[closed] Are SSDs Worth It?

If you're the kind of person who doesn't want to lose their data, enjoys a fast bootup time, handles your laptop in very shaky situations, prefers a cooler lap temperature, gets angry when transferring data too slowly and has fat stack of cash then, yes, an SSD is most definitely worth it.

A word of warning however: you will probably only be able to store half of that gigantic library of torrents unless you have a slave drive.

How many questions have we seen regarding SSDs? Have you considered reading those? I'm not sure how many times I've answered the same question. Here it is again: SSDs are very suitable for notebooks, but not so much for desktops. You can get the same speed and even better reliability, with 20x the capacity for the same price by spending the same amount of money on a RAID5 of 1TB HDDs instead. Do that if you're using a desktop. Don't bother with SSDs.

The same speed: Possibly higher. 1TB hard drives are typically 100MB/sec on the first 20% of the drive. Buy 4 cheap hard drives. RAID5 them. Partition the first 20% of the RAID off, and you get 300MB/sec. You've spent less than $300.

Even better reliability: What happens if your SSD does fail, due to mechanical issue? You lose all the data. Not just that, but you've lost all the mechanics of it until you get your RMA replacement (assuming it's under warranty). What happens if one of your HDDs in the RAID5 dies? Well, due to the distributed parity bit features of RAID5, you haven't lost any data. Just whack in a new drive and let it rebuild.

20x the capacity: When buying a 128GB SSD, you're looking at $400 for an expensive one. You could spend $200 on a cheap one, but check this out: 4x 1TB HDDs = 4TB. Minus the parity bit = 3TB. You've spent less than $300.

Some may argue there's a 0ms seek in SSDs. However, this isn't absolute 0ms (eg. 0 nanoseconds). Don't try to play it off as though they have infinitely faster seek rates. Hard drives are getting fairly quick seek times, too. They may not be as fast at SSDs as random reads/writes, but SSDs aren't as fast as RAM at random reads/writes either. In conclusion, if you have a desktop that has enough space and SATA interfaces (most mainboards these days have 4-6 SATA interfaces), spend your money on a RAID of hard drives and some extra RAM where you manage to save money. If you have a notebook, by all means: Go for an SSD! Just don't ask this same question again in 2 weeks time!