For the PC Boffins again.

[Bullet Magnet]

SSD hard drive prices are now dropping and SAMSUNG have just made a 250 Gig version and Amazon are promoting it for only 121 UK Pounds.
See here for details.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009 ... ukdeals-21

A short while ago, I did have a 120 Gig SSD drive Installed, and its very presence in my system made a huge difference to the performance,
and it didn't even host the operating system, just the swap file and a few games I was trying out..

My Mate called me up a week later to tell me his wife had left him and he could use some company, so I took the drive out of my PC headed into the mountains to see distraught mate, and after the initial chat about his situation, I presented him with said SSD drive to keep him distracted for the rest of the night after I had left...

Anyway, back to the 250 Gig SSD Drive. Most of my electrical stuff is SAMSUNG, and is very good quality, so I think I may order one of these as I need to rebuild my computer system very soon as I have not reloaded Windows in over 2 years, and there are some missing emails I need to reply to in a corrupt PST file that needs fixing...

[Dusak]

I found the Amazon logo a very interesting read, unfortunately BM I lost the plot two inches further down. At least you tried, and God likes a trier.

[BBLUX]

They certainly have come down in price. If Amazon are asking that price you can bet there is some other dealer with a better price.
Once they get to 500Gb at around £150 I will think of swapping over. Laptop only see

[Bullet Magnet]

How much Disk space do you use at present Barry ?
and don't forget, you don't need to keep 15% free for defragmentation purposes, as an SSD drive NEVER needs to be and should NEVER be defragmented.



Anyway, when the time comes to replace your computer, consider purchasing one with an SSD drive. Well worth the performance hit..
But, it should massively boost the performance on an older PC. 256 Gig should be more than enough for most people. With maybe the exception of Barry..

My setup however requires a little more disk space..
The Wife is non too pleased with what I did to the spare bedroom...

[Kevininabydos]

Yes, lovely I'm sure. You say you took it out of your PC/laptop to take to your mate, but where did you plug it in????
Nice of you to keep us up to date with this techie stuff but it might be a bit more helpful if you told us mere mortals what to do with this stuff. (by the way Dino96Dino has it for £114.88 + £4.59 postage!)
p.s. I like the spare room by the way, what's the ram on something like that?

[DJKeefy]

This link explains a Solid State Drive (SSD) or Hard Disk Drive (HDD) in a easier way to understand

http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

[BBLUX]

BM, lets put it this way, if I had a 256Gb SSD in my laptop it would now be just about full!
I did actually consider buying a laptop with an SSD but they were only 128Gb and were darned expensive. The option of using external storage via USB 2.0 would drive me mad waiting for the data transfer. Maybe next time with USB 3.0 readily available it would be a viable option.

[Kevininabydos]

Thank you Keefy.
So I suppose the answer is: yes they are better in a lot of ways but they have small storage capacity and are expensive, maybe wait a couple of years and look again.

[Bullet Magnet]

Sorry Kev.. I just assume people know about hard drives.

Keefy seems to have cleared it up, they are simply housed inside the case of your computer and have a power and data cable going to them.

Laptops are mostly slightly easier, as you remove the hard drive cover, pull out the drive and put the new one in.

I have a few hard drives in my system, basically with the data mirrored onto another drive, so that if one drive fails, then the mirrored data is still available on another drive.

SSD drives are very very fast, silent and generate very little to no heat, so great for laptops.
These Laptop size drives are also for a PC, as typically a PC would have a 3.5 inch drive and a Laptop would have a 2.5 inch drive.

Of course, as I said in the beginning, you would need to reload your Operating system, but when I used my SSD drive, I just added it to the others and formatted it and it was responsible for speeding up the whole system.

I have played the waiting game for about 3 years now, and the 256 gig version is only now affordable,
above that size, the price goes a bit silly. I think we will need to wait at least another year or so before we see something like a 500 Gig Drive for similar money.

PS. a standard hard drive with 500 gig capacity would cost about 35 UK Pounds...
I use them for data storage and backups, then the drive with my backups go to my Sisters house for safe keeping.


Barry, I hope you are backing up all that data somewhere.

External USB storage is good. I have a 1 Terrabyte External USB drive and is about the size of a fag packet, and cost 60 UK Pounds.

The Data Transfer rate on USB 2 drive plugged into a USB 2 slot should be about 35 MG per second,( sustained )
so not really that slow when you consider that today's internal standard SATA and the older IDE drives throw out about 48 - 60 MB per second.

SSD is capable of about 500mb / Second with virtually ZERO seek times...

[Bullet Magnet]

p.s. I like the spare room by the way, what's the ram on something like that?

Certainly not where I had planned on putting it after my Wife saw the room Kevin..