Solid State HDs
 

Does anyone have any experience with these? I'm looking to build a system in a few weeks and I'm considering buying one of them. This is the one I'm looking at, it would be my boot drive.

As for the rest of my planned system:

CPU: Intel Core i7 920
MB: ASUS P6T Deluxe LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX
RAM: G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit
GPU: EVGA 896-P3-1257-A1 GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition 896MB
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB
PSU: Antec NeoPower 650 Blue 650W
Optical1: LITE-ON Black 4X Blu-ray DVD-ROM 12X
Optical2: Any DVD +/- DL drive
Vista Home Premium 64-bit

I know there is some overkill here, but I'm fine with it. The cost is about $1500 right now. The extra $130 for the SSD HD won't kill me but I don't want to be completely wasteful. Alternatively, I could get a 74 GB WD 10k raptor for a boot drive. The difference is about $30 but really at this point, I'm not going to stress about $30.

I know I can save a lot and not lose much performance stepping down from the i7 to the Intel quad core. The downside to the quad core is that that socket is pretty much done. The 32nm processors will use the same socket as the i7's so this gives some long term upgradability. I also plan on doing plenty of encoding HD movies so the extra processing power will help.

If anyone has any experience with the SSD's feedback would be appreciated. Any other comments/suggestions are welcomed as well.

One thing that I've heard about SSD drives is that they may have a limited life span in that they are only meant to be read from/written to a few thousand times. Now as a secondary drive, or external storage drive, this amounts to a reasonable life span for the drive. But as the base drive for an OS, particularly Windows, the life is considerably shortened. Windows reads and writes pretty much all of the damn time, so thousands of read/write cycles could be used up in a matter of months instead of years. Maybe someone with more technical knowledge than me could chime in as well.

I recall someone blogging about their build of a near silent PC to act as a media server. They were using a SSD drive and running Linux to prevent the windows read/write issues.

Good luck and post how it turns out either way.

First thing SSD are slow compared to standard HD. The speed of that SSD is "Sequential Access - Read 155MB/sec Sequential Access - Write 90MB/sec" Where as the 10K drives usually have SATA 3.0Gb/s for a reason. There will no performance gain from having SSD as a boot drive.

Yours
Zweiblumen

If you are looking for performance, which judging by your potential setup it looks like you are, you need to go with a WD VelociRaptor instead of an SSD.

Also, you may be aware of this, but you can get 90% of that much power for like $700 instead of $1500. The last 10% of power always costs an absurd amount!

SSDs are nice for noise reduction and power savings.

This read/write issue with SSDs is the first I've heard about it... Does that mean that all those MacBook Airs will be paperweights in a couple months?
I always thought that the move toward solid state was the ultimate goal. That it would almost be like having your whole OS in RAM, or a hardware based OS or something for instant, unfaltering access.
I don't know much about computers...

However, I did build a computer from scartch for less than $700 that I have yet to ever max out. I do audio production so I tax the hell out of the machine... honestly, processing power is not the bottleneck anymore. harddrive speed, bus speed, ram speed are what's holding me back.

braisler: The read/write thing is true but IMO, overemphasized. If you take an 80GB MCL SSDHD it can last for about 10,000 write cycles. This is for each part of the drive. From what I understand, your capacity would decrease over time as parts of the drive die. However, it would take a long time to go through 10,000 write cycles. If you wrote/erased 20GB/day that would take 40,000 days (109 years) to use up the capacity.

From the benchmark tests I've seen, the SSD's are faster but there are some issues with teh SATA controllers on the cheaper MLC SSDs. The more expensive Intel ones are great, but they cost like $500. I think I might end up going with either a VelociRaptor as a boot disk or just getting two WD 640GB Black Editions in Raid.

I got my tax return today so I purchased all my components from Newegg:

ASUS P6T LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
EVGA 896-P3-1255-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail
Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80601920 - Retail
Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail
OCZ 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model OCZ3X1333LV6GK - Retail
VANTEC UGT-CR905 58-in-1 USB 2.0 Card Reader/Writer for 3.5” or 5.25” Drive Bay with Built-In USB Port - Retail
2 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
LITE-ON Black 6X Blu-Ray DVD ROM & 16X DVD±R DVD Burner SATA ModeliHES106-29 - OEM
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit for System Builders - OEM

I decided to go ahead and do the solid state drive, selecting the Intel X25-M. It was expensive but it has received amazing reviews since it came out. Boot and load times are supposed to be outrageous. I bought an Antex 650W PSU and a cheap Antec case a couple of weeks ago when there was a nice combo deal.