ssd?

are they realy worth the money kinda of pricey for glorified ram/flash memory.

Depends...I think it's a very personally view.  Some can justify the price for the greater speed. 

Pros: speed, ram chips, and silent, no moving parts either.

Cons: Degradation of the chips over time (they get slower with each use, but it is not noticable.)  I think Der Meister ran into this problem after 1 year of use.  And also, the most obvious is the rediculous price per gb.

I personally can't justify the price for a large drive.  I may get a 30gb one over the summer for my operating system, but solely the operating system.

Mentaldisorder summed up my opinion on SSDs pretty well. Until it gets less expensive it will be a nice feature for power users and the economically well endowed.

Agree with mentaldisorder as well. SSDs are better suited to mobile platforms such as netbooks/laptops for the efficiency and the durability (no moving parts).

I wouldn't worry too much about performance degradation. A few days ago I came across StorageSearch.com’s SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"

The gist is that most of the SSD drives being sold today have very high write endurances, somewhere in the 1-5 million range. You're looking at decades of intensive reading and writing before your drive fails, making them at least as durable as their magnetic counterparts.

The main thing is that people need to remember is that these drives do not need to be defragmented. If you do, you are subjecting your drive to needless wear.

nice i did not know that thats like having a closet organizer in your hdd nothing is ever out of place.

Funny way to look at it Caos a pocket organizer lol. I have not bitten this bullet yet either. I know many have said it is the most significant singular upgrade you can do and the like. I just can't justify the price for the amount of space. I mean I have two 750GB drives and I spent less on them considerably (65x2 and there WD Blacks w/free shipping) than I would for an 80GB SSD, maybe even a 60GB one. So not yet for me for a netbook maybe but that would be a requirement to make it partially tolerable. I have used them (SSD's) they are mad fast, and the ones ( on a couple netbooks I repaired) I've used were nowhere near top end ones either.

Lol, I agree. If you've already gotten a fast processor, tons of RAM, a kickass video card, and you still have some money left over, get yourself an SSD. And if you do, make sure you upgrade to WIndows 7 to get the most out of it.

You can make an argument as to whether other no they're worth the money, but the fact of the matter is, if you've got a fairly current system, using an SSD for the OS and your most common applications is the singe most noticable performance upgrade you could purchase at this time.

I hope to get one this year for my Core-i7 Beast, although it's hard to imagine it being allot faster than what it is already. I'd like one that is large enough for the OS and two or three of my favorite games to reside on.

a small ssd to boot from might be worth it. i've heard degradation isn't really much of a problem.

If I had the extra change laying around, I'd join the bandwagon and get one for my OS as well.

Nope my SSD is still going strong... I just can install the trim firmware update on mine with out wiping the drive... Which I will do next OS install

I thought there was someone having slow down issues.

An 80GB one would be more than enough to run your OS, apps and a few games. I've been eying the Intel X25-M for a while now.

Also, Intel has a 40GB drive out for $130, I'd say that's not too bad to get your toes wet.

Right NOW, they are a waste of money in my opinion. Especially if you spend over 800 dollars on an SSD that only has 300GB of capacity. If I were you, I'd wait a year or two for SSD's to mature and get cheaper as well. When the capacity of SSD's match that of 1 terabyte hard drives, that's when SSD's will be a viable upgrade. Right now it's only there for enthusiasts and people with boatloads of cash to spend. 

But if you still want to know why people are going crazy for SSD's, I would buy the Intel X25-V for only 130 dollars, although the capacity is pretty low, you could install Windows 7 on it and use it as a boot drive. At least that's what I will be doing. 

I don't know blazarcher I would disagree on some points you make and agree on others. The thing right now is as an OS drive, this would have the most affect on a system. This in many ways also makes it more secure all around because you would save your backup to a totally different drive. Another thing here is as gibbersome mentions you can grab a smaller HD in this format. To make this more attractive is there cheap really on the smaller ones. I also am pretty sure things are going to start getting interesting on this platform price wise as well. Think about OCZ specifically, they make some good SSD's, and they make a lot of them. They seems to release a new model every few weeks, and some other manufacturers are taking this path to. Wait until June I bet especially if they all keep throwing new models on the market. I use OCZ as a specific because you can go on Newegg and just search for an SSD and specify OCZ only with no other specifications. You will get a page complete I  bet if not two of all different models, but from one manufacturer. So the market is flooded choose a smaller one that is not the most recent release, but 1 step back. You grab a blazing drive that is faster by double at least than any mechanical HD, and for under 200, but most likely under 150. That is without a price war, just because of over stocking, so imagine what the prices will be in 3 months.

Well your saying it yourself, wait till June... We are STILL gonna have to wait for SSD's to be really worth the money. And OCZ aren't making NEW SSD's, they are just launching SSD's which are rebranded models of other SSD's. They just have a different name. And although you can get cheap SSD's like the Intel X25-V, they still aren't THAT much better than mechanical hard drives. And for me, it's not worth the headache of having to setup the SSD as a boot drive and have everything on the hard drive. Ultimately, it's too much work and you really won't see much benefits till the price starts going down and capacity going up. 

As for OCZ if they were just re-branded why does the performance as well as other capabilities change every time? As for the difference speed wise between a SSD and a mechanical HD you are dead wrong, sorry to say it. Almost any hardware site, reviewer, bench marker will tell you it is the most sufficient single upgrade period for a system these days (maybe minus a 980X). As for setting up a boot drive on a drive this fast it takes about 15 minutes at most from what I've heard. Do you still run a single hard drive system or something? All you would have to do is unplug the system, plug in you sata and mount the drive plug the system back up and push the power button, how can that take any time. Then take your 15 minutes for a Windows install to the drive after it's recognized, with a drive of this type I would imagine you could do it in a window while still running you programs actively in Windows. Either way it is rated as the most significant single upgrade you can do to any system, and for 100-150 dollars seems like a pretty good deal to me.

lol I never said that there wasn't a difference in terms of speed. All I am saying is that SSD's aren't cost effecive until their have more capacity and are more cheaper. That isn't stopping me from purchasing an Intel X25-V though. As for boot up times and shutting down, even my two year old Samsung F3 500GB hard drive boots in under 35 seconds and shuts down in 5. An SSD might cut that down a lil' but not by much.

And yes, I do agree that upgrading your HDD will affect how fast your PC operates the most. But take a look at this video. This guy has the best SSD yet he isn't seeing much of a performance boost. There must be something wrong with his setup but as you can see, he's got high end parts. 

And as for setting it up, what if I want to keep everything on my old hard drive. Setting up an SSD to act as the boot drive AND keep my data isn't as simple as swapping out drives and installing windows. 

Anyways, here is the video...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flmW4tPp6yM

Tell me why he isn't seeing a noticeable performance boost.

I watched the video first thing I noticed going into the bench test is he's running in SATA not even SATA2. He is running a Corsair drive which is slower than both an OCZ or an INTEL SSD not to mention most others which are current. If you click start then go to run type msconfig click boot, and change your boot timeout to 3 seconds it will speed up your boot time. Boot time in general means nothing to me as it always takes under 1 minute. However when he ran hist test's on was 50% faster which is twice the speed the other was 200% faster which is 4 times the speed of his Samsung drive. I will say one thing specifically I really like that Corsair 800 case he is using, those hot swap drive setup etc are sweet. I am not going to say anything about his knowledge he is I would assume knowledgeable enough to install a liquid cooling system. Thats pretty knowledgeable on hardware at least. I would bet I could probably drop at least 5 seconds off his boot time that was almost a minute, probably almost 10. I don't really consider boot time to mean much but bragging rights though.

The point I was talking about earlier is performance. Tell me you could take anything in that PC except upgrading to one of these 6 cores and produce a 200% difference performance wise on anything, and I bet you would not even get that on the CPU unless you were upgrading from something under a good dual core CPU.

Are you sure he is only running SATA? I didn't even notice that. And yeah, that Corsair 800D is absolutely amazing. Although it still isn't as nice as my Lian Li V2100B xD Oh and thanks for the tip for booting up, I will see if that changes my boot time. Anyways, his SSD speeds weren't 200%. The difference between the two was about 10 seconds when booting up I believe. 

Think about it this way. An hard drive upgrade will ALWAYS be the most significant improvement because IT is EVERYTHING. All your programs, all you games, everything is running from your hard drive. The HDD can be seen as the bottleneck of your system. Your CPU and your graphics cards (although it doesn't matter) could be the fastest in the world. But if you are limited to a slow hard drive, you won't really see any significant improvements..

It's like how the old saying goes, you are only as strong you as your weakest link. And in this case it is the mechanical hard drive. Obviously an SSD will yield the most improvements performance wise. But you can also argue that going from a Pentium 4 to a Core i7 will also improve performance just as well. And you could also argue that if you were playing games, the graphics card would yield the most performance. You can't really say that none of these other components matter because they are all EQUAL in terms of importance. If any one of them don't cut it, your whole system will suffer. 

Anyways, I will be getting an Intel X25-V soon when I upgrade my computer with watercooling. You should take a look at my thread when you've got the time.

my load times are greatly reduced with my ssd. Over my old 7200 32mb cash HD. 128 gb isnt a to for a HD but i only load my programs and OS on it. everything else is on my 500gb hd's

     Yeah I caught it when he flipped to the bookmarking program all it say's is SATA which is SATA 1 drivers. He may be running on an old motherboard, it make no sense with the build you see, but I have heard some crazy things. The drivers Corsair put out on this drive (being that it's a very recent one), and I think there first, it may have been the only drives they had when they made it, and he installed with the CD then did not check for driver updates. As for the 200% thats what he said one I think read's but it may have been writes was 200% better and the other one was 50%. You just have to think about it 50% better than his Samsung would be 100% better total, and when though of as better a 100% increase so a 200% faster drive. Where 200% better than the mechanical hard drive would be a 400% performance increase. Although he may have said 100% and 50% I know I heard the 50 one the other one was not as clear. Either way a 50% is that much better than his mechanical that a big increase and even 100% better is still completely twice the speed of the mechanical. He was also running his BIOS as invisible which is why you never saw it, while this does not always slow down boot time, I am pretty sure it usually does slightly like maybe 5 seconds. So drop that from his timer clock as well which would make a difference even if it was only 2 seconds were on a stop watch here.

     One thing especially on the Corsair drives I noticed is they were using a controller from OCZ's drive 2 or 3 generations back. I know that sounds crazy, but OCZ has been rolling out new (not renamed) releases every couple of months since they started pretty much. The drive controller has also changed several times, as has the NAND chip size they were using a few times.

     I think at least my top considerations if I was buying one brand wise would be an Intel an OCZ, and maybe a SuperTalent. There are however other drives worth it like SuperTalent, and A-Data who are lesser know names (in the US anyway) that have actually been around for quite some time ( I think SuperTalent is actually a oriental big name, but I am not positive). I am pretty sure some of the smaller houses like Patriot, and a few others have been putting them out, but there reviews have been more mixed. So you will or at least I would, want to know specific models and production numbers on what I wanted as well as what I ordered, and with confirmation before it left the shippers warehouse.

Remember this is a lot like memory, those numbers may really mean something. Consider Mushkin has Silver Red and Blackline memory, the enhanced models of each as well, and at least 2 sku's for both the red and blacks I know, and maybe the silver's to. On top of that they have all for DDR3 1600 3 different speeds from what I can tell. So you miss on number out of those sku's and you get a different bin than your inspecting, and then even on top pf that it is also Intel and AMD specific in each model base as well.  So order the wrong one and it's INTEL for an AMD or viceversa and won't work at all with your MB. Well SSD's are made from the same thing where they will all work with the intended Sata, they run at different speeds and capabilities all across the board.

 Listen he can't be running on an old motherboard. He's running a Rampage II Xtreme motherboard. And because of that, there can't be SATA 1, it's ALL SATA II. Also, the program that you noticed saying SATA... It ALWAYS says SATA. Even for me. Anyways, I really don't get how a 50% boost can equal 4x the performance. Lastly, he never said that the SSD was much faster. He even said that he was DISAPPOINTED.

Anyways, I will be buying an Intel X25-V soon. But was wondering if I should go OCZ instead. I was thinking One of their Vertex drives. Also I heard A-Data is good as well.