4 ms·

Are SSDs worth the money?

3 points by rjstelling 15y ago

Jem 15y ago
I had my other half buy me an SSD for my laptop for Christmas. I wasn't really interested in a boost in performance, but the ability to "throw" my laptop about without worrying about the HDD. With an active, inquisitive toddler around this has saved me a lot of worry.
- dspillett 15y ago
  Don't most spinning-disk drives intended for portable use have accelerometers these days so they can pull power from the spindle and park the heads if they detect sudden movement? Not perfect, but it greatly reduces the chance of damage due to a throw or a drop.
  - Jem 15y ago
    Oh, yes. I am being nought but paranoid, I freely admit to that. :)
    - dspillett 15y ago
      There is nothing wrong with a little healthy paranoia!
deskamess 15y ago
I got a laptop with an SSD and boot times are really fast. I keep my apps installed on the SSD drive. I have a second regular HD where I store all application data. So the primary benefit I get is fast reboot and start up of apps. The above was company sponsored laptop but I like it, and I will likely get something similar for my next personal purchase.
mgedmin 15y ago
As a developer I often have to recursively grep large source trees. With an HDD that was painful, no matter how much RAM I added to my laptop -- the whole source tree was rarely cached. With an SSD, I can grep a few hundred megs of sources in a couple of seconds. Now I'm someone who hates having to wait unnecessarily, and considers even 1 or 2 seconds of application startup time to be unacceptably slow (hence Chromium instead of Firefox). For me the expensive Intel SSD was worth the money.
prpatel 15y ago
Yes. If you're a developer, find an SSD with good IOPS performance. You'll save time/frustration/angst and never want to use a spinner again. Every single developer I've shown my laptop running an SSD and spinning up Xcode/eclipse/RubyMine/ Textmate/Rails/Grails/Tomcat/etc has been shocked at the speed. Once they make they jump, I invariably hear: how did I develop before this? For recommendations on an SSD, have a look at the Intel SSD's, the Crucial C300/C400, or the new Sandforce based drives. I had an Intel X25M-G2 and upgraded to a C300 and loved both.

3 points by rjstelling 15y ago

Jem 15y ago

I had my other half buy me an SSD for my laptop for Christmas. I wasn't really interested in a boost in performance, but the ability to "throw" my laptop about without worrying about the HDD. With an active, inquisitive toddler around this has saved me a lot of worry.

dspillett 15y ago
Don't most spinning-disk drives intended for portable use have accelerometers these days so they can pull power from the spindle and park the heads if they detect sudden movement? Not perfect, but it greatly reduces the chance of damage due to a throw or a drop.
- Jem 15y ago
  Oh, yes. I am being nought but paranoid, I freely admit to that. :)
  - dspillett 15y ago
    There is nothing wrong with a little healthy paranoia!

deskamess 15y ago

I got a laptop with an SSD and boot times are really fast. I keep my apps installed on the SSD drive. I have a second regular HD where I store all application data. So the primary benefit I get is fast reboot and start up of apps. The above was company sponsored laptop but I like it, and I will likely get something similar for my next personal purchase.

mgedmin 15y ago

As a developer I often have to recursively grep large source trees. With an HDD that was painful, no matter how much RAM I added to my laptop -- the whole source tree was rarely cached. With an SSD, I can grep a few hundred megs of sources in a couple of seconds. Now I'm someone who hates having to wait unnecessarily, and considers even 1 or 2 seconds of application startup time to be unacceptably slow (hence Chromium instead of Firefox). For me the expensive Intel SSD was worth the money.

prpatel 15y ago

Yes. If you're a developer, find an SSD with good IOPS performance. You'll save time/frustration/angst and never want to use a spinner again. Every single developer I've shown my laptop running an SSD and spinning up Xcode/eclipse/RubyMine/ Textmate/Rails/Grails/Tomcat/etc has been shocked at the speed. Once they make they jump, I invariably hear: how did I develop before this? For recommendations on an SSD, have a look at the Intel SSD's, the Crucial C300/C400, or the new Sandforce based drives. I had an Intel X25M-G2 and upgraded to a C300 and loved both.