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

[Aloone_Jonez]

I'm going to upgrade from an old IDE mechanical hard drive for something a bit faster and am torn between tow options: should I buy a single fast 10000rpm Raptor hard drive or a small 30GB solid state drive and a cheap 7200rpm drive?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149434

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/160730
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/160730

I like the idea of a fast solid state drive but 30GB won't be enough so I'll need a separate mechanical drive for my files and just keep the SSD for the OS.

I know that the price of SSDs will probably fall more than traditional hard drives in the coming years so I could just buy the Raptor and upgrade to an SSD later.

I'm not one for always having the latest hardware but I know that the hard drive is the main speed bottleneck and I'm better off upgrading it than anything else.

I've just got my brother's old motherboard, here's the spec:
Asus A8N-VM CSM
AMD Athlon 64 Processor running at 2GHz.
1GB RAM - don't know what sort, I've been told it's not very good so will probably get some faster RAM too.
Sapphire Radeon X300SE 256MB RAM

Much better than my old POS but not top of the range I know.

EDIT:
I'm looking for a 2GB DDR 400MHz RAM module. Two of the RAM sockets are fucked and leaving only two to upgrade.

Don't get me wrong, even 1GB is probably enough for me at the moment but I don't want to get to the stage where I want to buy more RAM but no one sells it because it's obsolete.

[davidnix71]

The Raptor. That blows away the others. Wait until sshd's get cheaper and faster.

[worker201]

I assume we're talking about a desktop model here?  Because on a laptop, there are other considerations.

[Aloone_Jonez]

It's a desktop.

So far it's one vote for the Raptor. I might go with that, I'll see what others have to say. The thing that attracted me to the SSD is the seek time is 0.1ms which is 42 times less than the Raptor, but it's so expensive for a tiny 30GB drive and the read time is similar.

[piratePenguin]

os on an ssd = fast as fuck os

but if you wait you can even (needlessly?) throw your films and music on a bbigger, cheaper and possibly faster drive.

[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.

[piratePenguin]

When you upgrade your ram maybe you'll be able to run Firefox