I'm about to upgrade my XP64 Desktop to Win10. I was hoping to upgrade the hardware at the same time. Any drawbacks to putting a SSD drive in a desktop? It currently has 3 6gb/s SATA drives but I love the way the SSD works on my new laptop.
It looks like SSD drives only come in 2.5 form factor is why I'm asking. It's like their not made for desktops???
SSDs certainly are intended for desktop use. The only real downside is the higher cost, particularly in the higher capacity drives. In conventional drives the larger 3.5 form factor has certain advantages, such as higher capacity. In SSDs there are no such advantages. It is simpler and cheaper for the manufacturers to make only the 2.5 form factor drives. If you make 2 sizes how many of each do you make? Whatever you choose it will likely be wrong. The 2.5 form factor can be used as is in laptops or with a cheap adapter in a desktop.
Edit: What many people do in a desktop is have 2 drives, an SSD for the OS and applications and a conventional drive for data storage. This gives you the performance of an SSD where it matters most at a significantly lower cost than using a large SSD for everything. If your data storage needs are small you may not even need the conventional drive.
Thanks all, I may consider your second option LMiller, just getting a small (256g) SSD drive for the OS and leaving the others as they are until they die. I do a lot of video editing, removing commercials etc... from my Tivo shows but I normally set them as a batch them let them run on their own so I think baby steps will work and be economical at the same time.
Thanks for the adapter Freebooter, I hope like Br0die I can snag one with the drive.
I was reading that SSD's don't last as long or doesn't have as many writes as a conventional drive which was my other reason for asking.
Installing a SSD will make a drastic speed improvement. The main benefit is achieved by installing your OS and program installations on the C: drive. Leaving your user files on a spinner will only occur a minor speed penalty. I installed a 120GB SSD for the C: drive 6 years ago and 60% is still free. All my large files (photos, videos etc) are on a separate HDD.
Just install the SSD in a conversion bracket available at Amazon and many other suppliers. SSDs have various interfaces. Choose the fastest one supported by your motherboard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-...Configurations
Wow, even the Wiki link you provided says this...
The Wiki also says this under reliability...Making a comparison between SSDs and ordinary (spinning) HDDs is difficult. Traditional HDD benchmarks tend to focus on the performance characteristics that are poor with HDDs, such as rotational latency and seek time. As SSDs do not need to spin or seek to locate data, they may prove vastly superior to HDDs in such tests. However, SSDs have challenges with mixed reads and writes, and their performance may degrade over time. SSD testing must start from the (in use) full drive, as the new and empty (fresh, out-of-the-box) drive may have much better write performance than it would show after only weeks of use.[106]
Each block of a flash-based SSD can only be erased (and therefore written) a limited number of times before it fails.
Both of those quotes are only partially right but......
It's true that SSD performance may drop a bit (not "much better write performance") when it's close to full but..... same goes for "spinners" HDDs. (maybe even worse) but still be much faster than any HDD.
"Each block of a flash-based SSD can only be erased (and therefore written) a limited number of times before it fails". also true but that number is very large. In fact so large that it's more likely to became too small or obsolete before it's reached, typically 10 or more years. HDDs also have a limited number of writes and may suffer from fatigue and loosing magnetic charge with time.
Some of those things may have been at the beginning but manufacturers have taken measures to alleviate them. Some use an empty partition and others set firmware to do "Wear leveling" so all memory cells are used equally and no cells have constant writes to them. "garbage collection" works mostly at quiet times. It works so when writing to disk, cells marked as deleted data are just skipped if data wants to write to them and are emptied later, as opposed to HDDS with which data at places like that has to be erased before new data is written, making it work twice as hard, SSDs don't do that.
So no different than when you begin getting bad sectors on the HDD platters... I read that like the more I use the computer the closer I come to loosing my data. I even read not to turn on the optimization for this same reason, each time it optimizes you're one write closer to drive failure.
Glad I got you guys to ask!!!
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