Whens the best time to get an ssd?

So the guy received the laptop this past Monday. So im planning on getting the acer 4820tg in about a week cant wait. Ima save the $130 instead of getting squaretrade since american express gives me another year for warranty. So my question is with that money im planning on doing three things.
Making my laptop ssd +hdd instead of odd since i dont use it in laptops.
what ssd would be the best for battery life and performance for the laptop? and when do you think i should buy it.
The other one is I would like to get an ssd for my desktop as well just to boot the OS, how much space do i need for that ssd, and definitely want to get sata 3 for my desktop since i have the ports? when do you think the best time to get these ssd would be? I dont mind waiting until the summer since I am in no rush to get these.

 

generally you dont wait for computers ... you buy something when you need it. The most you should wait is some upcoming holiday where you know there will be savings/sale.

speaking of good SSDs right now, look at Intel and Samsung. And there's this huge thread about SSDs up top, check it out.

 

Usually after 8pm on wednesdays.

 

If you're not in a hurry, then wait.

With at least three new (generation) SSD's expected in the next few months, you would be throwing $$$ and performance out the window with any SSD purchase right now.

The new Intel 510 does look very, very enticing though - coming March 1 to an online store near you.

Good luck.

 

Nevar? I've been getting along without an SSD since the dawn of time. Once upon a time I actually wanted to get one.

 

Trottel, the 'dawn of time' didn't start in 1980 (when is your birthday again? )

I have one, but wish I hadn't spent the money on it (Inferno).

 

June 1908. NBR centenarians say woot!

 

3 years ago

 

lol...

Hey, didn't I see you boarding some ship on April 10, 1912?

 

I'd wait a few months too, although not necessarily for the reasons tilleroftheearth suggests; I'd actually wait since prices on older technology usually drops with the release of newer. I tend not to want to be an early adopter, especially of a brand new model of SSD; there are always firmware upgrades or other bugs that need to be worked out with a new release. Especially now with the OCZ blunder, buying SSDs (unless you want to try OCZ!) is going to be more expensive than usual, because everyone is fleeing the OCZ line and buying up other brands instead, which drives their costs up (OCZ had a fairly significant market share, so all the people that would have bought OCZ buying other brands results in a significant squeeze).

As for a boot drive, if all you have on it is the OS, a 30-40 GB SSD is good enough.

 

The recommendation on SSD's has always been for as long as I can remember, "just wait for XXX to come out. SSD's will be awesome then." If a mechanical hard drive is driving you nuts, then just get an SSD within your budget. No sense in playing the waiting game.

 

Very few people actually need solid state drives. For the most of us, it is for bragging rights/ or a plaything. If you can absolutely wait, the Generation 3 Intel SSD are coming out in about 1 month, the newest SF based ones later this year.

 

Agree.
This is not the time to buy SSD, unless you don't care about being ripped off at all.

 

I don't think you need laptops either, what's wrong with pen and paper?

Seriously I think TRIM-enabled SSD was the biggest push to go for it as long as you can afford it and you don't require large storage capacity.

It's great to rejuvenate old/slow computers as well.

 

Best 3 years of my life. besides enjoying ssds, i can laught about everyone who "still waits"

 

You know, there is a difference between wanting something and needing something. Unless you are pushing massive amounts of data through 24/7, running a file server, or in rough environments, you don't NEED a solid state drive.

Using your logic, why have anything at all? Why do you need grocery bags to hold your groceries, why not just carry them in your hands? Why would you need cars, airplanes, shoes, clothing?

 

i need my ssds. i go crazy on any system that doesn't have one.

 

And if you wait another year Intel G4 will be out and later that year the new SF will be out.

If you need one just buy one. There is always something new just right around the corner, you could play the waiting game forever.

For the average user, the differences in speed would only be seen by benchmark programs, so whether you buy one now or when the next gen comes out, you will be hard pressed to see the difference

 

yea ima wait till intel g3 comes out see the prices etc... but yea no later than the summer of me buying one.

 

Everyone is entitled an opinion.

I personally am not buying one until quality/speed goes up and price per MB down! IMO not worthy investing in one at the moment.

 

For quality I feel Intel is the best out there, though they may not be the fastest on the market.

Speed wise, well your laptop with the drives out there currently are as fast as your Sata II controller can process. So you will not see any real benefit from a faster drive.

I am of the opinion that the drive manufactures are going to try and keep prices as high as they can, for as long as they can. Once SSD's are Commoditized like everything else the players will shake out and the quality will suffer even more.

 

quality and speed is way further than for hdds. it's only the price per mb that is a problem. then again, that doesn't matter to all. price per speed gain might be more important, especially if you still have big hdds to store stuff.

 

A SSD has been a game changer to me. I am one to avoid the latest and greatest, paying a 'premium' for the privilege of have it. But to me, this is something which speeds up many processes and has greatly increased my efficiency at work. My SSD has paid for itself.

 

100% Agree.

The most convenient time to buy any computer or computer part is 6 months from now. Prices will go down. Capacity / speed / performance will go up.

But WHEN should you actually buy? Do what Miro_GT suggested. Buy what you need, when you need it. Because if you try to wait for that great thing that is "just around the corner", you'll be waiting a very long time. Because there's always something just around the corner. Buy what you need, when you need it.

In all fairness, the performance you get with an SSD is absolutely unmatched. A mechanical / hybrid HDD doesn't even come anywhere close. Some people are willing to pay a little extra money for that performance. Other people (such as you) think that it isn't worth it.

It is fair enough that you have your own opinion, but I think that it is a fallacy to assume that everyone automatically prioritizes performance and cost the same way you do.

This is incorrect.

When you look at Sequential Read/Write performance, most drives will max out the speed of the SATA-2 3.0GBps bus. You can expect almost all modern SSD's to do Sequential Reads at ~240MBps to 250MBps. Everyone likes to pay attention to this number, because it's the "big" number.

But the number that actually matters is Random Read speeds, and I/O's per second (IOPS). Most of what you do with your computer uses Random Read patterns. And when you multitask and stack multiple random read/write requests together, you start using the drive in a way where IOPS matters.

Random Read speeds and IOPS are the two numbers are the numbers to pay attention to when you buy an SSD. And you can see that there is a HUGE difference between drives that all look "the same" if you only looked at their Sequential Read speed of ~240MBps.


That chart was taken from Anandtech's preview of the OCZ Vertex 3 (SandForce SD-2500 controller). You can't buy those drives yet.

If you must buy a drive now, then get a non-OCZ drive based on the SandForce SF-1200 controller (e.g. G.Skill Phoenix, Corsair F120). If you can afford to wait a month or two, you'll start seeing a lot of drives based on the SandForce SF-2500 controller coming out. You'll want to get a non-OCZ drive based on the SF-2500 controller.

Just whatever you do... don't buy OCZ. They are currently undergoing a Customer Relations nightmare, where they basically porked a bunch of their customers in the behind and are being jerks about cleaning up the mess. You don't want to be mixed up in that.

 

I knew when I made that statement someone had to bring out the charts and explain away how what I said is not correct. Show me how this will make me more productive when Firefox open's in less than 1 second already, and with the higher IOPS it will open 25% faster than that. (assuming the difference from my current intel G2 to the C300 for instance)? My word opens pretty much in an instant as well. If you can show me how I am more productive in the real world, please do. For the most part in everyday use I just don't see the same leap from this generation of SSD to the next as you would between a standard hard drive and and SSD.

 

People who buy SSDs now and have improved productivity aren't ripped off. If you mean that technology advances rapidly and prices drop, well that's with all technology and things in general. If you feel a SSD is worth the investment and have the money, it's never a rip off.

 

SSD's are not about load times of single applications or OS boot times. Any drive (mechanical or SSD) can load a single application well. And tyou are correct, that Firefox opening in 0.5sec vs. 1.0 sec doesn't make one bit of difference to anybody. Even reducing boot times doesn't make a difference, because you're not rebooting all day.

Where it matters:

(1) You run an I/O intensive application on your laptop, like a database. The higher the IOPS of your SSD, the less impact that a database running in the background has on the other stuff that you're doing with your computer.

(2) You're doing something where random read speeds matter, like a virtual machine. A virtual machine uses a bunch of random read patterns, on top of all of the random read patterns of the base OS. The better your SSD is at random read speeds, the better your VM will perform, and the better the "background stuff" in your base OS will perform.

(3) You like fast toys. If you're spending $200 on a 120GB SSD, doesn't it make sense to buy the fastest drive you can for your $200?



You are correct in a lot of areas. You are correct that the difference between SSD --> SSD is nowhere near as big as the difference from HDD --> SSD. You are correct that a lot of people don't need or will never notice the difference between SSD --> SSD, and that any SSD will provide "good enough" performance for them.

Just because a BMW 318i is "good enough" for most people, doesn't mean that there isn't a reason for some people to want a BMW 330i.

 

I had just recently bought on the Newegg shell shocker a OCZ 120G Vertex 2, wanting a faster drive than an Intel. Lucky for me I was able to get them to take it back with no restocking fee. This was after reading how people are having issues with the drive disappearing, the time warp issue, and the customer service fiasco. Now I will be looking at the Intel again. I don't really need the drive till I decide which new laptop I am going to put it in, but I will be getting Intel regardless of the difference in speed to comparable priced drives.

 

What you get out of an SSD depends on the kind of workload you typically subject your storage disk to.

For a primary system disk its hard to go back from an SSD to a HDD and I mean that in the way that its hard to go back to boiling water in a pan, running upstairs and chucking it in the tub every time you want a warm bath. Immersion heating solved a problem that technically wasn't a problem in the first place, in the sense that when your boiler/immersion goes out, you can and probably will boil water in a pan anyway. No harm done.

But its amazing how quickly you adjust to convenience and find new ways to spend the time you save.

For me the single biggest game changer about SSDs was the silent operation. No question. I mean my old hard drive used to grind with OS read/write activity and if you use a monitor like HDDLED you'll see how frequent it is for your OS to write to temporary files and folders, even when you are just idling with a couple of Chrome tabs up. That ticking/grinding noise is something I have associated with computers for as long as I've used computers. Gosh thats 16 or 17 years at this stage. The ticking noise is gone! IT almost doesn't feel like I'm using a computer anymore and I actually found the experience very weird at first. But its amazing how quickly you adjust.

I can hear the pleasant sounding woosh of my cpu fan now. I never used to hear that.

 

So true. Silence really is golden. Or maybe platinum

 

Well I brought SSD when I was in a fragile relationship with some white powder.

But, now I think best time to buy a ssd is when you feel you need to open/save/load programs fast.

 

I still think my SSD is the best computer upgrade I ever bought. And I've had quite a few of those magic upgrades before.

To put in perspective, I think its a better upgrade than my old Radeon 9600 pro. Anyone remember buying a 9600/9700 pro way back when? I'll bet it was because you saw those amazing Half Life 2 rolling demos and it was the first time a computer game flexed its DX9 muscles. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to ditch my Geforce 2 GTS. My SSD is better than that upgrade. 8O

 

Yes.

To put it another way: An SSD is literally 100x faster than a mechanical HDD. To go from SSD --> HDD would be like someone taking your 5.6MBps broadband connection, and going back to 56Kbps dial-up modem.

Perfect example. Even someone in a fragile-relationship-with-some-white-powder decided to forego buying some more white-powder, and bought an SSD instead. The SSD is better than unnamed-white-powder. It's THAT good.

 

Hilarious. SSD is powerful stuff.

 

I'd Say look at Samsung and Intel SSD's . Best time ? When they are on sale or you have enuff money to make a small investment in your laptop.

Cheers
3Fees

 

If your requirements (or actions) from your computer constantly have you waiting or staring at a little spinning orb - then highly consider a SSD. It has been the single best upgrade to date for me. Now the computer waits for me versus the other way around.
I get frustrated with our other work systems - waiting for the spinning drive to finally catch up. Here's an example: working thru finalizing several presentations to merge them into one large briefing. Want them all opened at the same time. Highlighting all and clicking open on the SSD - about a 2-3 second wait. Doing same with the spinner, 1-2 Minutes.
If you keep waiting, you'll never get the SSD, something will always be the "wait for this version or upgrade".

 

For most casual users, sure SSD's are fast (but still not 100x faster... ).

For getting real work done (a hard drive is meant to be written to - not babied!), no SSD I've bought, played with or tested has lived up to it's claim to fame (speed).

The only recommendations I give to current SSD's are to netbook owners - and they balk at doubling or even tripling the price of their 'toy' by putting in an SSD that is essentially 'shock-proof' and perfect for their usage.

I agree with Gracy123; they're just too expensive for what they offer yet.

 

I enjoy downhill skiing myself.

I agree they are still quite expensive, but as tiller states, great for netbooks, subcompact notebooks, not primarily for speed but for durability and battery life, not to mention vibration. I could never use my Dell Mini or M11x with a 7200RPM HDD because the vibration puts my hand to sleep and 5400RPM is just too darn slow. I probably would not have got one for my M11x if I hadn't got a rock bottom deal on the Intel 120GB, and wanted the extended battery life (approaches 9 hours! ) that it offers over a conventional HDD.

Only reason there's one in my Sager laptop is because I already had the 80GB Intel so decided might as well make good use of it. It does help with fast boots and a more responsive Windows, but after using a number of SSD's I would say I wouldn't spend more than $100 on any SSD, and use it only for your Windows boot drive and apps.

 

well thats exactly what i would use the ssd. for the battery life on a notebook. and to boot up the drive and apps that startup on my desktop not trying to do anything fancy like load games on it. thats what my main hdd does. I think ima wait for intel g3 to come out and see the prices and get it if its a good price. or wait for an amazing deal where i cant pass up and unfortunately i dont like the ones with MIR because i never see those.

 

I agree with this, and at more than 2 dollars a gigabyte for a decent SSD (Not bottom of the rung) I can wait.

Industry Analysts predict every year that by the end of the year SSD's will be down to about 1 dollar a gigabyte, they've been predicting this for the last couple of years.

So yeah, I can wait. hehe

 

You're starting to see the "sweet spot" cost / GB moving up to the larger space drives though. Right now 60-64GB drives can frequently be found for ~ $100 which is a reasonable cost IMHO. A 60GB is more than adequate as a boot drive and even room for a couple power apps or games and storage. But to be really useful you need to move up to a 128GB or larger to use as a single drive for OS, apps, storage, preferably 160GB+. But then you're looking at $200-$300 which for most users puts it out of their budget.

 

and the other reason for 120GB+ is that entering the 25nm generation, small size SSD will suffer in terms of performance, endurance and actual usable size.

 

Your real work is different from mine. My work benefits a lot from a SSD.

 

That is the issue, there is no one work pattern. Mine is very random access skewed like running a local SQL server, IIS server then building visual studio projects(which has lots of very small files and generates lots of small files).

SSD in this case can easily justify itself within 3 days given our charge rate.

If the pattern is read/write heavy but sequential in nature(I think photo editing is kind of falling in that category), the gain is less noticeable. After all, SSD sequential speed is only about 2x over HDD.

If the pattern is random read heavy but there are enough RAM as cache(like my after work notebook), the gain again is less felt.

 

I'm not sure about performance, and you're definitely correct about endurance, but actual usable size is (usually) not affected. The only reason the Sandforce drives are losing size is due to the way Sandforce works, not inherently due to the 25 nm NAND. With higher density chips, Sandforce requires a bigger portion of it for their RAISE (a form of error correction and internal RAID), which is what resulted in the space loss. Controllers that aren't Sandforce won't have this issue (unless they also decide to put in extra error correction, but the point is that the loss of space is not inherently due to the 25 nm NAND).

 

The reason that the OCZ Vertex 2 25nm loses space vs OCZ Vertex 2 34nm is because 25nm NAND chips have lower write lifecycles (3,000 cycles) than 34nm NAND chips (5,000 cycles). The "loss" of size is due to OCZ over-provisioning more memory for wear leveling.

SSDs Shifting to 25nm NAND - What You Need to Know | StorageReview.com

The OCZ Vertex 2 25nm/34nm both use the same controller (SandForce SF-1200). To say that the 25nm drives lose capacity because of the SandForce controller would be inaccurate, because the controllers haven't changed between the two drives.

 

Again, it's not OCZ. It's Sandforce. Every drive using a Sandforce controller that uses the higher density (64 Gbit vs 32 Gbit) ICs will suffer the same space loss. I think the reason the drives higher than 180 GB aren't affected is that they were already using higher density ICs (higher density 34 nm instead of 25 nm), so they were already losing the higher RAISE amount. This is why they offer the trade to lower density (16x 32 Gbit instead of 8x 64 Gbit) ICs so you can gain your space back. For source, here, posts 32, 34, 38, and 43.

 

Well, we're seeing conflicting information here. On one hand, a forum mod is saying that the loss in space is inherent to the SandForce SF-1200 controller because of RAISE. On another hand, StorageReview is saying that the loss in capacity is due to increased over-provisioning for wear leveling purposes.

At this point, the actual technical reason (whatever it is) is irrelevant. OCZ had to have known about this loss in capacity before they pushed the OCZ Vertex 2 25nm out the door, but didn't take any steps to inform their customers of this change.

If OCZ had just come out and said "Yeah, these new 25nm drives have XYZ capacity and have reduced ABC performance... but that's part of the 25nm process.. we have to work with what we have..." then people wouldn't be quite as upset. The lack-of-forewarning-by-OCZ is the real cause of this whole fiasco.

 

but up to.. especially noticable in those moments where you hated your computer before.

what crap have you tested. i don't baby anyone, i work with my ssds for up to 20h a day, i use them for all different purposes. then again, i don't buy crap-ssds

i recomend to anyone. and so one no one was not happy having it. i, on the other hand, can NEVER recomend a netbook to anyone.

definitely not. we're in a world with 500$ gpus, 500$ cpus available. a world where people love to buy apple, where even the most crappy configurations of laptops are >1000$. an ssd, for the gains you get, is definitely worth the money. since quite a while actually.

people hate their computers now since 10s of years, because no matter how much they spent on buying the megagigahertz system and superquadcore what ever with the big rams and the great gpu, the system does never really feel faster.

this gets easily fixed by spending 200$, 300$ on an ssd, instead of thousands on a high end system. definitely worth the cost.

 

Oh, I never argued that point (that OCZ made a mistake in the way they didn't clearly explain what was going on). If you look at my post in context, it has nothing to do (specifically) with OCZ, I was just pointing out that the shift to 25 nm NAND (and as I've said before elsewhere, _everyone_ is going to end up moving to 25 nm, because supplies of 34 nm are drying up, much like trying to find DDR RAM these days) inherently has a loss in P/E cycles, possibly a loss in performance, but no inherent loss of capacity. Now, it may result in a loss of capacity to "make up" for the loss in P/E cycles, but that's not an inherent product of the shift.