Recently? That news is about a year out of date. Indilinx, Sandforce, Marvel and Intel are the controllers to go for.

It was a Blog post on June 28th:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/06/28 ... -the-cash/

Like I say Dave, I really wouldn't rely on PCPro.

That blog may have been in June and states


It then links to a bit-tech article written in February in 2009. The SSD market has changed a hell of a lot since February last year.

Yeah, they should have linked to the LATEST ARTICLE

I had my first experience of SSDs yesterday, and I was thoroughly unimpressed.

On a brand new Dell notebook (E4200) I really can't see any difference what so ever compared with my HP desktop.

Either the SSDs Dell use are complete sh*te, or SSDs just aren't as fast as people are saying. Most people I know with one have said stuff like "it's incredible - it's the biggest jump in performance I've ever seen by upgrading a single component".

The performance gains are only in specific areas. The differences I noticed were extremely fast start-up times for software installed on the drive (and low boot time), and an absence of time spent waiting for a program to switch windows/close down whilst the hard drive light flashes randomly.

For much of the time during normal computer use, there is subjectively not a huge leap over a very fast hard drive, aside from there being no noise. You'd have to do a direct comparison in similar circumstances to notice the difference, except for boot times and program start-ups. However, going from a moderately old hard drive to SSD is night and day (as I experienced it).

From reviews I have read, some SSDs are slower than the best hard drives in terms of random writes (as the OS usually makes). If there is no TRIM support then the latency can become far worse than a bog standard HDD. I'd steer clear of SSDs installed in an assembled PC unless there are guarantees that the one you're getting isn't a cheap old one.

Is the SSD make and model identified? At least it will be more drop-proof than a HDD.

I think the speed difference is easier to see when you go from SSD back to normal hardrive on the same setup.

I remember when I went from 2gb ram to 4gb on Vista the difference in speed of the pc wasn't big. But then my 2gb set fail and I had to go from 4gb back to 2gb for couple of week. I was tearing my hairs out, that's how slow it felt. I even stopped using pc unless I really needed it for something important.

I don't think it was - I can't remember exactly.

Yeah, that's how I justified getting the SSD - but to be honest I just wanted to have a little play.

I'll have to spend a bit of time using it again tomorrow so maybe I'll see an improvement.