I've heard SSD has fairly short expectancy if installed with Windows system due to the limited number of times could be written. But isn't its mechanism like RAM? How could it has shorter life span than HD? Anyone have insight on how durable SSD is?

The speed and quality certainly varies a lot by model and brand, but in general, SSDs have a significantly longer life expectancy than mechanical drives:

RAM is temporary and disappears when you shut your computer off. SSD are based on similar technology but are permanent, think of those old super nintendo cartridges. its been a few months since ive even checked them out but supposedly they are getting better and better.

im not overly impressed with their speed compared to my velociraptor drives which were much cheaper and had more volume. all my videos load up instantly. the only game that takes along time to load is STALKER CoP and thats universal for everyone. the rest of my games load up almost instantly. the only benefit i see from them is in notebooks cause they are easier to move around.

The mechanism is nowhere near the same as RAM. If it were, all the data on it would be lost whenever you turned off the computer. The mechanism is the same as that in USB flash drives.

As for life expectancy, you can read http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html. It's a quite lengthy 4-years-old article about the issue, featuring a (quite pessimistically set) calculation estimating near-worst-case SSD life expectancy.

From experience with my SSDs (2 x 160GB Intel G2 X18 in Raid0), there isn't really much improvement to games except for load times. In the case games with very high res textures, or Oblivion with a crap-ton of mods installed, then yes, there is some frame rate improvement, however.

You will see significant improvements in boot/shutdown (about 12 sec boot / 4 sec shutdown for me), application load times and especially, where you notice a huge difference is working with extremely large files in Photoshop or video editing apps.

There are some very large image files that take my desktop 20 minutes to load in Photoshop, that load instantly on my laptop with SSDs.

3 to 5 years? WTF? I've never had hard drives die before 7 years (besides DOAs), and I've used PCs that run 24/7. I've got computers 8+ years old running original hardware without a problem (though I am prepared for their eventual failure).

That article is so full of BS it isn't even funny. First, consumer-grade SSDs haven't even been on the market long enough to give them a rating in the "decades" range, then there is how bad SSDs do when there are limited empty blocks to write to.

Don't get me wrong, SSDs do have their advantages, but only half those reasons in there are actually true.

Main problem with SSDs (beyond price) is they are incredibly insecure: Data written to an SSD is virtually impossible to fully delete.

A woodchipper would like to disagree with you on that point.

I recently bought some SSDs and are using them in my system after my old (6 years) hard-drives began to fail. I am still amazed at how fast Windows (and other applications) run when installed on SSDs.

Yeah, but I can wipe an HDD clean and use it for stuff other than confetti

But will it blend?

Oh, it will blend. At many of the conventions I've attended, I get to see a BlendTec blender in action. It's a whole lot of fun when you watch glowsticks get blended...

i'm currently on my acer w500. the speed is simply amazing. it's not going to replace my conventional desktop, but i had never had such speed experience since DOS. I'm wondering since my friends always said ssd won't last you more than 1/2 year when running windows. So i wondered how much of it is valid.

I'm pretty sure he meant "blend" as in "blend in with his furniture", you d0rk! <_<

I think your friend was rather mistaken.

Eh, either way it will blend. Well, so long as the computer it is in blends with the furniture.

it may be cause i use western digital exclusively but i have never had an HDD fail on any of my computers or any computers i have built for other people. i have seen them fail on computers that i was troubleshooting for people but those were all cheap Dells, Compaqs, or Gateways. knock on wood, but i havent even gotten a bad one when i ordered them although ive probably jinxed myself now. :sadvaultboy:

my crappy back up computer is from 2004 and has all the original components in it and the last time i used it it worked just fine. the computer i replaced with my current build still works as do a few of my other older computers that ive given away or sold.

since i only reboot my computer once a week or so out of habit the boot and shutdown time mean nothing to me. as it is it only takes about 30 seconds so its not like im sitting around for minutes on end. im gonna wait till they figure their software out and standardize it and obviously when the price gets cheaper. my last hardrive i bought was a second velociraptor at 300GB for my current rig and it cost me $150.

I beg to differ, good sir. I find that SSDs best blend with purple furniture. They don't look good beside anything wooden, though.

I recommend reading (or skimming) these articles from AnandTech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829

tl;dr: New-ish SSDs on reliable controllers last more than long enough with little or no discernible performance degradation over time if looked after (they shouldn't be defragged, for example). But choose your brand and model carefully.

Oh yes, that would be SSD-cide. Definitely avoid anything defragmenting-like with SSDs because it will 1) shorten the lifespan of the SSD significantly and 2) not provide almost any speed-up at all because SSDs don't have to spin the platter and move the arm/head/whatchammacallit in order to read a portion of a file that is written at a specific location like HDDs do - fragmentation has nearly no effect at all on read/write spead of SSDs.

If you are running win7, i think it's not possible to use the defrag tool on an SSD

i have also disabled hibernation because shutdown and boot are already fast enough with SSD

I have had my SSD for nearly 2 years now. I keep Windows 7 and programs on my SSD and my page file on my velociraptor. While the SSD is incredibly fast still, CrystalDiskInfo only states that it has 30% health left. I am not entirely sure how accurate that is, but that is only after 8200 hours of being on. Now I also have an old Western Digital 500GB drive from 2007 in here. It has been on for nearly 15000 hours and still going strong. That being said, I will never go back to using a mechanical drive as my OS drive in my desktop ever again.

If you're worried about data security to the point where secure deletion is a serious issue, then why the hell aren't you encrypting your data?

Defron probably is encrypting.

Probably twice

Then the ability to recover erased data is not an issue at all.

It's not an issue *for me* it's an issue *in general*.

I still disagree, for the vast majority of people it's a complete non-issue, and for anybody who does have important data, they need to be encrypting it anyway. If data recovery is an issue, then so is the fact you can take the drive out of a machine and mount it somewhere else!