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Are you using an SSD in your private computer? 

Are you using SSD in your private computer?
Yes, and it rocks 33%  33%  [ 9 ]
Yes, and it sucks 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
No, I don't need one / They are not good enough yet 11%  11%  [ 3 ]
No, I can't afford one / Can't justify the cost 56%  56%  [ 15 ]
What's SSD? 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Total votes : 27

Are you using an SSD in your private computer? 
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I haven't got one yet, I find them interesting, but I haven't had any real need for one yet. Capacity is more important than outright speed.

We've been building them into our terminals since the end of last year (Windows 7 on Atom and now Windows Embedded 7). We started off with Transcend drives, but we had a 100% failure rate. We switched to Intel and they seem to be more reliable. To be honest, I haven't seen any real speed improvement, but that is probably down to the Atom processors in the terminals.

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Mon Oct 10, 2011 4:00 am
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big_D wrote:
We started off with Transcend drives, but we had a 100% failure rate.


That's interesting. I have one of their SDHC cards, and I don't like using it. It's incredibly slow for it's alleged class, and I just feel it's going to break and take my photos with it.

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Mon Oct 10, 2011 6:44 am
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Don't especially need one, and the £:storage ratio isn't there for me yet ;)

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Tue Oct 11, 2011 9:51 pm
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I have one in the media center PC, used as the system drive. A few tweaks needed to reduce disk writes and its OK.

Doesn't rock the world, doesnt suck, so I didnt do the poll. It boots and responds quicker, noticably. Quieter, but not much, I designed with quietness in mind when I sourced the componants, before SSDs were about at reasnoable cost.

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Wed Oct 12, 2011 7:35 am
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I would like an SSD. At the time of purchasing a Mac it wasn't feasible though due to cost. In an ideal world I guess I'd have a 256GB SSD running the OS and apps, a 1TB internal HDD storing my photos, movies and documents and a 2TB external Firewire 800 drive backing it all up!

Anyone know if it's possible to fit an SSD in a 27" 2011 iMac alongside a 1TB HDD? I thinking a) Xmas and Bday come close together and b) I need to do a full reinstall of the OS anyway as it has been a POS since the upgrade to Lion.

Also....

I bought the App Store upgrade (no media). How would I even go about doing a reinstall?

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Wed Oct 12, 2011 10:15 am
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veato wrote:
Anyone know if it's possible to fit an SSD in a 27" 2011 iMac alongside a 1TB HDD? I thinking a) Xmas and Bday come close together and b) I need to do a full reinstall of the OS anyway as it has been a POS since the upgrade to Lion.

Also....

I bought the App Store upgrade (no media). How would I even go about doing a reinstall?


It's certainly possible although Apple have been playing silly buggers with the internal SATA connectors so installing non-Apple drives makes the system fans go nuts. I think OWC were offering a service to 'fix' the issue but I'm not sure if it's available in the UK. I'm sure and Apple store would be more than happy to gouge you for doing the upgrade, wheather you want to go down that route is up to you of course.

If you installed Lion it should have created a recovery partition when it installed from which you should be able to boot. Have a look on the Apple support pages for articles about reinstalling Lion and you should find some instructions. I have a sneaky suspicion that the Apple route will download the entire OS again from Apple.

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Wed Oct 12, 2011 1:34 pm
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davrosG5 wrote:
If you installed Lion it should have created a recovery partition when it installed from which you should be able to boot. Have a look on the Apple support pages for articles about reinstalling Lion and you should find some instructions. I have a sneaky suspicion that the Apple route will download the entire OS again from Apple.

if he's swapping the disk over it might not want to boot from the recovery partition. As far as I know you have two safe choices, both of which require you to at least have downloaded Lion from the App store already

1) Check if you've still got the Lion installer in your Applications folder. If you have, open the package and look for a .dmg file. You can burn that to a DVD and boot off that to reinstall Lion later.

2) Download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and use that to burn a DVD or make a USB boot stick (needs to be 4GB or better). That will then allow you to boot from it and install Lion again just as you would off the inbuilt recovery partition.

I have to say though, I've got a similar iMac than him and I couldn't get Lion to re-install on the internal drive no matter what I did. And you can't boot form an SL retail disk on an i7 iMac, it kernel panics because it doesn't understand i7 chips exist. In the end I booted off a backup I had and used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy that back into the internal HDD. Which isn't the same as a clean install, but at least it got it up and running.

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Wed Oct 12, 2011 1:59 pm
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I have 2, a Corsair SSD Force Series 3 120 GB thats has my OS and certain programs on and a OCZ Agility 2 40GB that I use for some games,boot time into windows is extremely fast as is everything else, have 8GB of ram so have reduced the page file to next to nothing and turned off sleep/hibernation as I never use it on my home PC so save a further 8 GB on the drive


Wed Oct 12, 2011 8:10 pm
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I "upgraded" my netbook from a 120GB HDD to a 60GB SSD. Application load times are vastly reduced, which is the main reason for doing it. I use the netbook on the go, and I want to be able to turn it on, do my thing and then get out of there. It's now about 10x faster than my supposedly more powerful laptop. I don't need any more space on it because it's not where I store my media.

I was disappointed by the reduction in battery life though. The HDD had a much lower standby current, so it now goes flat about 20% faster when there's no disk access. This may be less of an issue with more modern drives, but you'd need to check. Essentially, a hard disk has very little silicon on it so when the motor stops turning the current goes to almost nothing.

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Wed Oct 12, 2011 9:34 pm
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surprised at that as the screen is supposed to be the most power-hungry followed by the HDD. Just assumed that because SSD had no moving parts, it'd consume less power.

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Wed Oct 12, 2011 9:37 pm
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Depends very much what you're doing. Like I said, it only draws more current in standby. If you thrash your disk constantly, then an SSD would win by miles. I don't though - generally very little disk access once I'm set up and working.

Also, things are more exaggerated in a netbook with a small screen, low power processor and a small battery.

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Wed Oct 12, 2011 9:40 pm
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JJW009 wrote:
I "upgraded" my netbook from a 120GB HDD to a 60GB SSD.

Just to dig this up again, I've ordered a 128Gb for my main PC and so I popped the 64Gb in my netbook today.

Just to reiterate the above, it's made a drastic improvement, not only in boot times but to its general speed in use, particularly on the internet.

Wish I'd done that sooner, the netbook was starting to feeling like I was using a 5 year old computer on dial up.

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Wed Oct 26, 2011 7:05 pm
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Had one in my PC since about last Christmas when I rebuilt it (again!).

64Gb Crucial C300 - boot times still good at around 25sec from cold - keep all my music, films etc on conventional drives.

Virtually every PC at work now has an SSD as their only drive - rolling them out on laptops too.

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Thu Oct 27, 2011 7:33 pm
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Best SSDs For The Money: October 2011

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Mon Oct 31, 2011 9:30 pm
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Handy little thing there.

TBH the sweet spot is at the moment money/performance wise is the 128Gb Crucial M4. Since they've updated to 009 firmware it's keeping up with the OCZ Vertex 3 which costs much more. The 128Gb performs better than both the 64Gb and 256Gb M4 as well.

Well, that's why I picked one up the other day when they had 10% off and I had a further 5% code. Can't complain at almost £1/Gb especially when you look at current HDD prices. :D

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Mon Oct 31, 2011 11:13 pm
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