The impending hard drive shortage and price hikes

[scott91575]

I would get the best 10K+ RPM hard drive you can pair with your SATA bus. The new WD Velociraptors on new 6Gb/s SATA rev. 3 machines are stupid fast. If your motherboard is too old to enjoy that luxury, pick up a SSD and at least make use of Windows 7's Readyboost feature (right click your SSD device and enable Readyboost with a click -- BOOM, big ass RAM disk). You can find 40 - 64 Gb SSD for under $100. For as much image processing as you do, it'll make a world of difference.

Isn't ready boost for a system that has windows installed on a mechanical hard drive and they want to use a thumb drive for caching (especially if they are low on RAM)? If you buy a 40 or 60 GB SSD, you will want to make that your OS disc drive and no need to use readyboost.

 

[scott91575]

I've installed ~20 OCZs over the last 12-18 months and already bricked two. Forget them. We're having better luck with the Crucial M4s.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148441

Only problem with these is that they don't include a 2.5"->3.5" converter tray, so you may have some trouble finding a place to mount it unless you buy an aftermarket carrier.

That was one of the selling point of the OCZs ... those have a 3.5" tray in the box.

In your shoes, I'd switch to the Velociraptor as my OS/boot drive, run the SSD as a RamDisk, and relegate the SpinPoint to file storage.

To my point above, that seems like an incredible waste of a SSD. Just make it your OS drive. A 64GB SSD will be able to handle everything operating system related. No need to bother with a velociraptor. Honestly, those things are going the way of, well, the dinosaurs. SSD's blow them away in random reads/writes (huge for a OS drive) and a regular 7200 RPM is good enough for the other applications and data storage.

In a year or two high speed mechanical drives will be pretty much gone for home machines. It will be SSD combined with low speed, high storage mechanical drives for data (this is pretty much what I already do). For servers and the like I could still see higher speed mechanical drives, but for home use they will slowly fade away.

BTW...to the topic at hand, yes, prices have spiked. I bought a 3TB drive not to long ago for $109. Now I can't find any for under $200.

 

[jwinslow]

Lightroom is absolutely flying on my new SSD. In a perfect world I'd have a velociraptor for scratch files, temporary storage (importing photos, edit them there, dump them to large storage when I go to bed), but this Crucial M4 is living up to the hype.

Better yet, I should be able to put off upgrading for a few years.

 

[Dryden]

Isn't ready boost for a system that has windows installed on a mechanical hard drive and they want to use a thumb drive for caching (especially if they are low on RAM)? If you buy a 40 or 60 GB SSD, you will want to make that your OS disc drive and no need to use readyboost.

Ready Boost caches all mechanical disk reads for SuperFetch. The only time Ready Boost would not be useful is if you already have the SSD as the boot drive, or have pre-caching utilities such as SuperFetch disabled.

Some motherboards and OSes do not support booting from SSD devices as well. The reliability of mechanical drives still exceeds that of solid state, so I wouldn't recommend using an SSD as the boot/OS device for anyone other than tinkerers/extreme power users.

 

[scott91575]

Ready Boost caches all mechanical disk reads for SuperFetch. The only time Ready Boost would not be useful is if you already have the SSD as the boot drive, or have pre-caching utilities such as SuperFetch disabled.

Some motherboards and OSes do not support booting from SSD devices as well. The reliability of mechanical drives still exceeds that of solid state, so I wouldn't recommend using an SSD as the boot/OS device for anyone other than tinkerers/extreme power users.

Yes, I am saying boot drive. Why would you not want it as a boot drive.

I completely disagree with the reliability angle, at least for home use. For servers, yeah, you need an enterprise drive and those are crazy expensive. Yet for home use SSD's are actually more reliable. They will die in about 10 years, but over that time they are more reliable. No moving parts, run cooler, and way less prone to initial failures. Intel SSD's failure rates are minuscule, and it puts regular hard drives to shame. Again, on the server angle, they will die quick unless you use an enterprise drive. Yet for home use, the normal user will not see the usage like a server. Even heavy usage will last 5+ years, and by that time most people are going to upgrade anyway (especially a heavy user).

For home use, there simply is no negative to using SSD's for a boot/OS drive. Therefore, no need for ready boost.

As far as some motherboards not working well with SSD's, it's a fairly small number and most of that is trouble with sleep mode and a few other things. For a motherboard made in the last 4 or 5 years they will work well.