Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Now we are jealous 
I have been looking at SSDs for years, but unwilling to pay the price. I need way bigger than 64/128G for a desktop/laptop. Of course I only reboot every second Thursday so SSD not that important. |
You may be surprised.
The current trend is hybrid - put the OS and applications on an SSD, and store the data on a hard drive.
SSDs aren't just faster to boot off of - they are faster to run from as well. Years back, I had a setup with two SATA drives, set up as a RAID array, where the RAID setup made the two drives look like one big drive. It sped up things like program loading a treat because the disk access was spread across two drives, and so were disk writes.
SSDs perform even better. With a standard hard drive, you have several variables, but to read or write any particular area of disk, you must move the drive head across the spinning platter to the right cylinder, then wait for the area with the data involved to come under the drive head so it can be read or written to. It's why drives that spin at higher RPMs are more expensive and preferred for performance: rotational latency - the time spent waiting for the data to come under the drive head - is reduced. But hard drives are also subject to fragmentation, where data winds up being scattered all over the drive, it takes longer to read it/write to it, and you periodically run a defrag operation to collect stuff into nice contiguous chunks.
With SSDs, you don't care about fragmentation. It's memory, and any part of the SSD can be accessed in the same amount of time.
You may only boot every second Thursday, but how often do you load programs and how big are the ones you load? If you
can go with a hybrid approach, it might be nice indeed.
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Dennis