Solid state hard drives

Thinking of build a small media computer and using a small 30gig solid state drive as my boot device and all my music and films will be streamed off a sata drive or a network. Know solid states works in laptops so should work in a desktop computer with sata? Will windows load up virtual instantly? Coz thats wat I'm after.

 

It will load Windows into RAM almost instantly, but any processing that it has to do might delay. SSD's are fast, SSD's in RAID1 are even faster.

The biggest advantages of SSD's is power consumption and shock resistant.

 

So it would work and be faster then a normal drive? Whats the deal with the defragging your not ment to defrag coz it shorten there life spam so does the drive short it out automaticly or does the data still get fragment and slow the drive down?

 

SSD only has a finite number of writes to each bit. Sure, the number's big, but finite. Defragging involves a lot of writes and rearranging data, so if you did it often enough it might shorten the lifespan of your drive.

And the drive won't necessarily sort it out for you - it's to do with the filesystem (in this case NTFS).

 

Think its a case of set it up install everything you need defrag it once and leave it. Anyway thanks alot most helpful.

 

Defrag is (for the most part) unnecessary when using a SSD. The reason is because SSD's have extremely low latency. If a file is fragmented all over a drive, there is almost no seek time to read that whole file. Depending on the design, some SSD's can access several parts of there storage at once. This improves bandwidth too.

Mechanical HDD's have a spinning platter and a head/arm that moves across the platter. The action of moving the head is one factor that creates latency. Also, the head must wait until the platter spins around again to read, creating another factor in latency. So if a file is fragmented across 8 sectors on the platter, the head/arm must move 8 times. And it can only read one instance at a time.

 

I would strongly agree with "Adderall Assasin" on this one since he knows what he is talking about on this subject and giving you very good advice as a result.

 

I've been looking at the ocz ssd, i like ocz they make blinding pc memory. the seek times are something like .4 so yeah can see the point that due to sheer speed defragging is pointless.

Small loss but I'd move the recyce bin and temp files etc.. to another drive just to be on the safe side.

 

whats a solid state hard drive? Is i basically a 30gig usb key or something
ya know ? same principle and all that?

 

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=4147



x

 

If those things ever flip out you will never recover the data. best make sure you back up once a day. I wouldnt trust it, certainly not where they are carrying business data
I think I will stay with magnetic drives for the next 10 years

 

there probabaly safer then a magnetic drive as it got less moving parts to go wrong namely no parts that move. I think once they can get the price down there probably the future of storage but yeah trust is earnt.

 

That's why you would use RAID. Any RAID level besides RAID0.

Basically, you have all your data backed-up over several drives. If or when a drive fails, SMART will report it to you. Then just replace the defective drive and all data from the drive will be copied automatically.

This is simply how RAID works. The data is backed-up via mirroring, or parity. When one drive is replaced, the data still remains on all or some of the old drives. RAID will copy that data to the new drive and things will go on like nothing happened.

 

Here's an article about SSD that I got today.

http://www.computerworld.com/action...wArticleBasic&articleId=9126238&source=NLT_AM

 

Thanks. Interesting to note that due to lack of lanes or data channels that sata will probably not be the interface of choice when ssd do hit the mainstream users market and its more likely to use pcie x4 and look more like a memory stick or card.