SSD's are not really "hard drives" but a form of memory such as compact flash.  As such, they can be accessed and written to much 
faster than regular hard drives because of the decreased latency (seek time to find the spot on the rotating disk to read or write). 
But, like compact flash, they have a limited number of times that they can be written to the same spot without failure.  (Hundred 
thousand times or more - I don't know about the latest technology.)  Manufacturers have a way of moving the written areas around 
(not too unlike a screen saver), so that one lonely spot does not fail earlier than the rest.  You are still limited to a much 
smaller number of writes compared to a hard drive.  I am sorry, but I can't give you more engineering details - this is just a 
touch-and-go on the topic, as my knowledge is limited.

So, for a  SSD to be useful, it should be used to store information that is not frequently overwritten.  I think that storing 
operating system information would be ideal, because I would think that it would be relatively permanent.  However, there may be 
small parts that are written over thousands of times a day - you would have to ask Microsoft.  :)   It might be better used to store 
large volumes of things such as photographs, music, and video.  For example, an iPod might be a good place for using SSD to store 
the recorded material.

I hope this helps a little to make you understand the problems associated with SSD.  BTW, regular dynamic memory such as that used 
in ram does not suffer from these restrictions (at least the problems require orders of magnitude more accesses), so that RAM 
failure is usually caused by something else.

Dean Kukral

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phillip Williams" <[log in to unmask]>


Hello Listers,
 I've been looking at the varieties of hard drives and am amazed at
the difference in price per memory space of the solid state drives.
I'm wondering if any of you have experience with them and what are the
advantages to these drives vs. disc drives.

 Would it be beneficial to use one say, for an operating system
partion or for programs
and mix it with a less expensive disc drive for larger files? Or are
the benefits lessened by combining the two types?

 System I'm collecting parts for is based on a dual-core intel with a
1gig memory video card for gaming, video and music editing and
production, some 3-D rendering, animation and auto-cad.

 Interested in your opinions,
-Phil Williams-

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com