SSD harddisks

[clausdk]

My son got an old laptop from his granddad for xmas, I knew it did not work, but wanted to see if I could get it to work.

Turned out the HD was faulty, so I ordered me a new one 32GB SSD 80 $ incl. shipping.

I mounted the HD, installed XP in 19 minutes

It has become much faster, it starts in 21 seconds..

When it was in my dads shop it took almost 4 minutes to start up.. amazing
It still has trouble handeling graphcis and stutters a bit, but loading and installing goes lightning fast..

Now for the big question, how would a SSD affect sound in a PC enviroment ??
It has no moving parts, so it won't make noise, I think
and would therefore be ideal for a musicPC.

The downside is the small size it is "only" 32GB and if you want bigger ones the prices goes much higher..
But a USBkey are capable of holding 128 GB for a resonable price, so now we get no motion no motors and much lower powerconsumption

Any thoughts ??
Experiences ??

[Deleted]

Claus
Provided that the internal PSU isn't rubbish, you should get a small improvement in Audio from SSD and USB sticks.
Alex

[victoriaguy]

It will be nice when the SSD's start to get into the 'reasonable' price range.
For comparison, I just bought a 1.5Tb external (USB) drive for $100 - about 40 times cheaper per Gb.

It sounds quite fast in your laptop...though part of the reason for the faster bootup may be the clean install of XP. A few years worth of installing software - all with semi-hidden updaters, etc- will slow down most systems.

By 'noise' do you mean the whirring noise of the drive itself, or electrical noise of some kind?

John

[rowuk]

Considering the price of the SSDs, it may even make more sense to use a 64 bit operating system with>8GB of RAM and make a RAM-Disk with 2GB or so - enough for an hour or so of real hi res listening. Copy the file from the harddrive to the RAM-Disk for playback. Rip directly to the RAM-Disk.

Here is one example with freeware:
memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

[gommer]

Now this is a subject i know more about, in case anyone is interested in buying SSD's. I can't comment on audio qualities wrt ripping and playback, but i can report on quality of SSD's themselves.

Only one word: Intel. The 'value' version is 40GB for around €100 and the higher capacity versions have higher sustained throughput. I have both: 40GB value in the HTPC and 80GB in my main PC. Both disks host the OS, swapspace and all applications.

Good advice format only 75-80% of the disk and leave all other space empty. This improves performance of the embedded write distribution (the algorithm which prevents early failure due to repeated writes).

Why do I recommend Intel, you might ask. Because up 'till my last research (about 6 months ago), they provided best sustained throughput throughout the drive and they had the least spiky dips in read and write performance. The write distributions also seems to be the best performing and most reliable.

Cheers, Marc