I have for a long time been excited about getting one of those SSD drives to boost my laptop. Especially one of those SanDisk 40,000 RPM drop in replacement drives. Skimming around on YouTube there seem to be lots of videos showing how fast the new SSDs are at booting the operating system compared to HDDs.
BUT! These comments caught me attention:
chinesemilkman
"I've worked with those newfangled SSD Macs at my student computing support job and if memory serves, they run applications slower than your standard HDD Macs. I doubt any SDD storage product would run audio and visual as fast as a SATA II. Maybe one day they will optimize performance but in actuality, I have my doubts that any current SDD out performs top of the line HDDs in performance. AND COMPARING BOOTUP SPEED IS NOT A RELIABLE PERFORMANCE TEST! Lame marketing gimmick is what it is."
johnnyfast
"Interesting how NONE of the SSD tests show a real world multi-tasking environment.
I have an OCZ SSD 64 and it totally fails, as soon as my PC is doing 2 or more read/write multi tasks I get horrendous lock ups. It is going back to the shop as unfit for purpose.
SSD is a one trick (read speed) pony."
I mean, they "promise" speed, higher durability and lower power consumption. I was ready to almost accept the extreme prices and the disappointingly small sizes but if speed is only in boot up and single operations then I'd rather spend my money on RAM or CPU or something.
Comments
I've learned that this is not the complete story. Those tests show facts, but there are multiple ways of reading and writing data on the SSD, many of which probably aren't implemented in older OSes. Most OSes assume that there's a normal HDD and therefore are optimized for HDD's. As the SSD works entirely different, the optimisations for HDD only make SSD's go bad.
I do not know this for sure though...
But what operating systems are ready for SSD?