SSD prices are dropping - time for an upgrade?

[Dave2002]

Until recently the price of SSD memory was high compared with regular rotating drives - and indeed it still is.
However, the prices are dropping, and it's now feasible to replace moderate size hard drives quite cheaply - for example http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-inch...7S34FVKKZ03N29 - and there are others - some which may be cheaper.

Some older machines really don't have too much wrong with them, and if they are fairly recent and have USB 3 ports then an external "drive" unit with an SSD instead of a rotating disc might be a good upgrade. On the other hand, some older machines are limited by the external ports, so connecting a USB 3 drive is not going to give a large improvement because of the limitations of USB 2.

One option is to replace the drive inside the computer - though maybe this takes some courage.

See http://9to5mac.com/2015/02/13/how-to...drive-for-ssd/ for how to do that - though I'm still not sure that I'm brave enough to try that.

If anyone round here tries that it'd be good to know how things go. I wouldn't expect it to bring an older machine up to the specs of modern ones, but it might usefully give them a new lease of life, and many people might find that would be good enough. It would only be really high demand applications which would still be significantly limited, and maybe not so many people are doing those.

[Beef Oven!]

I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro from 500gb to 2TB. I was quoted between £500-700 for SSD. I went for a Samsung 5400 RPM 2TB drive at £93 including VAT.

I notice the Samsung SSD that you provide the link for is £500 for 2TB.

The prices will need to come down a helleva lot before I'm tempted.m

[Dave2002]

I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro from 500gb to 2TB. I was quoted between £500-700 for SSD. I went for a Samsung 5400 RPM 2TB drive at £93 including VAT.

I notice the Samsung SSD that you provide the link for is £500 for 2TB.

The prices will need to come down a helleva lot before I'm tempted.m

A lot depends what you want your machine for. Many people can work well with around 500 Gbytes. My MBP is (sadly) only 250 Gbytes, which is not enough for me. However, there is no way I'd go back to rotating drives if I didn't need to. With the SSD I can leave my MBP, and opening it up it - from sleep - takes virtually no time - 1 or 2 seconds. Even from a cold start it doesn't take long.

Some applications are much faster using SSD.

Reasons for keeping rotating drives:
Still cheaper for very large volumes of data - e.g 1 or more Gbytes.

Reasons for switching to SSD:
Much faster and some applications will definitely benefit.
Very low latency time - almost immediate start up.
Silent.

Fusion drives, or hybrid drives are one option for anyone who wants a balance between storage spage and speed, but who wants to keep costs down.

I would expect that following an exponential downward trend that a 1 Tbyte SSD drive would be around £100 in a year or two, which would benefit many people.

[Beef Oven!]

I use my machine to store and play music. Store my photos and undertake very minor tidying up of my images. Surfing the net, watching YouTube videos, paying my TV licence, car insurance etc.

For this type of use I'm ok with 5400 RPM. My machine is very fast anyway. If my usage changes, then it might be a different story.

Your prediction of a £100 1TB SSD drive by the end of the year is still 75% more than I'd be prepared to pay (I'm confused! Put it this way, I'd be happy to pay £125 for a 2TB SSD - do the math!)

[Anastasius]

For me, I see little benefit in SSD drives.

The odd times that I boot up is not exactly time-consuming.

My hard drive is virtually silent.

No apps that use would be benefit. The advantage of an SSD would surely be limited to those apps that do a lot of page swapping of data such as video editing and which I do none.

The potential risks in fitting it plus the time, effort and money just doesn't stack up for me.

They are a bit like superfast broadband speeds...this household is perfectly happy with our 6Mbps.

[Dave2002]

beefy and anastasius

I agree with you that for your needs, if you"re happy with rotating drives, there is relatively little benefit from changing to SSD and it would cost you.

One other factor is robustness - you should be able to drop an SSD without crashing it - though I'm not guaranteeing that SSDs won't fail in other ways.

However I think some types of application could get a big benefit. As you are not using those types of application you are right not to be concerned. Some people are doing things where they might notice a significant improvement.

I would upgrade to SSD if I could, but it might turn out to be simpler to use the current machines for other things (maybe even install Window 10!!!} and buy a new machine for the higher performance requirements. For a new machine I might be tempted by a hybrid drive for a desktop. For a laptop if I could afford a big enough one, I'd prefer to go with SSDs. Prices will almost certainly drop and I would expect 1 or 2 TByte machines to be affordable (not like houses!) in a couple of years.

Most technology of this type follows an exponential increase or decrease trend, with a typical "half life' of say 18 months - between 1 and 2 years. That is prices, will halve within the designated period, and performance and size attributes will double in the same period. This is analogous to Moore's so called "law" regarding the number of circuit elements on a chip.

[Pianoman]

I was so amazed at the improvement with my MBPro that I did the same SSD upgrade to an older Dell, and that machine has now also been given a new lease of life - faster, silent etc. I can't imagine going back to a standard drive (my wife's Lenovo sounds like a hairdryer going off...). Just followed the Youtube tutorials and everything went like a dream - and I'm not that 'techy'.