OT: SSD drive prices have dropped drastically this week.

[woodchucker]

From about $1.15 per gb to less half that.

512gb for under $200.

Where 256gb was over $256 recently.

Finally affordable.

[adsDUMP]

Replaced the drive in my ancient (2002 vintage) Dell dual-core laptop with a 240GB SSD. Never have to worry about moving it while in use or if a bump or jar will damage the drive. Just close it up, tuck it under my arm and go to the next place. Would have been nice to have it 15 years ago when I carefully carried a laptop around a network lab to talk to big pieces of Cisco hardware.

If there weren't so much stuff to load at startup (antivirus, firewall, etc) it would run a close second to my Lenovo tablet on boot speed.

[Leon]

If you put one in, a SSD, I have read that you should not run an optimization/derangementer. I don't, at least not in the last 3 years.

[krw]

There is no reason to do so and all it does is waste time (and write cycles). Defraggers/optimizers are intended to put files together so the head is where it needs to be when it needs to be there. Since SSDs have no head, defragmenting is rather silly. Add to that, the SSD screws up file sequencing, intentionally, and keeps moving stuff around to "load level" (keeps the number of writes constant across the drive).

[Puckdropper]

Leon wrote in news:G- [e-mail]:

Do you mean "defragmenter"? Windows 7 does some sort of defragmentation in the background, but I don't remember any of the details. They might turn it off for SSD, after all there's no delay as the drive waits for the head to move and platter to come to the right point.

Puckdropper

[WD]

In Jan bought Samsung 840 EVO 500Gb for $308.99. from BH Online. Been waiting ages for prices to drop. Finally bought one and it's fast....... for Dell laptop.

[Bill]

I paid about $220 for a Intel 40GB ssd when I built a PC 5 years ago. Then $100 (on sale) for a second Intel 40GB ssd about two years after that.

It's worth noting that I had to update the firmware in the first ssd in order to make them compatible with the Intel "SSD Toolbox" (a necessity). A full-backup is strongly suggested by the manufacturer (though I didn't run into any problems).

Maybe the most (only?) important point in my post. Not all ssd components are created equal. When I bought mine, Intel had the best performance specs.

I'm glad to see the price trend!

[Leon]

Yeah Deframenterifenter!

[pentapus]

Cool.

Crucial 64GB for about $100 a few years back. Fabulous for a boot drive.

My understanding at the time is that you don't get as many write cycles on a SSD as a HD. They have wear leveling software in them for that purpose. Not so much an issue as to counter the clear benefits. And I suspect they are improving. Many thumbs drives are purely driven by cost and seem to be getting worse!

[Leon]

Well maybe not. My primary SSD was 128 gig and I keep my data on another internal drive. If you are using Windows you will quickly out grow 64 gig. My 128 was 82% full just from security updates, the OS, and program files. I recently went to a 256 for my primary drive.

[Bill]

I will correct myself. Each of the SSD's I referred to above were 80GB, not 40GB.

[pentapus]

Just looked, I've got about 10GB free, there's 20GB of data on it somewhere which includes a swap file. Win 7 pro, MS Office 2010 full, video and photo editing software, assorted browsers and a handful of other programs. 2 or so years old. Data is on a 2 TB which is filling up, video and images mostly.

Seems like most of what fills up a HD is crap, I clean it out every few months. MS will stuff a HD if you give it a chance. And so will free/cheap programs.

With that said, I wouldn't mind a bigger boot drive, but it all still fits and the i5 still flies.

I suppose if I did all my work on it, it would be stuffed, but the entertainment has switched to the tablet and the light weight stuff is on the laptop.

MS could learn a thing or two from Android, computing is trending smaller.

[pentapus]

Deleted temp files and gained about 9GB, so I'm about 2/3 full. Not that I'd suggest buying a 64 now. I remember running windows on a 20MB drive, 80 was big! Along the way windows has surely and steadily gotten to be a pig.

[pentapus]

At my time it was the Crucial M4, not the fastest, but best overall.

Tom's Hardware still thinks highly of Crucial. SSD reviews:

Note Samsung 840EVO 250GB @ $135

[Leon]

Well while Windows does use a lot of storage space, they all have gone that route. You don't see many main stream OS systems these days that can be stored on a 360k floppy anymore.

[Lew Hodgett]

Remember the days of 64K?

They knew how to write tight code.

Lew

[woodchucker]

The crucial 512gb was 199 from Tiger direct this week, they sold out quickly.

256gb is $99

[Doug Winterburn]

They had 80x24 green text screens instead of the GUIs and multi-megapixel displays and photo and movie data and the software to process.

Modern data and its processing leads to larger software, memory and storage needs. Not to say that software inefficiencies haven't grown, but the hardware has improved faster than needed to outpace those inefficiencies.

[woodchucker]

But they are already back in stock it looks like. Can't do this until I'm back to work.. But I would consider 512 for 199 reasonable. That's all I would need for my laptop.

[Bill]

Yeah, those were the days, huh? ; )