Replies

Woody or Kathleen,

I just read your article on Touch Office. It had many, many paragraphs on the iPad verson and only a brief mention of 3 sentences about the Android version, which basically said nothing. Woody, it’s great that you love your iPad, but that is far from a universal product. I had previously thought that this was a “windows” blog, but recently I’ve begun to wonder if this is an Apple blog. If you talk about Apple products, is it possible to balance that with content from non-Apple fans, and include not only Android but also Blackberry? I’ve been a member/reader since the mid-1990s (in different iterations), but WindowsSecrets recently seems to be getting less and less relevant to me.

JerryCi

Scott — Perhaps I’m not understanding your computer problem description accurately, but how is the tower case noise related to the SSD? Ditto for the email client loading problem. Email client loading problems usually originate from incorrect email settings and have nothing to do with the hardware drive. When you substituted another HDD (VelociRaptor), was that a fresh OS install and app install?

Jerry C.

I researched this subject thoroughly a year ago before I built my system. I believe that it is incorrect to say that Intel SSDs blow away all other brands for reliability. Intel SSDs and the Samsung 800 series were both rated extremely reliable. However, The Intel SSDs were extremely overpriced. Other vendors such as Crucial and OCZ made very good SSDs, but their later models were highest performance with bugs, while the slightly older models were lower performance with the bugs worked out. This is a generalization of course. Regarding “green” hard drives, they have a terrible reputation for reliability and “workstation” manufacturers will not use them. They are basically very cheaply built, low power HDDs. The low-power feature is the sole qualification for “green”. Not only are the WD Velociraptors durable and high performance 10,000 rpm HDDs, but they are so overpriced that their prices approach SSD prices. There are some enterprise class 7200 rpm HDDs that are extremely durable and high performance that sell for only a slight premium over mid-class HDDs. Western Digital’s RE4 is an example. Their 1Tb versions might sell for only a $10 or $20 premium over their mid-range consumer HDDs. To summarize relative to the OP’s (“Backspacer”) situation, many SSDs are extremely reliable with both some Intel high-end and some Samsung 800 series SSDs having the best reliability reputations. For greater storage capacity needs, many systems use the SSDs for operating system and apps only, and enterprise-class HDDs for storage over 250Mb or 50o0Mb. The most reliable should be SSDs for the operating system and apps with at least (2) HDDs in RAID 1 array (two mirror image copies). Therefore, for mission critical application requiring less than 500 Mb capacity, I would use one Samsung 800 series SSD (240Mb to 500 Mb) with a daily backup to an enterprise-level HDD. If capacity requirements were over 500 Mb, I would still use a Samsung 800 series SSD, 240Mb, with enterprise-level 7,200rpm HDDs for data storage.

I am an architect with many thousands or 10s of thousands of work-hours embedded in drawings. Since their loss would be catastrophic and irreplaceable, I run a Samsung 830 SSD for OS with 2 enterprise-level 7200 rpm HDDs for data storage.