| Hot Deals Club | | | |
LOGIN to see more deals |
| | |
PRIVACY POLICY | | | |
DISCLAIMER | | | |
DONATE | Club Membership: Subscribe for email alerts |
|
Advertisements: what? | |||
| Hard Drive | Solid State Drive |
| 1.8" & 2.5" drives transfer data around 20-40 MBytes/sec 3.5" drives transfer data around 40-100 MBytes/sec |
(advantage) 1.8", 2.5", 3.5" drives transfer around 75-385 MBytes/sec |
| (advantage) Cost around $0.04 to $0.06 per GB for a 5400rpm or 7200rpm drive, with most recent hot deals around $0.04/GB. | Cost around $1.75 to $2.75 per GB, with recent hot deals around $1.75 to $2.15 per GB. |
| Has moving parts, so they are susceptible to skips caused by bumpy conditions. | (advantage) No moving parts. Some Youtube videos show someone throwing an SSD from the roof of a 3 story building, plugging it back in, and working fine. |
| Depending on the hard drive's spindle rotation speeds, they consume about 4 to 8 watts of power and can get very hot. | (advantage) SSD's use less than 1 watt power, and do not get hot. |
| In Windows filesystems, hard drives benefit from occasional defragmentation to avoid the drive having to spend time finding the data across all areas of the disk, similar to a CD player jumping ahead and back to different tracks just to play a single song. | (advantage) SSD's do not benefit from defragmentation, because SSD's can theoretically access any data on its drive at the same speed. In fact, you should disable defragmentation when using an SSD in Windows, to improve the longevity of your SSD by reducing the amount of unnecessary writes. |
| (advantage) Hard drives do not degrade in performance as data is written to the drive. Hard drives running a Windows filesystem can become fragmented, especially when they fill up, but can be defragmented. | SSD's can degrade in performance over time as data is written, deleted, then later overwritten. Degradation can begin as early as when the SSD is filled to capacity. A new TRIM feature for Windows and Linux helps slow the rate of degradation. Mac supposedly will release TRIM compatibility soon, but we heard Windows filesystems benefit more from TRIM than Mac by the way they store data on the drive. As described on WindowsITPro.com, TRIM only helps slow the rate of degradation, and does not eliminate it. This is why SSD's probably should only be purchased in brand new condition, to avoid drives which already suffer from degraded performance. Formatting SSD's do not help bring back the performance. There are some SSD-specific "secure erase" or "wipe" or "Sanity Erase" utilities which can restore the SSD back to peak performance by erasing all data blocks on the SSD. Wiping degraded SSD's is great if your SSD contains data that can be easily backed up first then later restored, but not so easy when your SSD contains your operating system. |
| (slight advantage) Partition and use the entire drive if you want, but keeping hard drives from exceeding 85% capacity will help keep the performance optimal. Drives on Windows can be defragmented to help keep the performance optimal as the drive fills up. If your drive reaches capacity, just delete some data, defragment, and the drive should perform at or near peak performance. | Leaving 10% to 20% free at all times should help reduce the rate of performance degradation. Some people even recommend leaving 10% to 20% unpartitioned, so the SSD will internally use the unallocated space as extra free blocks useful when the drive writes and deletes a lot of data. Check the SSD's specs for its true memory size, as some SSD's have already factored in an automatic 10% to 20% of space which cannot be partitioned. Intel's have about 5% reserved, while Vertex 2's already have about 20% of space reserved. So if you buy an Intel X25-M 80GB to hold your operating system and all your programs, you might want to consider leaving 5GB to 15GB unallocated, unpartitioned, and therefore unusable by you. |
| Comparing the performance of different hard drives is relatively simple. They spin at either around 5400rpm, 7200rpm, 10,000rpm, or 15,000rpm, where the faster spindle speeds mean faster access to your data. | Comparing SSD performance requires reading reviews and viewing benchmark comparisons. |
| Can be used safely with most operating systems, even older ones such as Windows XP | Best if used on a newer operating system with TRIM support, or a Mac |
| (advantage) Friendly to all RAID levels, those with redundancy (RAID 1), those with striping (RAID 0), and those with both (RAID 5,6,10). Double the performance of one disk by striping it across another disk of equal specs. | Most SSD's are not so RAID friendly in Windows yet. Intel came out with Windows 7 TRIM drivers for RAID, but it's new. Also putting SSD on a hardware RAID card with in a stripe set (RAID 0) configuration may not give much benefit unless the RAID card supports speeds faster than the SSDs can perform. |
| Looking to spend around $100 for the OS and some Programs | Intel X25-V 40GB SSD |
| Looking to spend around $125 for Apps & Games | Kingston SSDNow V-Series 64GB |
| Looking to spend around $150 for OS, Apps, Games | G.Skill Phoenix Pro Series 60GB SSD |
| Looking to spend around $200 for OS, Apps, Games | Intel X25-M G2 80GB SSD |
| Looking to spend around $250 for OS, Apps, Games | Crucial C300 128GB SSD |
| Looking to spend around $400 for OS, Apps, Games | Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD |
| Just looking for the fastest write speeds | OCZ Vertex 2 |
| If your motherboard supports SATA3 | any 2.5" Crucial C300 SSD |
| If your ultra-portable Laptop/Netbook needs a Micro-SATA 1.8" drive | Crucial C300 1.8" or a Intel X18-M |
| Use on a non-TRIM supported OS, or in a multi-disk RAID | G.Skill Phoenix Pro or OCZ Vertex 2 |
| Intel X25-M 160GB SSD | Corsair 128GB Performance SSD |
| 2.5" laptop form factor, includes 2.5" to 3.5" bay adapter for desktop computers | 2.5" laptop form factor, but desktop users will need to buy an adapter separately |
| Reads at around 175 MBytes/sec Writes at around 100 MBytes/sec |
Reads at around 175 MBytes/sec Writes at around 175 MBytes/sec |
| 3 year warranty | 2 year warranty |
| Comes with latest firmware supporting TRIM, and easy to burn & install future firmware updates | Comes with latest firmware supporting TRIM, but looking at past firmware update, it could be more difficult to install future updates |
| $400 ($2.5/GB), reviews | $319 ($2.49/GB), reviews |