Solid State Hard Drive

[Tyler]

Last week I checked my briefcase with the hotel bellman while at a networking event and had a surprise waiting for me when I booted up my laptop the next morning...the hard drive was clicking and something about hard drive failure on the screen.   

What bummed me out is this is on my favorite computer - the HP Pavilion DM 1.  The reason that I love this computer is that it's small, lightweight, has HDMI, BeatsAudio, and an HD screen.  It also has 4GB of RAM which powers everything I need it to do.  And better yet, I purchased it for less than $500!

So, not the hard drive is out and I have a decision to make.  Go with a standard hard drive for around $60  or upgrade to a solid state drive for around $200.  Given that I'm always on the go with my computer and I can't afford the time it takes to restore hard drives, I decided to pony up the money for the Intel 520 Series Solid State Drive with 180 GB.  This caused me to lose 140 GB to my old hard drive, but I use Bitcasa, which gives me infinite storage in the cloud anyways. 

So far I love it!  It's absolutely silent and I can tell it's much faster than my old drive.  While I had to re-install windows, it did allow me to remove all the bloatware that HP puts on it as I used a download directly from Microsoft.  This could be another reason that my computer seems faster as well.

Anyone else using a solid state hard drive?  I know some of you Mac guys already have them.

[benlen]

Tyler, are solid state drives the flash drive now powering many laptops, including Macs?

I know my new Macbook Pro Retina has a flash drive, and damn it is nice! Someday I'll have to upgrade my iPod to a flash drive model, because it's ancient and you can feel/hear the parts moving when I make it do a few too many tasks at once.

[Tyler]

I'm pretty sure it's the same thing that you're referring to as a flash drive.  Basically it has no moving parts, so it has a lot less failure rate.

[smixey]

Does this forum get mad if you bump an old thread?  I used to frequent another forum where they rag on you if you did, but I never understood why. 

Anyway, I'm thinking of getting an SSD also, but still waiting for price to come down.  I've read many places that they are still prone to failure, but will last longer and much faster than the traditional HDD.  http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/294754-32-long-ssds-last

[-Doug-]

I can't speak to your SSD questions, but if the question/thread is relevant, I don't see any issues with bumping it.