Solid State Drive for Windows Partition

[501 0]

I have been looking and 8GB Solid State drive are now down to about $250 or so. Wouldn't it be a good idea to load windows on this drive, and then use regular sata for storage. I would think this would make for a more reliable and stable machine if the drives prove to be as good and they appear. Thoughts?

[rory 0]

They are actually slower, unless you buy the $2000 ones.

Average Read/Writes are 24mbs and with a 7200rpm it can be 54mbs or more.

 

Also there will be alot of writing to that with geo and its logs/database, and they have a limited lifespan.

[ezCCTV 0]

The better SSDs don't suffer from the limited writes.

 

We have an Mtron 16GB SSD with Windows installed. Page file and all logs written to partition on HDD. Speed looks good.

 

We are just investigating the benefits of SSD drives at the moment. As I find things out I'll be sure to let you know.

[501 0]

To me, no moving parts would be a great benefit for stability. Please keep us updated as to what you find with more testing.

[Javik 0]

Make sure this is actually rated as a solid state drive, and is not merely a USB memory key. Heck, I bought an 8 gig SD memory card nearly a year ago that could easily hold Windows, but it's not safe to do that.

 

The problem with Windows on flash is the page file, and the registry. Flash memory can only support a limited number of writes before the memory cells wear out and a "bad sector" appears. Parts of the registry and the pagefile get hit heavily with writes every time Windows boots.

 

True SSD's use write-balancing techniques to spread out the writes over many cells rarther than pounding a select few. They also do sector sparing and mark failing sectors bad to work around the failing cells.

 

-Dale

[rory 0]

Experiencing all this fun on the Eee PC 2 and 4Gs right now .. we just disable the Page file though, but for Geo .. not too sure about that