Guys, I can't recommend a solid state drive enough.

About a year ago I bought a used laptop, a ThinkPad T420. My son, who dabbles in computers (for a living), set up an SSD. My Desktop computer, a Dell 7010, recently developed a Windows problem and we ended up installing an SSD on it, too, for the system files.

It's so nice to have a computer totally boot in 45 seconds. Yours might be faster, but for a long time a boot took so long that I ran the desktop all the time and always hibernated the laptop, restarting them about once a week basically as a reset.

There's another advantage to the SSD: despite early warnings that SSDs will wear out, they wear out in predictable ways, and along their path of decline you get warnings.

When your hard drive dies, it is dead. A test of SSDs showed


That's from [Link: extremetech.com], in which a test of a half dozen SSDs also showed that they lasted for multiple terabytes of read/writes beyond what was expected.

I think you and Stanley are in Cahoots to make sure y'all have the most posts on RC!

Bottom line, I think that's what all of this is about!

Stanley is just upset about being #2 behind you!

Wow. I thought I'd introduce a topic that could be helpful to all of us instead of starting a controversy. Little did I realize that you guys retain the controversy like some people retain water, and you only need a trigger.







[and that's one more post for me!]



[that last line was a joke.]

So was mine! Kinda ;)-

I recently changed to SSD: Very happy I did but I use a second drive that is a SATA for storage as very big SSD can be expensive

i've commented about them. my mid 2011 iMac 27 went from several minutes long boot time to 4-5 second boot time simply by dropping in a samsung 850 pro 1tb drive for $500. [Link: newegg.com]

the drive rocks. rated pretty much the best one out. cant recommend them enough. I can move just under 500mb of data per second with this drive. 3d nand as well so super long life.

elannut,
I didn't mean to imply that the SSD was the only drive in the desktop. I already had a 1 TB drive in it, and the one that messed up was a 1 TB drive, so now there are three. My son also dedicated a partition as a recovery area.

SpinRite is massaging the "bad" one (on which CHKDSK shows no bad sectors) when I'm not using the computer. SpinRite restores iffy sectors and marks bad ones. It's a program left over from the early days of Windows. It used to be tedious with 20 MB drives, but Good Lord it will take 113 hours to process this 1 TB drive! Luckily it can be interrupted and restarted.

The SSD + Dropbox combo is fantastic. And if you think your computer boots fast try running Windows 7 as a VM on a high powered, SSD equipped, Mac. It is just silly fast.

Wait until 10.11 comes out in a month or so. My 2012 Mac Mini is so fast boot up to my log in screen. That I have to wait a few seconds in order for my track pad and/or keyboard to connect.

I have a 480GB Extreme SSD from Other World Computers. Gotta love those 230MBs write and 500MBs reads.

KOT

This is great info. If this post was made in 2009.

Just a note on SSD failure. As an early adopter, I have had SSD on all of my systems for a few years. About a year ago I noticed by desktop system hanging randomly on disk I/O. Nothing I did would fix it. Ultimately I tracked it to errors on the SSD. This was not a graceful failure and quite hard to diagnose.

If you use your computer for a living, I highly recommend the new 3-D NAND Flash SSDs from Samsung (and now the their competitors). They have much better endurance. I have the 1 Tbyte Samsung Pro 850 ([Link: amazon.com]). It has been exceptionally reliable and with so much space, I no longer have to use external storage. Boot time with Windows 7 is around 10 seconds or so.

If you need extra space still, external USB 3.0 Flash is also quite speedy these days. Transfers between my internal SSD and Sandisk 3.0 Thumb drive happens lightning fast.

Life is good these days :).

Okay. Point made.
But, you know, if I hadn't brought it up, we wouldn't have this:


And so, since Amir brought this subject up to date,

This is something that interests me.

I just rebuilt my desktop (new MoBo, RAM, and Proc due a failure I could not pin down to anything else in the system). It was time anyway, my hardware was all aging as was my OS.

I opted for a HDD but the SSD intrigued me. If I chose to move it over to an SSD is it as simple as cloning or does it get complicated becasue it's two different types of drive?

Thanks.

Craig

Cloning should work just fine. The last SSD I bought came with a free copy of some cloning software, can't remember which one off the top of my head.

Acronis comes with some crucial drives for free and it is the industry standard in drive cloning and all around drive tools.