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Is SSD worth it?

gianly1985 said:
Try an Intel SSD before saying that it isn't worth......
It's only a matter of personal need of storage and personal budget....in other words, it's only a matter of WHEN you're gonna buy one...
An Intel SSD disintegrate your HDD in every possible way and in every possible activity beside...storage space. But for storage space it is possible to use a fw800 bus-powered hdd. Or an HDD in a MCE Optibay.

Personally, I will wait the Intel x-25m 160gb to get below 300€ (in Europe now it costs 400€) and then get it immediatly....finally we are out of the "experimental and hassle" phase of the SSDs and everyone should approach this wonderful technology as soon as possible....it's the SINGLE best performance upgrade (in everyday usage) of the last 5-10 years....it eliminates a long-hated bottleneck of our machines...
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I like Uberamd's personal choice to get the 500GB drive, I agree with him but maybe for different reasons. While I can see the speed benefit by going SSD, I'm one of those types who HAS to have everything on the internal drive, externals attached via FW, just need to then back that primary drive. I hate having crucial information on separate drives, and at the moment that is what I would have to do if I purchase an SSD due to capacity restraints.

The price has to come down, and the capacity has to jump ahead of what I have inside my laptop right now, which is a 500GB 7200rpm drive. Until then I'm not playing, but happy to wait anyway.

At least further down the line I can still extend the life of this machine by buying an SSD, saving me further money. :)
 
I have to agree with gianly1985, Intel are the best you can get (the new X25 at least, whenever it will be available again).

I just went for the Vertex again because I needed it now (the Intel is not available still) and for only $156 shipped I couldn't say no to the Vertex 60GB. :D
 
CrackedButter said:
I like Uberamd's personal choice to get the 500GB drive, I agree with him but maybe for different reasons. While I can see the speed benefit by going SSD, I'm one of those types who HAS to have everything on the internal drive, externals attached via FW, just need to then back that primary drive. I hate having crucial information on separate drives, and at the moment that is what I would have to do if I purchase an SSD due to capacity restraints.

The price has to come down, and the capacity has to jump ahead of what I have inside my laptop right now, which is a 500GB 7200rpm drive. Until then I'm not playing, but happy to wait anyway.

At least further down the line I can still extend the life of this machine by buying an SSD, saving me further money. :)
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Agreed. SSDs would be slower than a 7200 500GB for me because:

1) I keep large amounts of data on my drive (much more than 320GB)
2) I can't use an external firewire drive because I can't lug it around with me
3) so I use a NAS with external webdav access for those few things I don't have on my drive. if i had an SSD much of my data would be on that NAS. Accessing that is way slower than the 7200 drive.
 
I'm debating this as well. I'm getting a 13 inch MBP in the next 2 weeks and I can't decide. I'm stuck between getting a 320GB Scorpio Blue and an Intel X25-m 160GB.

If I get the Scorpio, I'll have more than enough space and since I'm not going to be doing anything really hardware taxing, the speed of the drive should be fine. It only cost $60 but I'd buy a SSD later anyway.

On the other hand, I could get the Intel right now instead of waiting. The G2s just came out so I'm thinking I'll be waiting for about a year until the (maybe) larger G3s come out. I've got a 160GB HDD on my desktop right now and I've got 119GB free. I've also got about 140GB of music on an external drive. I'd take maybe 70GB or less of that and put it on the Intel drive. So it would be however much space Snow Leopard takes + iWork + 70GB of iTunes library. I think that'll be enough space since I'll keep larger files on my external.

Another deciding factor is that I have the money to buy the SSD right now. Who knows if I'll have an extra $500 next year cause I'm just a typical poor college student. Decisions, decisions...:D
 
Belm said:
I'm debating this as well. I'm getting a 13 inch MBP in the next 2 weeks and I can't decide. I'm stuck between getting a 320GB Scorpio Blue and an Intel X25-m 160GB.

If I get the Scorpio, I'll have more than enough space and since I'm not going to be doing anything really hardware taxing, the speed of the drive should be fine. It only cost $60 but I'd buy a SSD later anyway.

On the other hand, I could get the Intel right now instead of waiting. The G2s just came out so I'm thinking I'll be waiting for about a year until the (maybe) larger G3s come out. I've got a 160GB HDD on my desktop right now and I've got 119GB free. I've also got about 140GB of music on an external drive. I'd take maybe 70GB or less of that and put it on the Intel drive. So it would be however much space Snow Leopard takes + iWork + 70GB of iTunes library. I think that'll be enough space since I'll keep larger files on my external.

Another deciding factor is that I have the money to buy the SSD right now. Who knows if I'll have an extra $500 next year cause I'm just a typical poor college student. Decisions, decisions...:D
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save the money. you can use the savings for more important things. Once you have an income you can upgrade, and by then you'll get more GB/$.
 
SeaWind12 said:
Is SSD worth it?
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Depends on how you assess value?

Let's see ......

160 GB SSD $400 - $500 ( I believe this was the range quoted for Intel )

500 GB HDD $100 ( approximate street price )

When you look at value economically, I'd have to say NO.

It's not worth it.

HOWEVER if the four following statements apply to you, it might be worth it ....

1) I do not need storage space!
2) I crave speed!
3) Money is no object!
4) Gotta have them bragging rights!


I think it would cost me $1500 to replace my HDD with an SSD, just not worth the effort. Maybe someday they'll drive the costs down to where it would become worth doing so.
 
I purchased a 13" MBP last week with the stock 250GB drive with the intention of replacing it with a 256GB Super Talent UltraDrive ME for ~$620 USD (it was on sale at the time).

Read= Up to 260MB/sec
Write= Up to 200MB/sec

New MBP boots in 14 seconds to usable desktop. Response is instantaneous where storage is usually the bottleneck.

From my experience with the MBA with the 64GB SSD, I couldn't see myself using rotating storage again.
 
The price won't drop until they start making them in larger sizes.

I feel that we won't see a 160GB SSD drop below $200, and until then I refuse to buy. The money is simply better spent on other things.
 
To the ones who wants to stick to the HDDs, look at one of the fastest consumer HDD (WD Velociraptor 10000rpm) being HUMILIATED by SSDs:

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/intelx25mg2perfpreview_072209165207/19506.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/intelx25mg2perfpreview_072209165207/19508.png

When I look at those benchmarks, I imagine the Velociraptor (which is faster than all your notebook HDDs) like a crippled postman who slowly deliver one letter at a time while, in the same time, the Intel SSD is going to and from at the speed of light delivering letters to the neighbourhood.

Please, just say you still cannot afford an SSDs, but nothing more. It's impossible to say it isn't worth.

I'm waiting for them to get a little cheaper (just a little) too, but I want to get rid as soon of possible of my retro clang clang clang steampunk disk and get a disk who reaches data for my OS and my applications at the speed of thought......
 
gianly1985 said:
To the ones who wants to stick to the HDDs, look at one of the fastest consumer HDD (WD Velociraptor 10000rpm) being HUMILIATED by SSDs:

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/intelx25mg2perfpreview_072209165207/19506.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/intelx25mg2perfpreview_072209165207/19508.png

When I look at those benchmarks, I imagine the Velociraptor (which is faster than all your notebook HDDs) like a crippled postman who slowly deliver one letter at a time while, in the same time, the Intel SSD is going to and from at the speed of light delivering letters to the neighbourhood.

Please, just say you still cannot afford an SSDs, but nothing more. It's impossible to say it isn't worth.

I'm waiting for them to get a little cheaper (just a little) too, but I want to get rid as soon of possible of my retro clang clang clang steampunk disk and get a disk who reaches data for my OS and my applications at the speed of thought......
Click to expand...

First of all, HDDs are inanimate objects. They can't be humiliated. Secondly, people hardly ever reboot, and the savings the rest of the time amounts probably to 15 minutes a week. Given that SSDs have such low capacity, of COURSE it is possible to say they aren't worth it. Why pay so much money to save so little time and lose so much capacity; for many people, the loss of capacity is such that they have to use external disks, NAS's, idisk, or other slow methods of accessing all their data, and thus installing an SSD will actually result in them spending MORE time reading and writing to storage. SSD's are humiliated by the massive capacity of the manly HDDs.
 
If SSDs would work in my MBP 13" it should be worth it. Thank you Apple for the brand new firmware... :mad:
 
cmaier said:
SSD's are humiliated by the massive capacity of the manly HDDs.
Click to expand...

doing a cost-to-benefit analysis yields that for 99.9% of users at the moment, no, ssd is not worth it. these findings are very official and scientific, take them as fact.
 
They are definitely worth it for some and definitely not worth it for the others. Saying that they are universally worth it or not worth it is a little dumb. Both HDs and SSDs have their very clear advantages/shortcomings and when you weight those against your specific needs/wants you get your answer.
 
I just installed a 1st generation Intel X25-M 80GB in my 13" MBP. I'm definitely sold. The speed difference is really impressive. Fortunately for me, I don't need that much disk space on my laptop and I have a 400 GB Western Digital Passport Elite that can be used if I need to store a lot of data. This drive is worth all the pennies ($250 CAD including taxes/shipping) I paid for it!
 
I replaced a 160MB (16MB cache) 7200rpm Hitachi HDD with a 500GB (8MB cache) 5400rpm WD "Scorpio Blue" HDD. Other than a less pleasant, higher pitch, it was "bigger", but was noticeably less responsive. Was the change it "worth it"? No way!:( I didn't need the extra storage room, it was noisier, and there was a downgrade in response. Then I replaced the 7200rpm HDD with a 120GB (120MB cache) OCZ "Summit" Samsung-driven SSD. I still had sufficient storage space, a responsiveness many times better than the HDD, and no noise at all - as well as knowing it uses much less power, has no vibration, creates less heat, is tougher in case of impact, and is a more secure form of data-storage. It is transformational, not incremental in its multiple effects - some are inherent benefits, some are system flow-on benefits. For 3X the cost of the alternative Scorpio Blue, was it "worth it'? You bet! And the Scorpio Blue became a perfect external HDD for imaging and backups; and the Hitachi a 2nd .:)
 
The answer is just too obvious

Think about it, people are willing to pay 300 hundred dollars more to upgrade from a 2.26ghz processor to a 2.53ghz in the Macbook Pro (yes yes, there's a slight HDD and RAM upgrade as well, but those are worthless compared to how much they cost to do it yourself.) There is no noticeable difference in going from 2.26 to 2.53, yet people are willing to pay this price for a less than 300mhz increase.

An Intel X-25 at around 200 dollars gives you a real world performance upgrade of several times more than upping a processing speed by 300mhz. It is easily, in terms of overall performance AND in performance to cost, the best upgrade you could possibly get for a notebook. Nothing else comes close.
 
Qusus said:
Think about it, people are willing to pay 300 hundred dollars more to upgrade from a 2.26ghz processor to a 2.53ghz in the Macbook Pro (yes yes, there's a slight HDD and RAM upgrade as well, but those are worthless compared to how much they cost to do it yourself.) There is no noticeable difference in going from 2.26 to 2.53, yet people are willing to pay this price for a less than 300mhz increase.

An Intel X-25 at around 200 dollars gives you a real world performance upgrade of several times more than upping a processing speed by 300mhz. It is easily, in terms of overall performance AND in performance to cost, the best upgrade you could possibly get for a notebook. Nothing else comes close.
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Having an Air and my first exposure to a SSD, couldn't agree more. That's why I bought the base 13", put 4G RAM in myself and am getting the X25 160. It'll smoke. What pisses me off is I JUST put in a Scorpio Blue 500GB yesterday, literally. Oh well, Time Machine it is.:D
 
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