Solid state drives. Why so expensive?

At this time you simply do not buy SSD's for storage, you buy them as Boot drive, to boot /load your OS of choice with a secondary drive as STORAGE. That said, once you have experience the speed of an SSD for booting you will never go back. Booting, resuming from standby or sleep, super fast shutdowns, etc, nothing compares and has been mentioned the time WILL come when SSD or similar tech is standard, it is not upon us yet but it is only a matter of time, in the meantime get at least a 120GB for your OS, all function calls go through OS so EVERYTHING is sped up significantly.

 

Apparently you can do that in OS X as well, but it requires entering some commands in Terminal.

 

What's everyone's brand preference for a SSD? I'm just curious since I'm thinking about diving into one.

 

Samsung

 

My drive is a SanDisk. It's served me well for the past year and a half or so.

 

Picked up a 128GB SanDisk a few weeks ago for my Macbook. Never been happier. System boots to a fully working desktop in 6 seconds

 

I currently own a Samsung hard disk but it's as a storage drive since it spins down when not in use. At first I though it was the Power Settings but it's made like that :/ SSD it won't happen to anyhow I might try and go for a Samsung since their products are great. Depends on price though and if SanDisk has served you guys well it's another brand I can go for Thanks for that guys.

 

You don't really get to make use of that bandwidth, a standard platter hard drive can't even saturate SATA2 bandwidth. It's fair to think that SSDs are still too expensive though, especially if you need the capacity.

It's a price/performance/capacity balance. Your older hard drives are great for storage, but are really slow when it comes to random data access. They are actually fine for reading/writing large files, but sadly that's not what most of your I/O in a normal work load.

The best solution, if you have a desktop or laptop with 2 drive slots, is to get a smaller SSD, 128 or 256 GB, and install your OS on that hard drive, plus your most used software, as space allows. Then get a cheap hard drive for data storage and software you don't have space for on the SSD.

SSDs are more expensive mainly because its much more expensive to manufacture the NAND cells (the building blocks of your SSD) to the performance and durability necessary to act as a primary drive. Thankfully, you do get some really nice benefits, as newer SSDs can make use of the full SATA3 bandwidth and have excellent random file read and write properties. Some SSD models have also proven to be extremely reliable, more reliable than any mechanical hard drive.

What this really means is that no matter what you are running on you computer, it will behave like it was just rebooted. There is virtually no lag between double clicking on an icon and the appropriate window popping open, even if you are doing things like scanning your system for viruses, playing a game, etc etc.