96GB SSD - €116

TJM wrote: »

Amazon are selling the Kingston SSD V+100 96GB SATA2 2.5inch bundle for £100.95 inc. free shipping, or approx. €116. Best value I've seen for this capacity of SSD, especially as it includes the mounting kit & cables.

Solid kit but I would want an SSD with more poke. Write is a little weak OCZ do a model Vertex 2 worth considering.

noelpat wrote: »

What's the advantages of an SSD?

Standard mechanical hard drives have to physically move an access arm and wait for the disk platters to rotate past the heads. This takes time - a lot of it in computer terms. It takes about a million times longer to access data on a hard drive than it does to retrieve it from RAM.

SSDs are entirely electronic. The system still has to go through more hoops to get at SSD data than RAM data, but all of the mechanical delay is eliminated - so SSDs can retrieve data much faster than a hard drive.

How much faster depends on how you want to measure it.

Latency - when you've asked for the data, how long do you have to wait before it starts coming back?

Transfer Rate - once you start getting the data, how much data per second can you get?

Think of latency like looking for a particular passage in a book. It depends on how many pages you have to flip though before you find what you're looking for.

Think of transfer rate like the number of words-per-minute that you can read. Once you've found the right page, how long does it take you to read it?

The latency of an hard drive (how long it takes to find something) is around 150 times longer than that of an SSD. The transfer rate of a hard drive (how fast it reads once it's found the file) is around 2 to 3 times slower than an SSD for reading, and (very roughly) similar to an SSD for writing.

So the exact performance improvement you're going to see depends a lot on how many individual things you have to look for and how big they are (the very much shorter latency of an SSD means it's a LOT faster to look for something, while it's somewhat faster transfer rate is less of an advantage the bigger the item you're reading).

Booting an OS and starting up application programs normally means reading lots and lots of small files from the system drive. This is where SSDs really shine - lots of file finding and relatively small file sizes play to it's big strength over hard drives - very small latencies.

For other uses, the drive will be faster but the difference may not be as dramatic, particularly if you're writing to the drive