Computer Techie Question

Rob Keeble

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GTA Ontario Canada
Anyone here using a solid state hard drive on a windows 7 dual core pc?

Noticed any differences?

Given i store my data off my pc i am thinking this could be a cheap way to squeeze a little more performance out of an old dog.

Given hard drives are the bottleneck these days.

Has a too good to be true ring to it so i am looking for the catch.

From real world past experience i know memory access times have to be way faster than mechanical movements but how long do the read write cycles remain successful. I can see it pairing up well with huge memory banks in the modern pc but older ones???:dunno:

New Egg Canada has a deal which makes testing the water look feasible.

Any thoughts.

Thanks
 
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I'm running W7 in my laptop which is an AMD Athlon 1.6 Ghz processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 64 GB SSD.

Back in December I was running Vista on this machine with a 320 GB HD and it was running very slow. Vista was giving me fits so I decided to upgrade to W7. It was taking over THREE MINUTES from power up to being able to get online.

The installation of the SSD and W7 was pretty quick and easy. I noticed the difference right away. Before I started the upgrade, I timed the boot up sequence and it was like 3:15 consistently. After the upgrade, it was fifty-one seconds from power up to being online! The machine performance was very fast for a while. But that's to be expected with a fresh system install. Eventually as the Windows registry gets loaded up with crap, it slows down. It's still better than it was before though.

Give it a shot, I think you'll like it!

Good luck

John
 
I'm not sold on the reliability of the SSD for long term use, so keep your data and config files backed up often, it should be fine and worth the trouble. I am definitely impressed with the speed of them.
 
I'm not sold on the reliability of the SSD for long term use, so keep your data and config files backed up often, it should be fine and worth the trouble. I am definitely impressed with the speed of them.

Yeah thats my issue the reliability long term. There is a significant difference between magnetism and silicon.;)

I think i will give it a try. I need another fresh install. Man one day MS will get to grow up and be a real piece of software.:(

Thanks John your answer was just what i was wanting to know. Needed a real person experience there is so much misinformation out there its hard to discern the fact from fiction.
 
SSD devices do have a finite number of read/write cycles they can do before they fail. I don't recall the number, and the manufacturers are continuing to look for ways to lengthen how long they last, but I recall this limited lifecycle was something our engineers were taking into account when we were working on defraggers/optimizers for SSDs at Diskeeper.

For speed though, they're hard to beat. :thumb:
 
I don't know what to think about long term storage.
I have floppies twenty years old and still good. Originally the word was 3 - 5 years for them. Same for CDs and DVDs. If data only lasts a few years how are we supposed to do long term? Paper?
 
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