SSD's

Right with Ruddbux on the way, I think I'm going to buy a SSD. I've been keeping an eye on developments with this kind of tech and the biggest issue (limited read/write cycles) seems to have been solved, with SSD's now on par or (in some cases) far better than normal hard disks. So forgetting that for a moment, does anybody have any hints or tips for paticualr brands or models to look out for? Cost is a primary driver, so I'm not looking for high end/enthusiast disks, just a decent 64Gb SSD to use as a windows and boot partition.

Suggestions?

suggestion?

wait 6 months.

btw hard drives in laptops only use 16~20% of the power so you might only be extending your battery life by 15%

If you have a desktop why are you bothering - computers arent particularly quiet anyway so there is little to be gained unless you are replacing multiple disks. Effectively you are just paying more for less.

Wait a bit and youll get twice the data for half the price and at twice the speed.

Its for a desktop.

You have a valid point, but applying that logic to tech in general means you'd never end up buying anything. (IE- the register is carrying a story today about windows 'eight')
This will be simply for speed, and certain applications I use that use the page file alot- graphics texture offloading (read: games) and windows load times. Capacity isn't an issue as I use normal hard drives for that, but after seeing even a crappy eee with a SSD, it really is clear that the speed bottleneck in modern PC's is the hard drive. That and its a new gadget to play with.

Anyways, any brand suggestions?

Everything I'm seeing suggests that these two statments are in fact very much mutually exclusive.

Oh, for a desktop? Lol, fuck that then. Just buy 2 fast conventional disks and run RAID0.

I've read a bit about SSDs, written by techie photographers trying to get things running more quickly. They're faster in most cases, but sometimes performance stays about the same. Booting windows is a lot faster, batch processing raw images is about 20-30% faster in Lightroom. One guy on a private forum i'm on had a raid array of six X25 units, the numbers were quite amazing, but that's not really practical or really all that useful yet. For most people I don't see a huge benefit unless you're waiting for the computer a lot - often adding RAM to be used as disk cache can be pretty effective.

I expect i'll move to SSDs in a couple of years for my working files, but I have 200-600GB of working files at a time so it's not time yet. I do a lot of raw image conversion, I suspect a new CPU and DDR3 memory will be needed at the same time as SSDs to remove other bottlenecks.

this. RAID0 a couple of 10k RPM SATA drives and you'll be fine.

you're only setting yourself up for an expensive disappointment.

Get more RAM?

That's another point, but once you go over 4gb, a lot of software simply wont be able to take advantage of any further increase unless it's 64-bit. Games are the primary suspects there.

Meh.. you really want video ram for games.

Yet to see anyone in the PC market replicate Apple's new IO architecture too, which reeeeally sets them up for the future, i'm sure its just an intel/nvidia thing so i'm not sure why it hasnt been done yet?

The answer to SSDs really is "not yet". They will be standard soon but until then more RAM is def. your answer. Particularly with 64bit Windows Vista (Because it uses superfetch) and Windows7