Solid state drive

Yes,  but of limited life even with the standard built-in wear-levelling technology.

Might there be value in putting your OS and applications, which don't change much, on the SSD, and your data on a standard drive?

Fraser

Do a google search and it seems these things won't last more than a year - they do seem a bit of a gamble. But then again there are reports that the Hitachi's that Apple commonly uses in its notebooks start to play up after 18 months. Intel's 5 year guarantee should see me through the short to mid term.

EJ

I put my OS and Apps on the SSD all data and windows page and temp file on a raid 10 array, very fast for a PC.

EJ,

How Big is Big?

600GB. I'm sure in a few years we'll laugh about it. Coming from an IBM 8086 with 20Mb hard disk, I remember putting a 320MB drive in my first custom built, 486/66. That was big! Some time later, I built a Pentium 90MHz with Voodoo2 and WD's first commercial 1 GB drive. That was BIG. Running Windows 3.1, the drive had to be partitioned in order to be recognized. Since Win95 and digital multimedia, relative size has not increased that much. 

EJ

Wow that takes me back to twin floppy drives, 256Kb RAM and no performance at all, but I still loved designing on the IBM XT with AutoCAD 2.17 especially when it was upgraded to 20Mb hard drive, 640Kb RAM, Hercules graphics and a 12" x 12" digitiser tablet.

Jono

I put an OWC SSD into my Mac Pro as a System and application drive. All user data is spread over two additional conventional drives.

OWC give me a good long warranty and they claim that the SSD will outlive a conventional drive and that the design of their SSD includes wear levellling etc so does not need to use TRIM

It is nice to get a 14 second boot time - compare that to the 5 minute or more boot time I had on my 1984 IBM PC with a 10MB and a 20MB hard drive in the extension unite.

I'm glad I made the purchase - Aperture with medium-sized library of 12k pictures, half of them in raw, is running like the whole thing is cached, all functions including start-up and imports are near-instantaneous. I'm also aware that this is not the wisest investment at this time. Besides the advantages, the two disadvantages of SSD are cost (approx 10x hdd cost per GB) and seeming endurance. All published statistics point to good longevity and better endurance than traditional spinners, but of course the publishers have a vested interest. The big difference is that with modern HDDs, failure is based on chance / bad luck more than usage, whereas with SDDs, lifetime is counting down and the counter is there for everyone to see (at least, for Windows users).

I'm not about to babysit the drive in the hopes of maximising its lifetime - other than maxing out the RAM in the laptop to avoid excessive paging where possible.

EJ

My 08 model Mini was painfully slow booting up and loading even the few apps I use, iTunes, Pure Music, Chrome & Mail.

Installed a small (40GB) Mushkin SSD & took the opportunity while the lid was off to double the RAM to 4GB, mostly for the benefit of Pure Music. It's a little rocket ship now, goes like the wind, total cost around $200.

Also bought a firewire-capable fanless hard drive enclosure, to which I fitted a 1TB Seagate drive with  three partitions, a large one for music duties and two smaller ones to hold bootable clones of the Mini's and my wife's iMac hard drives (using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner). It all works brilliantly.

I've had a similar arrangement in my main machine, a PC, with an OCZ SSD for quite a while, again absolutely brilliant speed and no problems at all so far.