[Bob Dillon]

I have to buy a new hard drive soon. My 40 gig just hit 37K and it's time to upgrade.

According to the ads of a local discounter, I can buy either a 90 gig digital drive or a 1 TB old style one for about $100.

Which one do I want, and why? Pentium 4 @ 3.2, with lots of memory, 30 gig cable internet.

Help me out here.

[wytnyt]

honestly its time to chuck the dino and get a new computer
yours may not even support a 1tb drive
also for the hd price you can add another buck fifty and get another cpu

[vidguy]

We use SSD drives in a few PC's here that we use for video encoding. We also use them in our Digital Video Recorders (Ki-Pros)

We have no trouble with them in either case. Fast as heck.
More costly, but the floods in Thailand bumped the cost of disc drives now. So..
Agreed, P4?? Come on, new motherboard or system anyhow for a little more then the cost of a drive.

Most people I talk to build systems with smaller SSD's for boot and apps and standard disc drives for data.

[Tom McQueen]

We made custom hand held devices for the military. These units were used in both theatres. The early ones had a platter drive. The moment we could buy SSD's (Solid State Drives) we made the switch. These units lived very hard lives, and to my knowledge, there has yet to be an SSD failure.
Bootup times were reduced by ~60%. When you read and write to the SSD, its in the neighborhood of 40X faster. The SSD's are faster, quieter, cooler and consume less power.

The platter drive is on the cusp of becoming obsolete.

[critter]

Stuck a SSD in my Macbook Pro and this sucker is fast. Like Vidguy said, the floods have made it just about a wash. That's why I moved to it.

[KS circutguy]

SSD the way to go, windows 7, I have a old Pen 4 computer I use for web surfing and netflix.
Bob, really get a new computer!
If not, SSD will work nice but are you running Windows 7?

[wytnyt]

Originally Posted by Tom McQueen

The platter drive is on the cusp of becoming obsolete.

yes but thats 20 years down the line,we havent saturated the market with 2,3,4 ect Tb platter drives yet

[KS circutguy]

Amazing what $400.00 buys now!
Example;
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+E...&skuId=4602619

[wytnyt]

i bought 3 quad core slimlines for that price and like add ons
prices are phenomenon

[Old Man Taylor]

The only downside to the SSD drives is the cost. They are hands down better than traditional disk drives.

[critter]

Well, one other downside. They do lose performance over time due to multiple read/writes on the blocks. But the computer may die before it's bad enough to care.

[Tom McQueen]

Originally Posted by wytnyt

yes but thats 20 years down the line,we havent saturated the market with 2,3,4 ect Tb platter drives yet

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, not 20 years. More like 5. But the technology and demand for platter drives has peaked, and were on the downhill side. They have already pushed platter speeds to the max. Im not familiar with any platter drive that doesnt require a power plug with both +12 and +5 volts on it.

Higher current requirements mean higher temperatures produced and reduced battery life. They have taken IC chips from 15, 12 and 5 volts to 1.8, 1.2, 1.0 and even .85 volts. Less power consumed = 2 good things. Less heat and longer battery life. The platter disk is simply the next victim in this equation. It takes to much power, it produces to much heat and it does not do well in drop testing. And its slow and heavy. SSD's solve all these issues. And like anything else, they will get cheaper, and they will get bigger.

[lrosen]

Originally Posted by critter

Well, one other downside. They do lose performance over time due to multiple read/writes on the blocks. But the computer may die before it's bad enough to care.

No they don't really. They use wear leveling algorithms so all blocks get written to (as evenly as possible) the same number of times. They begin to wear bits out after a few million r/w cycles and performance may suffer some (and usually only in a busy enterprise server), but that would be years down the road. Even with the lost performance, modern SSD's will still run rings around a spinning disk.

As a single user system at home you will probably never notice any degradation.

[Bob Dillon]

Thanks, all. I'm running Windows XP professional, by the way. I'm not interested in upgrading my other hardware now as it meets my needs.

Thanks to all for the advice.

[cuz68]

Originally Posted by Bob Dillon

I have to buy a new hard drive soon. My 40 gig just hit 37K and it's time to upgrade.

According to the ads of a local discounter, I can buy either a 90 gig digital drive or a 1 TB old style one for about $100.

Which one do I want, and why? Pentium 4 @ 3.2, with lots of memory, 30 gig cable internet.

Help me out here.

BOB i am useing a old dell home pc, I got a new hp lap top for christmas and it is like night to day very fast, my brother loned me a 640 gig hard drive with music on it, I have not tryed it on my old dell, but it sure works great on the hp, He said they cost around $100 he has 8 of them i have used this one for 4 days, Good luck my friend.

[andyg]

You have made sure your drive is a SATA interface right? Not the old ribbon cable, that will limit your HD choices to platters if its not SATA. If you do have the SATA interface, run a solid state. I put one in my laptop and love it.

[KS circutguy]

But XP has no "Trim" support.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25...indows-windows

[KS circutguy]

http://ssd-life.com/
it's a free trial to test SSD's.
Ya get this after the quick test ends,only takes seconds.
According to this test my new SSD is good till 2020

[andyg]

KS, our drives have similar lives left lol. Mine has been in since early November.

[Cammer-6]

I just replaced my HD and MB.
Got a good deal on a black WD 1TB($130)warranty until 2017,which is probably when its outdated anyway.
Bob,like you I dont need the fastest system,reliability is more important.
But you should consider a switch to Windows 7 64 bit.
Its a world of difference.