SSD's and HDD's

[TheHalf™]

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have a great potential to speed up your system, and they're becoming mainstream with prices dropping and the technology maturing. SSDs are faster, have no moving parts, use less power, are quieter, less succeptible to physical shock, with lower access time and latency than traditional mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs).

However, SSDs use memory chips to store data, which makes them quite different than traditional mechanical drives and most current OSes are still not tuned by default to use this type of storage media to its full potential. It may take a bit of knowledge and tinkering to setup and tune the SSDs and squeeze that last bit of potential and improve their reliability.

The foregoing article aims at some general principles in improving the speed and reliability of Solid State Drives, discussing some  tweaking recommendations. Even though most tweaks are illustrated under Windows 7/Vista, the general ideas can be applied to any OS. In a couple of words, the main idea behind SSD tweaking for performance revolves around partition alignment, enabling TRIM, reducing unnecessary writes (very fast drives with somewhat limited write cycles), and freeing up space where possible. Note that newer generation, and more expensive SSDs have improved write endurance.

Windows 7 is better at recognizing and working with Solid State Drives (SSD) than previous versions of Windows. It has the ability to detect SSDs and set the disk defragmentation service to manual, even use the TRIM command on some drives. Even with these basic optimization steps, there is always some room for improvement, as outlined below.

Full article--->http://www.speedguide.net/articles/ssd-speed-tweaks-3319

TheHalf™

[Synbios]

Almost all SSD use TRIM now, most of the older ones can have their firmware updated to support it. I do not recommend using an SSD without TRIM as your performance will drop significantly over time. For a while only Windows 7 had TRIM but recently Linux and Mac versions support it as well. Vista and older do not have TRIM.

[danny251]

I will definitely get a SSD next time I purchase a PC!

[chelseaman]

  Normal hard drives will be with us for a long time. SSD`s make up a small amt overall.
Too expensive for the size ($30 per GB )average. But in saying that, and you need something to certainly speed up your read/write figures and know what your doing,then OK.
It`s getting back to,the latest toy/cpu/hd. Oh I must have one of those.
This won`t even give us time to go to the Loo

Prices will come down, and then I`ll give it some thought.
cheers