3DO ZONE Forums

Hi guys,

I am planning to make my laptop a bit faster and decided to
buy a new HDD.

Has anyone any experiences with those flash memory hard discs?
How fast do they really are in comparison with a normal SATA hdd
(boot-up speed, data transfer rate,...)?

Also I've noticed now, that there are hdds with a spinning speed
of 7200 rpms - didn't know that before, I thought 5400 rpms was
the fastest for 2.5" discs.
How about heat issues with using 7200rpm hdds in a laptop?
Could imagine that such a hdd fries the hardware pretty much...!

For the £ per Mb it's not really worth it in my opinion. I would rather have 500Gb HDD and wait an extra 5 seconds.

having said that booting is quite a bit quicker, but day to day access to the drive it's not massively noticeable to be honest. Plus the quality of SD HDD's is a fairly broad spectrum with only the best one being truly worth the expense.

Thanks for the info! I guess I'll wait a bit before I get a flash hdd - letting
the technology improve a bit more.
*EDIT*: And let the prices drop a bit.

I have heard that the flash drives also have a limited amount of writes? Is this true? I would be most worried about that.

Yes, that's true. But modern flash drives are "smart" and try to use all
areas of the memory equally when writing. This increases the live span
a lot. Strictly spoken, conventional hdds have a limited amount of writes, too.

So, I have been looking into this.

Seems the OCZ are quick for sequential loads. i.e. improves boot times but not so hot where there are lots of 4k read/writes. Also, the OCZ ones seem to have a lot of failures. Looking at their forums, there are a lot of unhappy customers.

Intel use a different controller chip and have fewer unhappy customer. It seems intel are a little slower on the sequential reads (so they boot a wee bit slower) but the 4k file is a lot better.

I'm toying with this or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10"

Although, I don't really need either. So, i'll probably get neither. (oh to be young again )

Seems a little too flakey at the moment to be worth it.

Too expensive too. £200+ for 120gb drive is a bit daft

Buzz!!!!

I'm just throwing my vote in that I love the SDD disk I got. Everything is legitimately faster. Also, there's no noise.

It's all about price though. I've seen cheap deals show up like $100 for 94Gb.

Hm, and I suppose if it were down to that or a sweet juicy tablet as a toy, I'd go with the galaxy tab, 3DOKid.

I'm settling for a car service and some rear brakes.

D'oh! I suppose it had to be done though..