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Solid state HD + cheap HD or top of the range HD?

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reactosguy:
I know this one well. Solid state drives are lighter, speedier and more durable because they're based on large chunks of flash memory, which is not volatile. The price of US$2 per gigabyte for a flash drive makes them more expensive.


A hard drive is cheaper, and I agree with you just using an SSD for the OS files. In fact, when the cheaper high capacity SSDs come out, you're in for a treat. Then you can get lots of advantages.



Okay, I'm tired of explaining all this, please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive for further info. :)

Aloone_Jonez:
I've read all about this on Wikipedia. I just want some advice from someone who's had previous experience of solid state drives and fast hard drives.

I'm still in two minds. I'm also considering RAID but I think the Raptor sounds best at the moment, I can upgrade to a SSD when they get cheaper.

worker201:
Sounds like you've decided.  But why do you need so much speed?

Lead Head:
Just go with the Raptor. Don't waste your time with a small 30GB SSD. The smaller and cheaper SSDs also seem to have issues with continuous read/writes.

Also, SSDs will eventually fail like mechanical disk drives. SSD memory cells have a finite life before they go bad. In fact the general consensus is that a mechanical harddrive that is worked hard (lots of read/writes) is likely to out last your average SSD.

Although unlikely to effect your choice any, SSD memory cells will also loose their charge after 8-10 years. So you can't just shove an SSD computer in a corner and come back to it 8 years later and expect to it boot right up without issue. Like wise its not a good idea to store important stuff on an SSD if you plan on storing the drive unpowered for several years.

As far as wanting speed, I'm running two 10 year old 73GB 10,000 RPM SCSI drives as my main OS drives right now (got them for free, so figured I might as well use them). They actually have slower read/writes then my newer 320GB 7200 RPM SATA drive, but their seek time is much much faster. My computer is A LOT quicker on the SCSI drives then the 320GB one.

Aloone_Jonez:
I thought wear levelling has mitigated the problem with cells being killed by multiple writes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

Even data retention isn't too important since I'll only have the OS on there which will probably be reinstalled more often than 8 years.

Despite this, I agree, the Raptor is looking like the best option, just one hard drive to buy and I can stick the old IDE drive in my old computer.

Then when SSDs become cheaper I can upgrade again.

I've bought two 2GB modules off ebay. I hope they'll both work with the motherboard. They're 400MHz buffered EEC server modules, from what I've been told my motherboard will work with this kind of memory but I'm not 100% sure it'll take 2GB module, if not I'll stick them back on ebay. Even if it does accept them XP Home certainly won't detect both of them, not that it matters as I use Linux more or hope to be after I've got all the optimised drivers working. I'll probably have to upgrade to the 64-bit version of Fedora to make the most of it, the 32-bit version has a PAE kernel, so should work with 4GB, but it's still crippling my machine. I'll probably wait until Fedora 13 comes out before I upgrade though.

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