Which SSD for Netbook?

Thats the point I tried to make too, but feel like SSD was being shoved down my throat

Honestly while on paper SSD is "more reliable" they have not passed the test of time yet. We may see them drop dead earlier than expected, also if data protection is your reason for swiching you could always have looked into backing it up as a cheaper solution and it would offer even more protection than the SSD.

What if the SSD breaks?

What if your laptop is stolen?

Data Backup will prevent both of those from making your data to bye bye and all you need to do it is another cheap $50 hdd and an external enclosure and some data backup software

 

I never said it was "the" reason...I'm not a newbie...I do backup. As I said, everyone has their own reasons for switching...can we leave it there please. If you don't see the need to switch then fine don't use them. What's all the fuss about?

 

The fuss is about biased statements like "SSDs are by far much better than HDDs in every aspect."

Truth is, for some people SSD is the better choice, for some HDD is the better choice.

 

Fine, i'm not gonna ask you to list the advantages that HDDs has over SSDs.

BTW who shoved SSDs down your throat?

 

You know what...imma list the advantages for you. The one and only advantage a HDD has over an SSD is the price to gigabyte ratio.

The only reason for HDDs in my life now is for storing files and for backups etc.

 

HDD Pros
> Cost
> Capacity
> Availability
> Variety
> Compatibility

SSD Pros
> Speed (some)
> Durability
> Power Draw (some)
> Heat (some)

Breaking that down some

Cost - No brainer

Capacity - No brainer

Availability - Easy to get anywhere from your trusted stores, SSD some of them hard to find, people having to use channels like ebay to get them and that can be risky

Variety - There are different HDD's you can get the low heat low power green type drive if that is your goal, or you can go for the fast type, lots of brands to choose from.

Compatibility - Works with any system the way its supposed too, SSD seems many of them have issues with XP and most of the older chipsets doing things like limiting there speed or performance.

Speed - A good SSD is much faster than a HDD, esp laptop HDDs, but of course there are many bad SSD's too that are slower or suffer studdering issues.

Durability - A SSD is more shock resistant than a HDD especially while in use, but not shock proof, a good drop could break one. HDD's are shock resistant too when off and some have the fall sensors built in. If you were using your netbook while on safari in the back of a jeep SSD may come in hand

Power Draw - This is another 2 way street, some SSD draw more power than a good HDD, but a good one can use less.

Heat - And another 2 way street, seen many reviews showing SSD running way hotter than a HDD, but this is limited to some SSD not all, some of them can run cooler.

So the SSD takes much more time researching to find a good one with so many lemons out there. Many people have droped a big part of there paycheck only to be very dissapointed with there new SSD.

We are still tackling the issue with speed loss in a used SSD, and people need to know advanced things like how to align XP's partitions to keep performance from dropping way down on many SSD's.

Half of the SSD Pro's are also situational, Heat for isntance isnt really going to matter to anybody unless it was hot enough to warm your laptop up but a good hdd shouldnt unless you have a very poor laptop design.

Shock resistance isnt going to matter to somebody like me who only uses his laptop on his desk.

Power Draw is not going to matter to somebody that always uses there machine plugged in, and even when on battery just how much do you really gain in real life time? Not a whole lot I would imagine.

The one undeniable gain you can get from the SSD is speed, but when you factor real life test and real life numbers, what do you really gain from the speed boost?

If winamp takes 5 seconds to open instead of one, was that really a huge gain? 4 seconds of your time is really nothing and its not like your going to stop while waiting for it you continue working on what you were doing.

So I still think that many SSD owners are under there "Christmas day" type impression where the excitement of the new hardware and its benefits makes it feel like a larger gain than what it really is in reality.

I plan to get one still like I said for my w90, I dont mind cutting my game load times in half and my boot time in half if I am lucky, but I am going into this knowing that besides a bit of coolness and convenience I am not really gaining much. I could boost my proficiency at work on a much larger scale with a 2nd monitor than I could an SSD.

At home on my desktop I can probably cut 10 minutes off of a 1 hour long photoshop project with a new Wacom tablet, it would take weeks worth of application opening to accumilate 10 minutes worth of time gained over hdd loading times.

But everybody will have there own take on things and there own budget, so consider the above my opinion.

 

You forgot Reliability;

Nevertheless that was a very informative post. Newbies can learn alot from threads like these.

It all comes back to what I what davepermen and myself were basically saying though. Everyone has their own reasons and priorities in choosing either.

 

I kinda put Reliability and Durability together, if your referring to how long they last before they drop dead. Thats not really something that cant be stated yet until more time has passed.

I have seen *dead* SSD posts on these forums.

 

Oh right, my bad...I missed that...did you see the post on these forums where they threw an SSD over a highway overpass and put it into a notebook and the OS booted up without issues? (No moving parts FTW!)

Now don't get me wrong...it's an electric device...some will come DOA. And yes, jump drives do fail so SSDs can too.

 

interesting breakdown.

still not 100% true (but very close).

COST
cost being a nobrainer, f.e. ssd's are much cheaper than a new system. so if you think your system is too slow and you want to upgrade to a new one, consider an ssd instead. it's MUCH cheaper. and the gain, actually much bigger.
newer notebooks have about the same performance as one, two year olds, espencially in disk performance. => you don't gain much and then have to hazzle with a "slow system" again.
as stated before, my tiny core2duo 1.2ghz runs circles around my quadcore 2.4ghz desktop thanks to the mtron (not anymore as i upgraded to ssds in the desktop, too). it bootet faster, apps opened faster, no slowdowns anymore.

so for 220$ or so, i got a system upgrade that i could not get by buying a new laptop at all (there is no quadcore 12" laptop around yet, is there? ).

so cost is relative to what you do. yes, it's hella expensive if you plan to store your ripped blueray movie on it. but that's not the plan.

SILENCE
you don't know what the silence of an ssd means to the feeling of performance till you had it. you know the noise the pc always does when he has to do something on the hdd, and you know how it does it sometimes more, namely when it had messed up with the page file (hello xp), or loads some fragmented data, or what ever. you essentially HEAR the slowness. now my winamp may boot in 2 sec less than before, but you don't hear it. as such, you don't notice it that much anymore.

and besides, it's great when your girlfriend is in bed while you're at the computer/notebook beside her (and yes, blabla, concentrate on the girlfriend, then.. i know ).

SHOCK RESISTANCE
1) i killed a pc harddrive by touching the chasis with my hand, maybe moved it 2mm or so. hdds can die at any time from the most slight rumble. and they did, several times. notebook hdds, desktop hdds. just 2 days ago, i was replacing a dying home-server hdd. i spent quite some money in the end on replacements. a hidden cost.

2) yes you can break an ssd. but not without breaking it's surrounding, a.k.a. the laptop itself. now while that can happen anytime, it needs much more force than what is needed to kill a hdd. it can not "silently break". and yes, i dropped some ssd systems, moved hard while using it. besides notebook and laptop, you may know cellphones. all "ssd based". i can drop mine without problem. takes some damage, still works. only my gf is great at dropping them and killing them completely while doing so.

TIME GAINS
I've measured idle times at my work system during typical work of me, and others. interestingly (we don't have much on-system-storage in use anyways, 40gb only for everything), investing in intel ssds would pay off after about 3 months, compared to the boot times of our users where they have to wait, the start times of the different apps they open and close, the page-file-slowdowns (yeah, i hate xp in that regard )..

from poweron to full callcenter-ready, it takes 10 - 20 minutes. to really snappy, another 10 minutes. and this all with defragmentations, cleanups, etc.

it would take 3 months to pay out for switching to the most expensive ssd's right now. (ok not the most expensive ones, but most expensive consumer ones).

you can come and visit all my systems, and then talk again about christmas day. i can reconfigure them even to default state so you can expirience the before and after. it made, on every system, a huge difference. since half a year, i have christmas. that was worth the money. much more than buying a new system (like i did, when i buyed the 2730p to replace the 2710p. but i did it for other reasons. i had one specific app that needed more than 1.2ghz cpu. not for the power, but for the frequency. it's a realtime audio application, ableton live).



and i do agree that, depending on needs and situation, hdd's or ssd's fit better. but, it still stays that way, if you want to spend money to enhance your experience (gpu, cpu, ram, hdd, new system), and don't have storage problems (get a server, really, get one. home server rules ), then ssd is, always, way to go.
if you don't want to spend money, nothing is way to go. if you need much storage, ssd's aren't there yet. everyone else, do the risk, feel the christmas

i can't wait for the tiny hp netbook that gets fitted with the huge 128gb ssd i have

oh, and i know crap ssd expirience. i have an asus 900 (my gf has it). woah that thing is slow at loading anything still, it is quite snappy, even then but an usb-stick-as-an-ssd is woah slow

i'd love to spend everyone an ssd to play around with. if i would be rich, i would have done this by now. including visiting each one to see their moments (and have nice holidays )

 

all i can say to reliability and durability is, it's so random, for the individual, it's just good or bad luck. but there are more factors that can kill a hdd than an ssd. that doesn't mean i would trust ocz ssds more than a hdd, as they are quickly and with cheap components manufactured. but a good tested, not-cheap-built ssd should stand the test of time. that said, it's still mostly luck or bad luck.

so far, i have now about 3/4 year of random ssd experience, with some of them in daily usage, having different stress scenarios (i'm a dj.. my notebook is in clubs. bad air, loud music, lot of vibration, even drinks spilled over the notebook, etc..). the ssd's so far survived.

but we have to wait till we're 80 to be able to say, you know, i was right. they did work for 50 years.

 

Ok so it was thrown from on top of a building.

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I cant think of a system a year or two old that matches my new quad core dual 4870's

And when I upgraded to my old machine with a 3.2ghz dual and a 9700GT that was a big jump over the past machine.

The CPU/GPU tech moves much faster than the storage tech.

Sure you can make a old machine more snappy on loading times, but that still goes back to what I said before, just how much do you really gain with a faster load?

Not nearly as much as you gain with a new cpu/gpu unless all your doing is office work or something.

Silence... I have never had a hdd I can hear period, I even tested one outside of the notebook with a sata cable hooked to my pc and I had to put it against my ear to hear it run.

I hear those "loading" sounds on my desktop drives but only if I have no sound.