Anyone else made the jump to a SSD

[Achilleslastand]

From a mechanical HD
Got a Samsung 512 GB SSD the other day and its nothing short of amazing.
SAMSUNG 850 EVO-Series MZ-75E500B/AM 2.5" 500GB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - Newegg.com

Boot times are approx. 5 seconds and opening programs/multitasking is almost instant. Ditto for loading times for games.

[Pete]

And boot times are crazy fast as well.

I have a hybrid where the operating system and other key stuff is on the SSD and the programs and data are on a regular HD.

Not nearly as fast as pure SSD but faster than a typical HD setup.

[Swake]

I have a MBP Retina with SSD, it's very, very fast.

[Achilleslastand]

And boot times are crazy fast as well.

I have a hybrid where the operating system and other key stuff is on the SSD and the programs and data are on a regular HD.

Not nearly as fast as pur SSD but faster than a typical HD setup.

I have a WD "black' regular drive that I want to install just for additional storage{its 1 TB}. So on your regular HDD I assume it has no OS system installed? I wanted to throw some older games on the HDD and keep the newer stuff on the SSD. Is it possible to format the HDD and throw some of those older games on there w/o a OS?

[Swake]

You only need an OS on it if you want the option to boot from that drive.

[Jim Kyle]

Is it possible to format the HDD and throw some of those older games on there w/o a OS?

Depends on the game; in olden times quite a few programs insisted on installing to the C: drive, which is now your SSD. Since I'm not a gamer I don't know if any of the current crop continue this archaic practice, but there's no restriction in Windows itself (if that's what you use; most folks seem to be stuck on Windows).

However you can easily reformat any drive; I've done so fairly often over the years. For a 1-TB drive you can expect it to take a while, since each of its trillion bytes must be written, but you can go away and do something else while it's working.

[tfvc.org]

I have a hybrid system. OS and programs are on the SSD (Samsung 840 pro) cache and things that uses heavy write cycles are on a WD Black. Pics, music, vids, ect are stored on a Synology NAS. The Samsung is smoking fast. I like how every component is all made in house as well.

[ctchandler]

I ordered my IMac with an optional 1 terrabyte, Fusion" drive. It was $200 more. Yes, it boots quickly and of course has all the benefits of speed when accessing/storing data to the drive.
C. T.

[John1780]

I have 2, 1TB versions of the exact same SSD and the random read/write speeds are much quicker compared to the higher end 10k rpm HDD's and hybrid drives. Plus my case stays cooler without the heat generation from multiple HDD's.

[David]

My tentative plan at the moment is to hold off until Windows 10 is out and rebuild fresh with a decently sized SSD as my C drive at that point, with my current traditional drive taking the role of secondary storage.

[JohnH_in_OKC]

You'll soon get 10TB SSDs thanks to new memory tech

From Engadget: You'll soon get 10TB SSDs thanks to new memory tech

SSDs and other flash memory devices will soon get cheaper and larger thanks to big announcements from Toshiba and Intel. Both companies revealed new "3D NAND" memory chips that are stacked in layers to pack in more data, unlike single-plane chips currently used. Toshiba said that it's created the world's first 48-layer NAND, yielding a 16GB chip with boosted speeds and reliability. The Japanese company invented flash memory in the first place and has the smallest NAND cells in the world at 15nm. Toshiba is now giving manufacturers engineering samples, but products using the new chips won't arrive for another year or so.

At the same time, Intel and partner Micron revealed they're now manufacturing their own 32-layer NAND chips that should also arrive in SSDs in around a year. They're sampling even larger capacity NAND memory than Toshiba, with 32GB chips available now and a 48GB version coming soon. Micron said the chips could be used to make gum-stick sized M.2 PCIe SSDs up to 3.5TB in size and 2.5-inch SSDs with 10TB of capacity -- on par with the latest hard drives. All of this means that Toshiba, Intel/Micron and companies using their chips will soon give some extra competition to Samsung, which has been using 3D NAND tech for much longer. The result will be nothing but good for consumers: higher capacity, cheaper SSDs that will make spinning hard disks sleep with one eye open.

[David]

Yeah, that announcement was part of my thinking. As time marches on the SSDs that are available are just going to get cheaper with more capacity, and while those varieties in particular might not be cheap enough for when I take the plunge, they'll probably help push the cost of slightly older models down.