Kestrel
Flashaholic
Well, after some hard drive issues in my Dell laptop earlier this year (a slow but certain HD death), I decided to try out an SSD drive. I'm not as computer-savvy as I used to be, so I had a local computer shop source a relatively less-common EIDE SSD for my older Dell, as well as install & configure it (I undertook the WinXP reinstall :scowl.
The cost was $190 for a 64GB Super Talent EIDE (MLC), ~110 MB/sec transfer rate IIRC. I might have been able to find something cheaper and/or faster but I'd rather have the local shop take responsibility for the upgrade & making sure everything is functional - fewer folks able to point their finger at others if something isn't working, you know how that goes ... :ironic:
So I'm pretty happy with it so far, a low-level format took ~30 seconds, and WinXP boots up in something like half the time as previously.
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The other thing I've just accomplished with this laptop is that I picked up a Lexar 32-bit CardBus PCMCIA -> Compact Flash adaptor, as I've always wanted significant secondary flash drive capacity that is completely internal to my laptop. Furthermore, it's nice to use the commodity-type cards such as CF & SD - with so many companies competing, it's easier to get high-performance upgrades at a lower cost. Now when I need more capacity in my 'second hard drive', I can just pop out the CF card and insert one with greater capacity as the costs come down.
The other advantage that I see with this strategy is that since MLC flash memory is only good for ~3000 write cycles (albeit not as significant an issue with wear leveling algorithms), I can 'offload' a lot of the more-intensive read-write use (such as the My Documents & Settings folder, Temporary Internet Files, and virtual memory/swap) to the CF drive, saving my expensive & harder to replace internal SSD HD for the OS and various applications.
And it is still fast enough, a 32GB low-level format of this card took only 20 seconds, and since the 32-bit (CardBus) bus is most definitely not the data bottleneck in this configuration, I'm only limited by the quite-respectable ~60MB/sec transfer rate of this particular line of Sandisk CF cards.
BTW, do any of the computer gurus here know of a way to turn off last-fileaccess-time stamping with removable media using WinXP & Fat32? I'm tempted to convert the CF card from Fat32 to NTFS and/or make it a 'fixed' volume to facilitate this, but I'm wondering if there is a more straightforward approach ... ? :thinking: I also want to enable write-cacheing for this drive, so I'm inclined to make it a fixed volume...
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So anyway, I'd be curious as to who here has been using SSD's in place of traditional hard disks for their computers, and what experiences they've had? It sounds like there were a lot of failures in the first ones to come out, but I'm hoping that the more recent SSD's have been more reliable ...
Your thoughts?
The cost was $190 for a 64GB Super Talent EIDE (MLC), ~110 MB/sec transfer rate IIRC. I might have been able to find something cheaper and/or faster but I'd rather have the local shop take responsibility for the upgrade & making sure everything is functional - fewer folks able to point their finger at others if something isn't working, you know how that goes ... :ironic:
So I'm pretty happy with it so far, a low-level format took ~30 seconds, and WinXP boots up in something like half the time as previously.
--------------------------
The other thing I've just accomplished with this laptop is that I picked up a Lexar 32-bit CardBus PCMCIA -> Compact Flash adaptor, as I've always wanted significant secondary flash drive capacity that is completely internal to my laptop. Furthermore, it's nice to use the commodity-type cards such as CF & SD - with so many companies competing, it's easier to get high-performance upgrades at a lower cost. Now when I need more capacity in my 'second hard drive', I can just pop out the CF card and insert one with greater capacity as the costs come down.
The other advantage that I see with this strategy is that since MLC flash memory is only good for ~3000 write cycles (albeit not as significant an issue with wear leveling algorithms), I can 'offload' a lot of the more-intensive read-write use (such as the My Documents & Settings folder, Temporary Internet Files, and virtual memory/swap) to the CF drive, saving my expensive & harder to replace internal SSD HD for the OS and various applications.
And it is still fast enough, a 32GB low-level format of this card took only 20 seconds, and since the 32-bit (CardBus) bus is most definitely not the data bottleneck in this configuration, I'm only limited by the quite-respectable ~60MB/sec transfer rate of this particular line of Sandisk CF cards.
BTW, do any of the computer gurus here know of a way to turn off last-fileaccess-time stamping with removable media using WinXP & Fat32? I'm tempted to convert the CF card from Fat32 to NTFS and/or make it a 'fixed' volume to facilitate this, but I'm wondering if there is a more straightforward approach ... ? :thinking: I also want to enable write-cacheing for this drive, so I'm inclined to make it a fixed volume...
--------------------------
So anyway, I'd be curious as to who here has been using SSD's in place of traditional hard disks for their computers, and what experiences they've had? It sounds like there were a lot of failures in the first ones to come out, but I'm hoping that the more recent SSD's have been more reliable ...
Your thoughts?
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