[tpm] OT: Are SSDs really worth purchasing to speed up our computing experience?

[Cees Hek]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Tom Legrady <legrady at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have heard that SSDs have limited lifetimes, compared to disk, only so
> many read-write cycles. Don't know how significant that is in actual use.

They do, but these days you will more than likely be replacing your
system before you run into any issues with read/write cycles on an
SSD.  My current laptop (Dell XPS 1640) was purchased three years ago
and came with a 240Gb SSD drive which I have never had any issues with
(note that this is anecdotal and doesn't prove there aren't any issues
with some SSD drives).  I also have an SSD in my work computer and my
media center...

I think the read/write cycles are more of an issue in enterprise
situations.  And enterprise grade SSDs have contingencies for this by
adding extra space on the drives that are used when needed.  Also
files that change often are moved around the drive so that reads and
writes are more evenly distributed across the entire drive.

Personally I wouldn't build a system these days without an SSD.  For a
desktop I would buy a decent but small SSD for the OS (60-120Gb), and
then stick a 2Tb spindle disk for data.  For a laptop it is trickier
since you only have room for one drive so you have to go bigger which
is still expensive...  But if you can afford it, the speed, low power,
silent operation of an SSD are a huge asset in a laptop.

Cheers,

Cees

ps.  my 3 year old laptop cold boots into a fully loaded Ubuntu
desktop in ~14 seconds (that includes a second or so for me to type in
my password at the login prompt).  LibreOffice and Firefox take ~1
second each to load.

>
> Tom
>