Solid state drive

[wtb32141]

Is a solid state drive worth the extra money?

[wizard10000]

I think so.

I've got a couple of them and these days all my machines boot off SSD; I use external mechanical drives for big storage.

[MoonRise]

+1 to what Wiz states.

[GreyGeek]

I don't own any SSD's and have considered buying one, BUT, the most common complaint I hear is that when they die they do so without warning, completely and unrecoverable. On the other hand, my backup 500GB Passport USB 5000 rpm HD just died the same way.

[acheron]

Depends on your usage. Very much worth it for me. Speeds up I/O intensive stuff when I am unable to completely do that in RAM itself.

[oshunluvr]

SSD for speed and reliablity. HDD for storage space. That pretty much sums it up.

A top quality 250GB SSD costs about as much as an average quality 6TB HDD.

If bucks are tight, look for a reliable but not-the-fastest SSD. I love my Samsung 850 PRO drives (250GB @$140) but you can get an 850 EVO for less money and almost as fast (250GB @99).

[NoWorries]

I have 3 computers and all have SSDs (eg Two with 256GB and now one with 512GB). They certainly make all computers work faster. I think that one of my SSDs has failed and I have replaced it with a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD. The reason why I "think" it failed was because it was giving serious package update errors. I plan to get an adaptor to connect this suspect SSD to my Laptop USB 3.0 port to see how I go formatting it.

At least I do not believe that the failure of a SSD is catastrophic like a HDD. I tend to look on an SSD failure like RAM which can develop faulty memory cells.

[whatthefunk]

I think they are worth the money. My main box has a small 50GB SSD that root and home are mounted on. Everything else is on one of my massive HDDs. Noticed pretty big speed improvements when I first installed it. My boot time is about 15 seconds, which is quite good I think.

[dibl]

It's true that it's ugly when you lose one, which I have. On the other hand, I've never had a hdd die gracefully either. Like oshunluvr, I rely on a multi-drive BTRFS filesystem for data security, plus the occasional full data backup. The root filesystem is fast on a SSD, and if it dies (which it did a couple years back), hey you just grab another SSD and install an OS and link in the data directories.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, if there's one thing better about the platters drives it's that you usually get a warning before it dies for good. Not usually so for an SSD.