120GB SSD @ NCIX for $209 (After MIR)

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by photon

Ah I went ahead and ordered one, it'll go into my MBP at some point and I just made $57 at the bottle depot so I guess I can justify it.

That was $570 worth of beer you originally bought that could have bought you much more SSD goodness.

[photon]

Yeah didn't know there was one in Chestermere, and had been storing them up for a looong time.

Been working on my primary HDD to get it down below 120GB and so far so good, I already had pictures and music and stuff split off to a 2nd drive so this is pretty painless so far.

[photon]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

That was $570 worth of beer you originally bought that could have bought you much more SSD goodness.

True, but then I wouldn't have the beer. You see my problem.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by photon

Ah I went ahead and ordered one, it'll go into my MBP at some point and I just made $57 at the bottle depot so I guess I can justify it.

Does the lack of TRIM concern you at all, or is it not really that big of a deal for a Mac?

[photon]

Doesn't concern me much, they'll add it eventually and under normal conditions these Sandforce drives have seemed to be quite resilient as far as performance degradation is concerned.

[Rathji]

This thread needs to die.

As of last night, I am in the market for a new laptop drive. Since it is a couple year old entry level Dell, I probably shouldn't waste the money but it sure is tempting.

[silentsim]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Does the lack of TRIM concern you at all, or is it not really that big of a deal for a Mac?

OS X doesn't use TRIM, i think it has some built in mechanism to counter the speed reductions.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by Rathji

This thread needs to die.

As of last night, I am in the market for a new laptop drive. Since it is a couple year old entry level Dell, I probably shouldn't waste the money but it sure is tempting.

agreed. the reason i'm putting off the SSD upgrade until i replace my motherboard, CPU, and RAM is that i'm gonna have to re-install Windows at that point anyways, and i'd rather not have to do it twice in the span of a few months. but yet this thread keeps popping up at the top, and i keep seeing that price...

and yes, i realize i'm screwing myself by bumping it again

[3 Justin 3]

What do one of these things do anyway? Why is it good to have one?

Just wondering because I am probably out to lunch but will this improve the speed/performance from my laptop if I use it? (My laptop is 5 years old)

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by 3 Justin 3

What do one of these things do anyway? Why is it good to have one?

Just wondering because I am probably out to lunch but will this improve the speed/performance from my laptop if I use it? (My laptop is 5 years old)

[layman's]
Your laptop probably has a slow as molasses 4200RPM mechanical harddrive where the disk has to spin to the right spot everytime for you to retrieve the data that you want.

An SSD is basically like Ram except it's the entire harddrive, like a big USB stick but really fast and almost instant (compared to a slow RPM laptop HDD) speeds because it's just made out of memory chips and there's nothing mechanical. It just reads the data whenever it wants to.[/layman's]

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by 3 Justin 3

What do one of these things do anyway? Why is it good to have one?

Just wondering because I am probably out to lunch but will this improve the speed/performance from my laptop if I use it? (My laptop is 5 years old)

It will make your computer feel about 5 times faster. Hard disk access is the biggest general performance bottleneck in most computers and an SSD basically eliminates that.

I compare the perceived performance increase to the first time I put a hardware 3D accelerator in a computer. It's night & day.

In a 5 year old laptop? Not sure how that would affect things. What are the specs on it?

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by silentsim

OS X doesn't use TRIM, i think it has some built in mechanism to counter the speed reductions.

It doesn’t. That being said, the performance drop off over time without TRIM is real, but it bottoms out, and then the drive doesn’t perform any worse. Write speeds are still good. It’s still such a night and day difference from spinning disk that personally, I could care less about TRIM.

With or without TRIM, SSD is the fastest disk available in the consumer space, and that’s good enough for me.

[3 Justin 3]

If I put this in my laptop, it would replace my current HDD right? Or no?

[photon]

Depends on if your laptop supports more than one drive. But typically yes it would replace it, and to gain the benefit of the speed of the SSD Windows and most of the apps would have to be running from the SSD.

[cKy]

I got an 80gig Intel SSD a few months back. I can't go back to a mechanical drive anymore. 80 gig is good enough for the OS, Office, a few games and such.

120 gig at a good price would be well worth it. It is by far the best update to my machine.

My Windows 7 score rated the HD at a 7.4 (out of 7.9), it isn't even the best drive out there.

[Vulcan]

I've got a 40GB Intel SSD (WI of 7.2) and this is tempting to upgrade but I think I'll wait till the new year and hopefully prices continue to drop.

[Kickassguy55]

Would all the drives in my computer need to be SSD for me to have a consistent performance boost? I'd hate to see my 1 TB SATA2 go to waste.

How is the SSD drive best utilized, anyways? Is it best to have your OS installed onto your SSD (and any other particularly intensive programs), and then have anything else like movies, music, pictures, etc. on an older non-SSD hard-drive? I'm just speculating here; I'm not too sure.

[photon]

That's exactly right, stuff like movies and music are huge, but don't require any performance increase since the info in those comes off the drive at very slow speeds during normal use anyway.

So yeah, OS and commonly used programs on the SSD, pics, vids, music on the big disk.

[mykalberta]

Most people in desktop situations use the SSD for the OS drive, and have SATA for storage. So long as you are running the program from the OS drive then you will see the performance boost.

[sclitheroe]

For the macheads that would like an SSD boot drive, but still want lots of space on their Macbooks, this is a wonderful invention: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

There are knockoff versions of this on ebay for considerably less, but MCE has a long track record making these, if that matters to you.