SSD Drives

[Khalil]

I was told SSD hard drives are much faster than regular hard drives, I did some googling but all I found was mostly advertising for them.

I am building a workstation for a friend who owns a recording studio. He was using 10K raptors with his old machine yet they were not fast enough for certain software such as pro tools and such.
Would SSD be a better option? They are very expensive but the guy is willing to spend the money if it will improve write speeds.

[liambl]

As far as what I've heard they aren't any faster than normal drives, but offer lower latencies. I don't think it would be worth it.

[EzyStvy]

Aren't they like $500.00 for 36gigs?

[liambl]

On Newegg the sell between $400 and $700 for a 32GB drive. However these are the 2.5" drives, I couldn't find any 3.5" ones.

[Cricket]

However these are the 2.5" drives, I couldn't find any 3.5" ones.They don't make 3.5" SSDs yet, only 2.5" laptop SSDs.

They're a new technology that will improve over time. I would use one for performance reasons as they aren't much faster than regular HDDs now (I heard boot up time was shorter but during regular use they weren't much faster). But this time next year, who knows? They could be a lot faster than standard HDDs.

:) Cricket

[mikeL]

I see Lenovo and Apple offer them in certain laptops, why to pricey for myself though

[Khalil]

I made some phone calls today to a few system builders I know and the feedback I got was not very favorable. Supposedly, takes almost 5 hours to install windows XP on an SSD drive. The drive will boot XP once installed in less than 15 seconds however it seems that once xp is running everything else slows down to near a stop. Data transfer speeds and writing are horrid, slower than a 4200 rpm laptop drive. I may still buy an 8 GB unit just to try it for myself but I am not sure I want to waste my money.