Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBottomTooth
Aren't they supposed to be a lot faster (plus no moving parts, doesn't need defragmentation, uses less power, quieter)
Sounds like it would be perfect for regular desktops too.
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SSDs are more advantageous for laptops than desktops for several reasons.
Laptop drives are slow - typically 5400 RPM or slower. On a desktop, you can
easily use a pair of 7200 RPM or higher drives.
A little less power makes difference when you're running from a battery.
With a desktop that's plugged in, a few watts doesn't matter.
On a desktop which stays running, all of the frequently accessed files are cached in
RAM, so the speed of the hard drive doesn't matter too much. A laptop is often
powered up and down, so system and program files have to be read from disk rather than RAM.
In order to save a few watts of power, a laptop on battery will aggressively spin down
the hard drive. Spinning it back up is slow, so avoiding spinup with an SSD is good.
On a desktop, the drive is rarely spun down, so it makes less of a difference.
Desktops typically have much larger hard drives. Replacing a 250GB drive in a
laptop with a $750 SSD is one thing. Spending $6000 to replace a 2 TB desktop
drive is quite another.
So yes, SSDs have their advantages even on desktop systems, but the benefits are
much more pronounced in laptops. That said, I may get an SSD for my system drive
next year, when prices drop. Instead, I may just get another 4GB of RAM for $125,
so everything will be cached and that'll be much faster than an SSD. Of course, I use
Linux, which much more effectively takes advantage of that extra RAM compared
to Windows. Windows is just starting to try to use extra RAM with superfetch.
While it's about 10 years behind Linux in this regard, superfetch does allow Windows
users to take advantage of extra RAM to reduce disk access, in a limited way.