find the 160gb 1.8" version).

 

So I guess one of you guys with all the money and multiple SSD's need to send me one so I can try it out.

See if after my professional non biased review of the product I think SSD is worth the money or that the faster speeds actually did anything for productivity or if it was just a "wow cool" effect like I currently think it is.

 

i'd like to send you one. but i have a big list of people who want one if one ever gets unused here.

one thing you wouldn't notice is the silence. having no mechanical disk at all anymore close to me is amazing.

well, to get a "feel" on how it changes my computing experience: take a current firefox with all sort of plugins (around 20 at the time i switched). start your os, and then directly at logon start firefox. that takes a while. then install chrome and do the same. it's instant.

once i got my ssd, firefox got instant just as chrome.

right after booting, at around 10 seconds later, i have around 20 apps started, including some music software (ableton live, traktor), adobe stuff (reader, photoshop), visual studio, office, etc.

wow or useful depends. but definitely very nice to have. _very_ nice.

i'm currently estimating if the actual idle time users have at work because of load times (10-15 minutes till xp + needed apps start to get useful) would cost more in personal costs than buying each one an intel ssd. the gained minutes/day of work are actually much more worth than the ssd so from current numbers around here, it would be a worthy investment after around .. 3 months? and i'm talking about buying 2000 intel ssd's at once, not a cheap thing per se

 

If you have an HDD, but want SSD performance, pop in a fast flashdrive for readboost or eboostr and you get the same result. Small files gets accessed from flash drive (0.1ms access time) and large file is accessed from HDD. You get best from both world for cheap.

Problem solved.

BTW.. I have standard laptop HDD on my netbook, Windows XP starts in 15-20 seconds every time. Photoshop loads in 10 seconds. If I had faster CPU on my netbook (boot time's cpu ussage is always 100% even with HT), i could probably cut the boot time by 25-50%.

 

i have 2 laptops with samsung ssd, dell studio 16 with 256gb samsung, dell studio xps 13 with 128gb samsung.
im telling you it doesnt worth paying hundreds $$$ more for ssd. ssd wont be ready for average consumers until next year.
im waiting for low cost sandisk ssd instead of
absurdly priced samsung.

 

it's not the same result, except if you only have a tiny amount of data you access. and flashdrives have 5-10times slower max readspeed than ssd's right now, makes quite a difference, too.

photoshop boots in 2-3sec max here. on slow cpu's, that is. every other app is about instant (<1sec), except for ableton live, which takes some seconds, and traktor, which takes some seconds to scan trough all tracks.

but the main good thing about ssds imho is this: you buy one, you put it in, you install your os and your apps and use it just like you always used a pc/notebook. you never have to THINK at all about it. no extra-usb-stick somewhere in, no special drivers or tools or what ever, no "do i want to enhance this app, or that? (ramdisk case)", no i-gain-here-but-i-lose-there, etc.

just use it and have gains EVERYWHERE. except maybe if you have tons of data and it doesn't fit on the disk but for anyone without need for always-ready-movies, games, or virtualmachines, ssd's provide enough storage.

 

I'll trade you a 500gb WD and some money for the 256GB Samsung if your not happy with it

SSD's are amazingly fast. They are expensive, but i've seen the difference they make.

PDF files are instant using ntfs on a SSD and even using ext4 on my linux machine (and not having to open adobe and its bloat) on a 500GB WD; i am still an order of magnitude slower in opening the same file.

 

i will trade my 100gb hitachi 7200rpm 16mb cache for your 500gb wd 5400rpm and some cash. who wants 5400 hard drive anyway except using it as external hd.

 

Personally, I won't be investing into SSD for two important reasons. The first is price, obviously. To date, SSD's are much more expensive than their mechanical based counterparts on a dollar-per-gig-basis.

The second is that I don't feel that SSD technology has reached a point yet where they are considered "mainstream" and had the kinks worked out of them. Generally speaking, I refuse to be a beta tester for new hardware technology that charges a premium.

I would rather wait for a new technology to mature before investing my money into it. In most cases, not only is the technology more robust and free from problems that may have plagued its first iterations, but also cheaper as well.

 

HAHA i don't mind being a "beta tester" because the "beta" units are far superior to the mature mainstream HDD's you refer to.

 

Superior in what? Pure performance? Because if that's the case, then I agree with you. There is no doubt in my mind that SSD's will replace mechanical hard drives. With more manufacturers jumping on the SSD bandwagon, SSD prices have and will continue to fall, making the price-per-gigabyte pricing scheme much more affordable. Until that time, I just can't see investing money into a technology that just hasn't matured yet.

 

General thoughts on SSDs? That's taking too broad of a question IMO. Not all SSDs are created equally, just like not all HDDs are equal. SSDs (at least SLC) has been around for 30+ years and is a very stable technology. Like any other solid state device (LEDs vs. LCDs for example), the technology in a SSD is far superior and well developed as it has the potential to be more reliable/rugged, consume less power (hence more battery life, run cooler, less noise, etc.), run faster (sequential and random R/W speeds, lower latency - both can be order(s) of magnitude better than a HDD), hold more capacity per physical size/weight than its HDD counterpart (ie. 1.8" 256GB SSD vs. 1.8" 160GB HDD). However, there is always a drawback, price.

In the attempt to lower this and bring it to mainstream, MLC technology was developed, which initially doubled the capacity but at the expense of reliability and speed. Also, companies (such as Jmicron, who develop controllers for HDDs) started to use their HDD-based (not optimized) controllers for SSDs and caused all sorts of negative feedback due to having worse performance and using more power than HDDs. While the past few months and years has seen a maturation in MLC SSDs and their controllers, I feel the general public still has yet to adopt it due to relatively high prices.

While prices are far lower than even a year ago, $300 for 80GB SSD is still too expensive to most people and cannot be justified, especially when you can purchase a 500GB HDD for as low as $50, despite all the technological benefits that SSDs have to offer. Just my 2 cents.

 

I now have 3 SSDs - a 128GB PATA Transcend in my Asus M6Ne, a 256GB SATA G.Skill Titan in my HP dv5z, and a 128GB SATA OCZ Core V2 sitting in an external USB case. Even with all the trouble these crappy Jmicron controllers occasionally have, they're still faster than my previous drives, which were the-fastest-available 7200RPM Hitachis. For software development, my compile times have measurably dropped, and my systems boot faster. Two key pain points that have improved, can't argue with that...

 

That 500gb 5400rpm is probably 95% the speed of the 7200rpm drive.

 

Read the SSD effects link in my signature for my analysis of an SSD vs. HDD.

Short Version:

For a laptop I see very real benefits for an SSD. This is most notably energy efficiency and vibration immunity. However, they also perform far better than notebook hard drives and are a good choice on that metric as well.

On a desktop, the advantage is less clear. Energy efficiency and vibration resistance are largely irrelevant on desktops (they don't move regularly, and operate off the mains), this only leaves performance. SSDs are substantially faster for random access than ANY HDD (even the velociraptor), but the difference in sequential speed compared to a good desktop drive can be quite small. My recommendation for a performance desktop would be a small SSD for the OS (say 32GB) and using HDD(s) for storage of Media and extremely large programs (e.g. games with lots of textures).

 

I agree completely, but that said I still think the cost of the SSD does not justify the gains in performance yet.

On the desktop it never boots its always on, and the longest loading program I have is photoshop that takes all of 6 seconds to load, saving me 6 seconds of wait is not worth $300+ and once its opened one time it stays in my ram and pretty much instant opens after that.

VR is the way to go for me, it will help my video render speeds, thats a real life difference of possibly minutes and also there is enough space on there to put my games on.

All other programs I ever use are already instant open with just a normal hdd.

> Firefox
> Irfanview
> Media Player Classic

Thats pretty much the extent of the programs I use, and they are all instant open without the help of a SSD.

If somebody took the time to gather the data of SSD cost vs efficentcy, meaning what you actually gain from having one, I think it would be a really low number.

Things like a 2nd monitor, faster cpu, a wacom tablet, and others that cost less could boost efficiency more.

Really, can you SSD people give me a list of programs you use honestly and tell me the before SSD times? Even if you had 10 programs use use regularly and you say they took 6 seconds each to load thats only 1 minute of time out of what 3 hours of working on the computer?

Boot time for me has never been more than a minute, and I turn on the laptop boot boot while I am pluggin in the A/C adapter and my mouse so its ready to go before I even am.

 

thats exactly what im doing..using 2 64gb ssds for OS and programs, and 2 500gb or 1tb in raid 1 for storage. plus im building a multi terabyte network storage and file sharing system....SSD is the future.

in my notebook, I will get one 128gb SSD for OS and programs, and get a 500gb for storage.

 

Personally, I think people comparing the price of an SSD to a normal HD are on crack. If the speed of an SSD was the same as the HD, then by all means, compare their prices against each other and go for the cheaper alternative. But, in my mind, comparing a lightning fast SSD to a slow as heck mechanical HD, WITHOUT factoring in the speed, is lunacy. To me, it amounts to someone comparing a Ferrari to a Taurus wagon, and ONLY taking into account the trunk space when comparing their prices. Well, buddy, you might want to factor in the speed.

It's unbelievably fast- it will literally change your computing experience. All those people talking about Velociraptors are also on crack- until you use an SSD you honestly don't know what you're missing and you're just trying to rationalize it to make it sound better to yourself. I read something about feeding kids. That's a lame argument to say the least, if you're worried about feeding children, then sell your laptop and get a second job. What are you doing on these forums in the first place if you're so financially cash strapped that you can't feed your children? I don't know who said it to be honest nor if they were talking about their children or children in Darfur or something.... but my point's the same either way.

The price is a factor but I once again don't see anyone complaining about the cost of a CPU? No problemo to pay $275 to upgrade to a P8700 but to pay that money instead on a high-end SSD is blasphemy. I don't get it. You WILL notice the difference in upgrading to the SSD while you WON'T notice the upgrade to the CPU, save for video work.

I just think people aren't putting things in perspective. They think SSDs are just HDs- they forget the fact that they are many magnitudes faster. I can honestly say, I have never felt fulfilled when I upgraded to a new system. When I went from a P2 333mhz to a P3 800mhz, I really didn't feel anything. From the P3 to the P4 or the P4 to the C2D, there really wasn't that big of a difference considering the software/OS were more intensive, y'know? But man, when I put in the SSD, it was like.... WHOAAAA.

Put things in perspective in regards to the SSDs.

In regards to the size concern, like I said before in other posts, if you need to lug around more than 80GB worth of space, then well, you have issues. I don't think you need 60 odd movies wherever you go. When your laptop is sitting on the desk, plug in the external HD and you're good to go anyway.

$325 for the Intel SSD IMO, for the experience it gives you, is well worth it. If you're willing to play $250-300 to upgrade your CPU, for a boost you probably will not notice on a day-to-day basis, then $325 for a boost you will notice every moment you're using your laptop is pretty reasonable. Granted, I would love the prices to drop to $200 a pop, but you get my point....

This is just MY opinion, answering the question that was asked , so please don't berate me and jump on my balls either way. Thanks.

 

^^^
I'll agree with like 95% of that Your always going to pay more for the best!

BTW i forget what are the actual sequential speeds of a VR? I'm pretty sure they are doubled by any of the latest gen SSD's... If you buy two VR's and RAID em' for $400 then buy an SSD $200-300 and a 500gb drive for same price and slotter your old VR's!!!

Another benfit to SSD that isn't stressed enough is the multitasking. You can clog up ur HDD opening/doing a couple different things at once. No worries with SDD Sure if you only do one thing at a time u will only be saving fractions of seconds in loading apps and a couple seconds loading something requiring sequential reads. but try doing a bunch of stuff at once and you'll see a HUGE difference between HDD and SDD!

BTW I love gaming on SSD especially for notebooks (b/c notebook HDDs are usually not quite as fast as desktop) Load screens have always been a huge anoyance to me and now with higher sequential speed than any HDD you don't have to wait near as long. Especially on a game you constantly change zones and have lots of load screens.

 

hm. the mtrons are 1.5 years old and work flawless since then in a lot of use cases.

i think the "have not matured yet" is simply an excuse because some people don't want to consider switching to them as it would cost money and would mean some work to do.

yes, cheap ones from ocz where (quite) bad. but all in all, there are big players in this business since 1.5 years. samsung, mtron.. others like intel took a year off to perfectionise their first release. and while they came late, it did mean it came mature out of the box.

so while we can't prove an ssd will last 80 years, as we'd have to use it for 80 years to do that, existing ssd's have proven that they so far are alive and working well.

 

agreed. i look at ssd's like gpu's to integrated onboard graphic-chips. they are a different leage.

since i used my first p3 (600mhz i think), there where two moments i've noticed enhancement on the user side: first, by switching from a 17" crt to a 19" tft. made my pc so much faster, just by having an actual clear big picture.. and proved it's all about perception.

since then, no newer system gave me a real "woah, now that's fast" again. till i got my first ssd half a year ago. at this time, i had a quadcore with 4gb ram at home, and a 24" screen. so it's not comparable to the p3 in any form. still, i haven't really felt the difference. like i did with the first move to tft.

now i can't wait for the next big thing that'll make me feel such a gain again

people pay for gpus, cpus, physics hw, ram upgrades, etc to enhance their experience. they do buy new systems for enhancing their experience. get an ssd instead and you'll be happy (except the nomoredell user that just buys dell all the time but the moment he has to step back to an ordinary hdd, he'll hate it )

 

Vicious, you just think your programs open instantly because you never knew they could open faster. Just like all those system delays you don't even realize exist until you have a SSD and all of a sudden they're gone.

I'd half tempted to offer my SSD to you for a couple hours of benchmarking and reviewing in International Plaza while I go shopping. You're in Tampa, right?

 

to make some friends sure that ssd's kick everyone's ***, i put all my apps into the autostart, and made a simple boot. it's amazing to see that directly when logged in, in halfsecond-steps apps pop up. similar to the 24ssds video on youtube. not that fast, but still similar. most people are so used to wait up to a minute or more for outlook to boot, they don't even realise what quick really could mean to them.

 

Im sold. i dont care about spending a few hundered extra for a really fast drive. and if I had the money, i would have the samsung computer. that video is crazy...

but if I can have the same experince, except say rip a dvd in 3 min...instead of the 20-30 it take now....then im totally sold...

 

Your dvd rip speed is already limited by the speed of your optical drive I would think, a faster hark disk in the computer wont help.

 

Yeah I am, live over in tampa close to USF and work in Wesley Chapel near the new mall.

Id love to do a review, I promise to keep it fair and unbiased. You can even come over and play some arcade games on my arcade I built while I work on it

 

General opinion? 20% faster than hard drives, 80% more expensive. They do use less power though, thats nice.

 

Close but I think its more like (for a good ssd, vertex or intel)

250% faster sequencial read/write
1000% faster seek




$100 500gb hdd vs $400 120gb vertex

100/500 = 0.2 per gb
400/120 = 3.33 per gb
= 1600% increase in cost per gb

The SSD advantage is of course its insant seek times .1ms vs 10-12ms typical off a laptop hdd.

However this is when you should do some math too.

ms is millisecond, not even a full second.

If you had a program you needed too open and it had 30 files (and a proper defrag will have them sequential anyways not scattered)

The SSD would in a best case situation take 3ms to find all those files.

the HDD would take 300ms to find those files (10 x 30) but 300ms is still really nothing... so do I really care? not really and it was not worth the 1600% increase in cost.

My math is theoretical but seems logical.

 

Don't forget cooler, quieter, and more battery life (because of that lesser power).

 

dont forget we debunked the cooler myth already some ssd are running hotter than hdd's, but you got quiet (but I cant hear my hdd's in any of my laptops so thats a tie), and battery life I think you win, but I want to say that was debunked too.

edit: here ya go about the battery life - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html

and I trust toms I think they are one of the best and most legit review people.

so really all you have is speed, but at a high cost and hdd still wins in capacity.

 

Um, that Tom's article was "debunked" - the SSDs performed much more work than the HDDs, which meant that given equal work load, the SSD would finish faster and idle longer than an HDD would.

Furthermore, SSDs do run cooler than HDDs - even if their TDP is the same, they get things done faster and again idle/cool for longer periods.

Here's the link - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html

Some SSDs do consume more power - like the G.Skill Titan and OCZ Apex with their two JMicron controllers - but as a general rule, the good ones (Intel, Samsung, Vertex) don't.

 

Yeah the link says "we are still right a good hdd can save more power than a ssd except for 1" pretty much.

but I read more than one article about the ssd heat output, it was actually much hotter than the hdd.

I think both sides of the debate are trying to strech the truth in ways not needed, SSD dont save much power and they dont run much cooler, and both are near silent. Its best to call them equal on those terms IMO.

The real difference lies in capacity, speed, and price.

HDD wins 2 out of 3 in the major differences.

 

Well said, Xiphias. Good SSDs are pretty much better in every aspect except cost compared w/ HDDs. Also, aside from speed and power consumption, those SSDs are much more reliable (especially if they use SLC NAND) in terms of physical shock/abuse and data retention, and also are able to exceed their HDD counterparts in terms of storage capacity/density and physical size/weight. I elaborated more before in my post on page 3:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4819144&postcount=29

edit: You can't generalize SSDs, Vicious. Good SSDs consume less power hence they will be cooler and with no moving parts, they will also be quieter. There is no stretching of the truth. Ask anyone who has used a Samsung/Intel/Vertex/Mtron/Memoright and you will hear that you get more battery life (hence less power consumed). Check out Les' first post in the SSD thread of switching a HDD for a SSD.

As explained in my post, capacity goes to SSD due to limitations in HDD platter density. So SSDs win in 2/3 - only drawback is cost.