£50 less the VAT >> £42 less employers NI >> £33 less allowance for holidays >> £28 less heating, lighting, rent, tools, insurance &c >> £20

or actually around £10 per hour.

Not sure what to make of these SDD units. sure they are quicker in booting up the computer, but I am not sure if they offer much advantage when the computer is running.

I just wonder how many people close down their computers these days, mine is always in sleep mode, so take seconds to restart with a press of the keyboard. Ok now and again I have to close the machine to clear the memory, but only about once a week.

I saw little difference in loading software, Photoshop loaded quicker than it used to with a mechanical drive, but the difference was not that great.

The other problem is space, sure you can buy large SSD units, but they will be expensive, 60-80Gb is not much, so you will still need a second drive for storage.

how reliable are these units, they are still pretty new, do anyone know how many gets returned compared to mechanical drives?


I am waiting for prices to come down before I think about getting one, I got a Seagate Hybrid, 500GB normal 2.5 icnh drive with 4GB of SSD memory, not sure if it makes any difference to be honest.

In reply to a post by craigglawson:

Just thinking on it, even if it takes them 2 hours to build, test and pack the bundle, that's £25 an hour... I'm in the wrong job!!!

Tell me about it.

Built a computer last week, took me 20 mins to put it together, and that was including the making coffee. just a hour or so in total including installing windows.

The worse problem I have is putting the panel cables on for LED and switch, i mean to put them on before I place the board in the case, but normally forget.

I always test the board, CPU and memory outside the case just to make sure it works.

"how reliable are these units, they are still pretty new"

Good question.

Flash disks all have a limited lifetime; after a given number of writes, a block will fail. "Wear levelling" attempts to ensure that "hot spots" don't wear out prematurely thereby wrecking the whole drive, but something will wear out eventually.

Commercial flash disk arrays presumably have field replaceable flash modules, not sure what happens with the stuff you can currently buy retail, you don't read much about them wearing out for some reason...

Having a pagefile on SSD is therefore probably A Bad Idea, in lifetime terms, given that the data is disposable anyway.

Having the registry on SSD is probably not great either. But unlike the pagefile, the registry does need to be in non-volatile storage.

What else gets updated lots?

Other lifetime-related comments, anyone?

Hybrids suck.

SSD advantages = silence, no heat, faster boot times, more responsive OS, faster game load times & quicker shut downs.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Not sure what to make of these SDD units. sure they are quicker in booting up the computer, but I am not sure if they offer much advantage when the computer is running.

Well with the winsxs folder, the swapfile having to be as big as the memory capacity (windows gets in a tiz, since it supposedly requires enough to perform memory dumps), antivirus proggies running constantly etc. there's no way I'm committing to a solution which slows down once all the sectors have been used. Even if there's a disk speed up solution. The whole method of utilising the technology is wrong imo. They should be using twin ROM chips for bootup (one and one for backup) in this day and age. Every time the system shuts down, it should write or overwrite the chip accordingly. I realise it's harder to do than say, but it surely has to be better than the SSD method. Motherboards have ROM chips for BIOS and POST functions. Why not for the key OS files and the registry?

imo,

get a 2nd or higher generation SSD for use as the OS drive, use a mechanical (or 2) HD's for back ups, storage etc, piling 8GB RAM (edit, have seen the novatech link now and see the system already includes 8GB) into the system will significantly improve sleep\hibernate etc resume times, and coupled with the SSD, you'll enjoy a hugely quick and responsive system.

Edited by deleted (Wed 29-Jun-11 20:42:35)

Yeah, because noone has ever had a PC arrive DOA before....

In reply to a post by git:

Yeah, because noone has ever had a PC arrive DOA before....

I been asked to build a new computer for someone they got the bits and I am building it. I put it together at their place and the thing did not work.


I got it home and it did work until I switched it back off again and then no more. Tried another power supply no go, changed the CPU no go, put their CPu into another motherboard and that worked.

I had no spare DDR3 memory to test with the board, but i am pretty sure it is not that.

The CPU fan spins, but very slow and there are no beeps, with or without the memory in.

I put it as a faulty board, it is a Biostar, but I got no idea what they are like.

But what made me laugh is that the money they spent on these bit I could have got something a lot better for less, but people don't listen.
Anyway, the point is that you can have DOA bits or computers.

In reply to a post by gmoorc:

If you are interested in video work/encoding it would be worth getting a Z68 board which will let you utilise the on chip graphics/sandybridge acceleration.

You could also use a cheaper H67 board but as you are getting a K chip I guess you want to overclock which you wont be able to do with that chipset.

As far as I can tell the main chipset differences are :

H67 = On chip graphics
P67 = Overclock with multiplier
Z68 = On chip graphics + overclock with multiplier

Re the SSD I have had one as a boot drive for a while now and not noticed any problems. I do struggle with only 60GB though. Even just using it as a boot drive for W7.
Wouldn't do without one now as the user experience is so much better in my opinion. It's just 'nice' that programs open instantly

I got a AMD phenom, 8Gb of ram and a older Nvideo 9800Gt grpahics card and have no problem with video editing.