Replace iPC HDD with SSD?

Solid state drives have been discussed multiple times on this forum, both from a performance and reliability standpoint. Your search engine of choice should bring up plenty of results that address the questions you are asking.

Hey Smokey,

Hope you are well!

Yes an SSD will probably give you faster seek + retreive times as well as make your desk lighter, and more "rugged" as far as shocks go.

The downside is that you may see an SSD fail much sooner than a traditional HDD since the H3 system reads and writes so many files constantly to the system, and SSDs don't hold up to that very well. This has gotten better the last year or two, but only with the more expensive SSDs.

Given the huge gap in price between a replacement HDD of the same type and a good SSD, I'm not sure it is worth the cost/risk in the end just yet, but that is ultimately up to you.

Who knows where SSDs are going to be in a few years, but right now you would probably be best served with the same type of HDD.

Hope this helps. :)

Small files aren't so much the issue with an SSD, as the windows file system that doesn't handle it that well. I replaced the drive in my H3 with a SSD several months back, and it does marginally increase performance. Loading shows, merging files, backup were faster, other than that, most other activities were the same.

However, I also tried that same drive in our older iPC and saw a signifiant improvement in boot time and general response.... not speaking for anyone else's views, but especially in the older console, it was def snappier.

Thanks for the input guys. I've decided to stick with a 7200rpm HDD. It doesn't really make sense for me to spend 3 or 4 times the $$$ on something that might marginally improve performance that I don't have issue with already but might have a shorter life.

Here's a copy of something I initially posted on LN ( lightnetwork.com//?msg=32799.26 )

I'm a big proponent of solid state drives, but reliability is not among their strong points. It seems at first they'd be more reliable ("No moving parts...") but anecdotal experience and some moderately sized studies have not shown they are much more reliable than rotating media when you control for age.

Further, nearly every SSD manufacturer has struggled with firmware bugs of the "you just lost all of your data" variety. SandForce has been the worst of late, but even Intel has had a few doozies. Even worse, when an SSD forgets all your data, you're often out of luck. With a hard drive, you can sometimes recover at least some of your data.

Buy SSDs for performance, not reliability.