If SSD drives wears out from writing to it many times, then it isn't worth getting them. HDD are fast enough to read information. Sure SSD drives read data faster than a HDD, but is a few milliseconds slower going to kill you. a good 10,000 RPM hard drive is good enough and can tolerate many reads and writes.

This is the typical response you get from somebody who has only used HDDs on how they justify not using an SSD. That is until they use an SSD.

The write limit is ridiculously high, completely outside the range of possibility for 99.99% of use-cases. For those infinitesimally rare cases in which the user could theoretically hit the write limit before the rest of the machine dies, there is always SLC. SSD write limits have been completely blown out of proportion, usually by people who have never even used one before...

A few milliseconds per read adds up VERY fast when you have to do over a thousand random reads in order to launch an application. A quarter of a second quickly turns into 10-20 seconds, 30 seconds to boot the machine (completely, so it's actually usable) turns into 5 minutes. 20 seconds of OS updates turns into 10 minutes. The list goes on and on.

My time is worth too much to me to sit around for hours waiting on an HDD to figure itself out and do what needs doing. There's absolutely no sense running a machine newer than 2006 if you're going to stick the OS on an HDD (at least for daily tasks, raw number-crunching is an exception). The processor and RAM are going to spend 95% of their time just waiting on the HDD, it might as well be running a Pentium 4.

Luckily every machine I use on a daily basis is running an SSD, but every so often I'm forced to use a machine with an HDD. I can tell, without exception, that it's running an HDD within about 5 seconds of sitting down. It is always unbearably slow, regardless of how powerful the rest of the hardware in the machine might be.

Even so, my hard drive is pretty fast at opening files and applications. My hard drive is a SATA III on a 6gb data channel. SSD drives are not bad of course, it just a matter of preference and each have their pros and cons.

If you've never tried the alternative, then you have nothing to compare against. I guarantee you that the vast majority of the times that you think you're waiting on your processor, you're really waiting on your HDD.

It has a SATA-III controller, but it's not moving anywhere near SATA-III speeds. The seek times are still absurdly slow and the sequential transfer rate is still the same as you'd get on a SATA-II interface, hell you'd probably even get the same speeds on SATA-I. Hard drives have never come close to saturating SATA-II (they're lucky to hit 1/2 of SATA-II speeds, 1/3 or slower is typical), sticking a SATA-III interface on them is just a marketing ploy. However, modern SSDs can easily saturate SATA-II, and they're even getting close to saturating SATA-III now...in another year or two we're going to need a SATA-IV to keep up. Meanwhile HDDs are still going to be putting around at SATA-I speeds, like they have been for the last decade.

Maybe you're right, I shouldn't compare SSD and HDD drives until I experience SSD in action and maybe one day I might buy one. For now, my HDD is working fast at least in my situation.

You people are killing me Using a 40gig 5400 rpm PATA HDD here.

I so want a SSD

PATA to CF card converter

No such thing as an absolute. There are some occasions such as machines designed to be small and light that won't fit two drives and an SSD large enough to hold all the data costs more than the whole machine.

I have a few systems like that, they run SSDs.

Thats why I specified the price. Are you going to spend $500 on a 500G SSD for a $300 laptop, is the performance really worth it?

Even if so I mentioned before (and derailed the thread majorly) that having multiple backups is a priority over speed for me. Rather than spend the $ on one SSD to make my system fast I'll buy three more drives and let it run backups overnight or sync to my server, etc.

Thats why I say you can't say that there is absolutely no reason to not buy an SSD, and I'm simply saying there is.

I already have, many times, and yes. Most of the systems I was referring to in my post cost $200, they're all running SSDs costing between $3-600. They are unique systems though, small, low power, high speed data acquisition, and installed in very unique environments (high altitude balloon, research aircraft, etc. where HDDs would simply fail due to the vibration or temperature extremes).

Not all of them fit that bill though, I have an old ASUS EEEPC 1000 that's running two SSDs that cost more than the machine itself. I'd rather use that ~5 year old single core 1.6 GHz Atom machine with its SSDs than any modern $700 laptop with an HDD for daily use (ignoring screen size).

I don't consider it "buying a $300 drive for a $300 laptop", I consider it "buying a $600 laptop", it's just part of the cost, and I can pretty much guarantee you it'll blow away any $600 HDD-based laptop.

That's not what I said. What I said was that there's no sense running a machine newer than 2006 if you're going to be sticking the OS on an HDD. The advancements that have been made in processing power, memory bandwidth, etc. are all going to be for not if you have an HDD bottlenecking the entire system.

Thats ok you missed my point too

Lets say you have a given budget of $300 for storage and have 500G of data.
A real quick search gives me http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820168067 (I'm sure there are cheaper/better deals but I just grabbed the first quick one for an example).

So you spent your budget on one drive, what about backups?

I choose rather to buy three $100 512G hdd's so I can have two backups. I'm not doing anything that would require SSD's and I can't increase the budget, wife doesn't like me spending the $300 already And I'm not willing to forgo backups no matter what technology I use as I have data that is mine and can't be replaced (family photos, etc).

Mid 2000's is when the standard switched from PATA to SATA, thats one of the reasons I replaced my C400 with the ASUS a couple years ago when PATA drives started getting more $ than SATA. Sure the newer ASUS doesn't perform any better than the C400 but I had to keep with the current technology standard. If I could have found a tiny PATA to SATA convertor maybe that would have been an option.

Now note that I'm simplifying my example, two hdd's are not my only backup method, I have other methods. My point is that none of us have unlimited budgets and the cost per G for the amount of space I require * multiple drives for backups prevents me from purchasing SSD's currently. If/when the size/cost gets closer then I'm sure I'll switch but until then there are valid reasons to stay with HDD's.

Sorry, but that indicates that you already have a working backup solution, so this should be irrelevant when deciding to buy a new disk for one of your machines.

All of my devices automatically back themselves up to a central server (which then backs itself up to its own external drive) - laptops, phones, tablets, etc. Buying two external backup drives per device is an incredibly inefficient and cumbersome (not to mention expensive) way of doing things.

Invest a little bit of time and money in your infrastructure and this backup problem you keep bringing up will cease to be an issue.