Well that was fun...

[elija]

No doubt that SSDs are fast but I don't know enough about them to make a snap judgement about one. I worry about the price per GB and the life time of them.

I'm liking Mageia so far so the 02 was a good roll

[Irithori]

The SSD lifetime is measured in writes per cell.
There is controller logic and spare cells to distribute writes evenly over the whole SSD.
Which btw is the reason why ssd needs a different approach in secure deleting.
A recent consumer SSD should last several years, aka 5+

About the costs: Yes, that is the reason why only my system discs are SSDs, while my data is still on traditional harddiscs.

But there is a middle way, at least if you have a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge motherboard with the srt feature.

With srt, you can create a SSD cache for a regular harddisk.
- This setup is OS agnostic. It doesnt need a driver or tool on OS side.
- you can use an arbitrary mix of SSD and harddisc
- srt uses a maximum of 64GB of the SSD. And these are in a fairly decent price range.
- depending on the selected mode, there is or is no data loss if the ssd should fail:
The "enhanced" mode will report a write completed once the HD reports it. aka: The ssd cache doesnt accelate writes, only future reads.
The "extreme" mode will report a write completed once the SSD cache reports it. Which results in faster writes but is a bit more dangerous.

So given a scenario where your day to day work fits inside the 64GB cache, you should get close to SSD read performance.

[oz]

I used to baby my own SSDs for fear of prematurely wearing them out or breaking them in some way, but after a while I decided to go ahead and treat them more like conventional hard drives, so now I do only a few SSD tweaks for them and thus far they've withstood all the full erasures, overwrites, and other common hard drive tasks that I've put them through. Once they do fail, I may or may not replace them with newer SSDs, depending on the reliability factor and the price per GB for SSDs at that point in time and how they compare with regular hard drives.

[gruven]

The SSD lifetime is measured in writes per cell.
There is controller logic and spare cells to distribute writes evenly over the whole SSD.
Which btw is the reason why ssd needs a different approach in secure deleting.
A recent consumer SSD should last several years, aka 5+

About the costs: Yes, that is the reason why only my system discs are SSDs, while my data is still on traditional harddiscs.

But there is a middle way, at least if you have a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge motherboard with the srt feature.

With srt, you can create a SSD cache for a regular harddisk.
- This setup is OS agnostic. It doesnt need a driver or tool on OS side.
- you can use an arbitrary mix of SSD and harddisc
- srt uses a maximum of 64GB of the SSD. And these are in a fairly decent price range.
- depending on the selected mode, there is or is no data loss if the ssd should fail:
The "enhanced" mode will report a write completed once the HD reports it. aka: The ssd cache doesnt accelate writes, only future reads.
The "extreme" mode will report a write completed once the SSD cache reports it. Which results in faster writes but is a bit more dangerous.

So given a scenario where your day to day work fits inside the 64GB cache, you should get close to SSD read performance.

I just use the Seagate Hybrid SSD/HDD 750GB hard drives for my data. Good prices and great performance. I would put performance between SSD and HDD, but it feels faster than my RAID0 did.

[elija]

It sounds like SSD may be worth having a look at next time I need (or want) a drive...