Solid State Hard Drive

[Tellos Athenaios]

Anyone heard of these? I've been doing a little reading, and it seems they store all their information electronically. Would they be worth paying extra money for? Thanks.

Yes.

I have one, and I love it, because if you install your OS on it you can boot up and be on the internet in ~30 seconds.

I also have a more conventionally hard drive for games and other media and programs.

CR

CR: get rid of that bloatware! That is at least an order of magnitude too slow.

That's what I wanted to hear. It would be 180 GB which is fine because I don't use a lot of space.

Yes it would. I found 80GB worked pretty well for me but that was 2-3 years or so ago (Intel X-25M, which essentially was the first consumer SSD that actually delivered the promised goodies) and I used it for development work, not as a speed upgrade for games say. Even so when you are working with lots of data (or Windows VMs) you might want something bigger which is why I got myself a 256GB Samsung 830 unit.

What you want to look for is an SSD which appears to be "balanced". That is you want read or write performance to be relatively "close" to each other and specifically you want to avoid gotcha's like performance metrics of "highly compressible" data vs "not nearly as compressible" data. Right now the "top" brands appear to be Intel and Samsung.