What's your opinion about solid-state drives today?

I completely agree that SSD are the better performance choice but the price is still too expensive for me. I just bought a 1TB Seagate for $60 that I use to store music. I have several other drives that I use to store pictures and backup files. I would love to replace my current drives with SSDs but the amount of storage I require would cost way too much at this time. But they are getting closer.

I did replace the hard drive in my Sony PS3 with a 240GB SSD last year for about $160 and it was well worth it. It boots up quicker, the apps load quicker, the dreaded updates take considerably less time and my games load faster. I Highly recommend it.

Here's the layout I use to run video editing with my Asus MB with Intel core I7...

Primary Drive - 250 GB M4SSD2
- contains WIN7 programs & drivers, all loaded software
- the amount of 'free' space can be monitored very easily
- it is consumed very slowly
- Windows loads in seconds, programs load a run at peak efficiency

Secondary Drive - 1TB Toshiba HDD
- contains all data files
- important data files can be tracked very easily, and
- backed up to an external drive via USB2 port
- fluctuation of massive amounts of space are absorbed / little costs

I boot from the SSD & run all programs from it as well.
Every two months, I go into the USERS folders and
delete the temp work files created by the installed programs.
Programs load to memory from the SSD, and read/write from
the HDD only.
I spent 25 years as an IBM Programmer (Mainframe).
This technique was the basis for all 'efficiently' designed
program databases.

I have two MacBooks, A Pro and an Air 11". I use the Pro as a fixed station/desktop and the Air as a take-with. The Air had the max at the time of 128 GB, and my established data store from the Pro made the Air uneasily close to full, so I bought a larger SSD to double capacity. It was pretty easy, and worked fine, so I decided to replace the HD in the Pro, because I've had HD failures in a couple of MS PCs in the past and one in the Pro. Also, I carry both MacBooks back and forth between two homes in season, and plopping a computer in a TSA tray at the airports seemed to be hazardous to the health of a disk, while I've dropped the Air a number of times, once on pavement, with no I'll effect. Changing the Pro to SSD was also easy, and although I'm not a speed addict, the faster performance of the Pro was noticeable. It's been a while now, and everything is hunky-dory, including the usage charts; no sign of lost capacity due to dead zones or whatever you call them. I'm happy.

My notebook came with a big CHD that is fast enough for anything I do when I am mobile, but it draws more power than an SSD; I may upgrade to an SSD when prices drop further, just for the longer battery life. My desktop machine uses an SSD as the boot drive, and has three CHDs for storage. If I turn a spare machine into a home server, I will populate it exclusively with CHDs. SSDs are fast and probably more rugged (important in portable devices), but CHDs are much less expensive when storage capacity is important. I use both, choosing the best tool for each job.

iI have been using one daily for the last two years. It is a half terabyte. I do not feel that my processing is speeded up. There are still elements in the processing that choke back the speed..

cons: advised not to defragged., I feel that might a difference.

I have a 5 year warranty from my drive manufacture so reliability doesn't concern me.
I am using a combo of ssd and chd the ssd has my system and the chd has my data.
It is a sweet combo of speed and capacity. My boot time went from 60 to 16 seconds/

I was a little skeptical of SSD's at first.

But when Best Buy had a 99 dollar trade in ofr old XP machines, I thought might as well experiment with getting the little 198 dollar Acer for 99 dollars.

I've been pretty happy with that device. It's my main laptop for out of the house.

Then since it's an experimental machine for me, I installed Linux and dual boot. It boots quickly, as in less than ten seconds, and is screaming fast - especially for a little cheapie - runs faster than my wifes 600 plus dollar W8 Machine, which now runs Cinnamon Mint. So, so far, so good.

It's over a year now that I can fully satisfied report hat I no longer own a traditional HDD.
This being said, all the laptops in our household are SSD based and the only desktop is as well running on two 256 Samsung SSD drives.
Windows 8.1 present on all machines and Office 365 as well on all.
Cloud storage: approx 1 TB on ONE DRIVE (former Sky Drive),, approx. 100 GB on Google drive and 200GB on Dropbox.
I got used to save certain stuff in each of them and they all show due to OFFICE 365 just as local drives on my machines.
The benefits of using SSD are infinite; the lightning fast boot periode (with traditional HDD the boot sequence is 500% longer), the power consumption is something which no longer is an issue for the laptops while running on battery, no noise, more reliable, and so on...
One thing needs to be disclosed: A SSD based system will need fast RAM in order to take advantage of the benefits of the better speed of an SSD drive.
For someone looking at a lower cost, you can go with a 120GB SSD for the OS and have data on a different cheap traditional HDD. This will still give you the superfast boot speed.
My conclusion is that I don't even look back to rotary HDD.

My first experience with an SSD was great, but my second almost soured me to the idea of using SSDs again. I had a new Lenovo Edge laptop a about four years ago I used on my night table and I kept jolting it with my knee, so I decided to buy my second SSD for it, since they'll take a whole lot more bumping before going bad. I bought a new major brand name high end SSD. Because I had to shrink a 500GB hardrive onto it I cloned the Recovery Partition (RP) onto a small disk to store away for an emergency. Then I did some shrinking of the OS partition with a third party CD and after I cloned the OS partition onto the SSD. I put the SSD in the laptop, but I couldn't get the disk to boot, so I went to a Windows 7 installation disk for startup repair, and found I needed the recovery partition. I put the disk with the RP into a USB enclosure, got the drivers installed, and the Edge came to life, or so I thought.

First, I noticed that startup wasn't nearly as fast as I'd achieved with my first SSD in my desktop, barely fast than an HDD at all. I searched the forums for many hours, and tried to find a problem with alignment as several articles at that time suggested. I also played with a BIOS setting or two, but finally just resigned myself to bad speed, but at least having protection from disk failure.

A couple of months later the startup time started getting worse with a kind of double flash on the screen that either sounded or just made me feel something was 'grinding' inside. I called the manufacturer and they asked for some logs or information, I forget which, and decided everything was ok. They suggested I try Lenovo's support and they came to the same conclusion, so I kept assuming things were ok myself. I thought I just had a lemon of an SSD, until one morning the disk completely failed, and the computer wouldn't start at all. I called the manufacturer again, and they had me burn a CD disk, and try to install a new firmware. When that failed they replaced the disk under warranty, and I got Lenovo to send me reinstall disks.

The new installation had the same problem of a slow startup time. On a whim I changed the BIOS from UEFI to a Legacy BIOS and everything was solved at once. I have no idea why that worked and I've never seen an article with that solution, although I haven't searched much since then. I ended up selling the laptop about a year later, because the keyboard is meant for giants, or at least people with bigger hands than me.

I've cloned an SSD into the replacement laptop, as well as two others since, without problems. I just feel this information might save someone from needless headaches.

In my opinion, overall SSDs are worth their weight in gold.

Love it! New user here, less than 60 days with an iMac. Configured as the boot drive, using the Samsung 840Evo. Obviously can't speak to any reliability issues yet but I did my homework and the Samsung always seemed to become part of the solution. The i7 boots Mavericks in seconds. I was freaked out about ambient temps and heat stress and so on but I have learned a bunch from several of the comments! Thanks! I had the builder take the existing HDD drive and put it in a USB enclosure and will expand terrabyte? at a time. I absolutely love the SSD so far!

Friend's imac (4,1) CHD failed, so i thought that was a good time to swap out the dead drive and my ancient macbook (1,1) CHD. Installed new SATA IIs (no point in anything faster as the SATA II constraint governs performance) in both machines running snow leopard. Because these were small drives (256) and not IIIs they were inexpensive, even for people like me who have a hard time springing for new shoelaces. Significant improvements in both speed and reliability. Plus maintenance only takes about a third of the time it used to. If you want to squeeze a few more years out of your old apple mac machines I'd say that was the way to go.

I would until the price go down a bit because it's not worth buying expensive devices. Especially for servers still need normal hard disk instead of ssd hard disk. To save document on cloud still not secure anyone might hack it. For old laptop and pc ssd hard disk unable to format the hard disk. I try it couple of times.

SSD is good for laptop but still too expensive and still need to wait a couple of years.

I recently bought an 8-core "piledriver" AMD desktop and amongst the amenities I substituted was an SSD for the primary OS/application drive for Windows 8.1.

4 months: no problem at all. The best demonstration of speed is when you do a search over the entire disk. I don't have official measurements, but the SSD seems to beat my old HDD by at least an order of magnitude time-wise. Plus, my boot time is about 15 seconds, and application startup times (like Abobe CS3 apps such as Photoshop Pro, etc). also seem an order of magnitude faster.

However, I do believe these speed increases are not due to SSD alone. Faster processor speed, faster memory, faster FSB, more cores, all contribute to a better/faster experience. I'd definitely recommend a SSD at least for your OS/Application drive in a laptop or desktop.

Yes yes yes. Faster Faster Faster. Must go Faster.

--Me (SDP)

I am liking the Samsung 840 evo. I put one in my laptop a few months back, cut the boot time from 55 seconds to 25. Everything runs Faster. It seems to be the most bang-for-the-buck upgrade there is. I reluctantly bought the used Samsung SSD drive, having serious doubts that anything would ever come out of it. But, it was reasonably easy to install. And, it's still working perfectly today. And yes, it's FAST. I won't buy another PC unless it has SSD or I put one in it....

While it is probably a better option for a system drive than a CHD in a laptop, the fact remains that price per GB is still no match. I build my own desktops and game online and while a SSD would be ideal I simply cannot justify the cost per GB/performance differences. A 10,000 RPM 1TB CHD is comparable in performance to a SSD although not the durability, and can still be had cheaper than a high end performance 250GB SSD.

I purchased a 128 GB Samsung SSD 840 Pro. I do not think I will ever go back.

I know way too much about hard drives and SSD technology to believe either of them work at all. I worked in the semi conductor test industry for 33 years, most of my time was spent in memory technology and testing with memory manufacturers around the world. If the average person knew the design characteristics of storing bits of data in an SSD or hard drive, they would be much more diligent about doing backups. Having said that they are amazingly good at not losing our data - until they crash that is.

I think the life of a hard drive or an SSD are about the same. The speed advantage of an SSD is not in question, but as of today neither is the price differential.

I'll answer by saying that I have 8 1/4 terabytes of storage attached to my desktop - all hard drives. But I do believe that the next storage device I buy will be an SSD. I would put it to work as my C/OS drive. Prices for a 250GB SSD have come down to the point where they are attractive.

Large storage, on the order of 1-4TB is still the realm of the hard drive. I do expect SSD prices to continue to drop. I imagine in 5 years or so SSDs will be so close in price to large hard drives they will begin to match sales of hard drives.

About three years ago, I had to reinstall Windows. That machine was about three years old at the time, so I chose to go ahead and pull the hard drive and replace it with a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB CHD. This year, I purchased new machine with a 512 GB SSD and a 4 TB CHD.

I'm probably just used to it, now. But it doesn't feel like an enormous difference in speed. Programs are probably a little snappier to come up. But, a lot of that is due to the machine I'm typing on. A pretty hot machine, running an Intel 4770K with 16 GB of RAM.

From a blog I read, Coding Horror, the author there said that, as of a couple of years ago, SSDs were significantly less reliable than CHDs. But, he appreciated their speed advantage. So, he strongly recommends an SSD with a good backup system. Because, as others have pointed out, it's rare to be able to recover any of the data if an SSD does fail.

Personally, I have a NAS that I back up my machines to. I use a couple of Time Machine-like Windows programs for these local backups. Yardis on one, and AutoVer on a couple of others. I supplement that with a paid account with CrashPlan, a cloud version of a Time Machine-like continuous back. I have three machines here on that, plus my mom's computer.

Drake Christensen

I did have doubts about swapping out my old HDD for an SSD, but the advent of a more demanding operating system for my old, tired computer made me opt for an upgrade to both memory and drive. Glad I did it. Price reduction was a factor as was product reliability and guarantee. The speed boost for boot and application opening is a real improvement. I don't shout at the poor machine any more! My 7 year old MBP seems to be a happy bunny...

Let's face it, the only reason I don't yet have an SSD in my computer is cause the prices are still too high for me to afford ( STILL waiting for cost to drop!)

Thanks to Lee and Aaron for this article and all of you who have written in. It's been most interesting.

Here is my story:

I have just purchased my first SSD, a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB drive as a System reliability improvement. I have also had to purchase a Highpoint Rocket 640L 4 port (RAID) controller as I have already filled the 8 SATA ports on the main board! However, I shall be placing a couple of the other CHD's onto this card as I have read there is a (slight) loss of speed compared to the SATA III ports on the main board. I am anxious to get this set up, but have to wait for it to arrive.
My present setup is:
4 x 1TB HDD's set up in RAID 10 (for speed and redundancy - and yes I do carry out regular backups!) = 2TB drive.
1 x 1TB HDD for backup internally.
1 x 1.5TB external HDD for backups and other data.
1 x 1TB HDD for working data
1 x 1TB HDD standby disk.
1 x 160GB HDD for storage of Video and photography. This is an older Seagate Barracuda drive which has proven to be highly reliable - and yes, most of the data has been permanently backed up to optical disks (CD's & DVD's). This drive is somewhere around 15 years old! Touch wood!!
When I setup the RAID 3 years ago, I went to Western Digital Black Caviar drives as then they were recommended for RAID, however, I have had 2 fail and according to Western Digital, these are no longer recommended for this task, so I am replacing them as I get the money with others that are (and have been for a long time) recommended for this task. I must say in defense of Western Digital, they still honored their warranty as they had originally recommended these drives for RAIDing.
Now, due to a recent drop in price, down to $179.00(Australian) from $245 for the 840 series Samsung pro 256, this had provoked me from waiting for the newer and most impressive 850 series that is about to hit our shores. These were supposed to be released 17th July, but I have yet to see them here, and I suspect the price of an equivalent SSD would be around the $300+ mark. As the 840 pro series has a 5 year warranty and my usage would be only a little above average, I can't see the point in waiting any longer, as I suspect I will most likely need to build a new computer within the next 5 years anyway, and I would then most likely purchase the most appropriate SSD available then, possibly relegating this (now new - then probably ancient) SSD to data storage - if it's big enough!

But for now, I am excited to see how much quicker my system shall be - down from my present average boot up time of 40secs - yes, I do have a fair amount of programs coming up on boot up.

Once I used SSD on my wife's Mac Air, I got selfish and dashed out for my own Mac Pro with even more SSD memory. What's not to love about it? Our battery lasts longer & our notebook zips along faster. The only downside is of course the cost. To me that's not a big deal. I cut out home delivery pizza's years ago just so I could enjoy higher quality tech (I know every manufacturer is using SSD). SSD was the memory breakthrough that really changed the way we compute and interact with tech since it's in everything. Gee, isn't this fun

You can get the top of the line 250 GB SSD for $ 130 or less.
Your smart phone costs six times that.

over the life of the SSD that is about 5 cents a day !!!