SSD for better performance?

[skywise]

Saw this in the v18 announcement:

Reading and saving files greater than 2GB is now supported. In theory the maximum limit is 2TB, but available system memory and hard drive speed are now the limiting factors. For substantially better performance, use an SSD.

I presume that refers to the tag files and the swap space?

I'm looking at building a new PC in the next few months and looking at getting an SSD but everything I've read says that you do NOT want swap files (or anything that does drive thrashing) kept on the SSD as it will shorten the lifespan of the drive.

Anyone have any experience in this area about that?

[Clark]

"For substantially better performance, use an SSD". This sentence is recommending that the large file you are editing be stored on an SSD. I used a 500gig SSD for most testing of large file editing. As for storing the editor's buffer cache on an SSD, you will only get speed improvements if you make very large modifications which cause a lot of reads/writes of the spill file.

Storing tag files on an SSD will definitely give you some speed improvements.

Given the speed benefits of an SSD, I would recommend using them for almost everything if you can. Be sure to buy a good quality SSD. Some of us (including myself) have been burned by SSDs. After being burned by bad performance with an SSD, I refused to use SSDs for a while until the technology was improved.

I now have two SSDs in my machine. Hopefully, they will last a long time. If they don't, I'll just buy new ones  I'm totally hooked.

[chrisant]

Agreed.  I consistently burn out Crucial M4 drives in 4-8 months, but I'm completely hooked on the performance boost, it's too huge for me to go back to rotational drives.  But I prioritize some disposable income for this -- of course it's a trade off, but I feel it's worth it for me.

I'm currently trying the Samsung 840 PRO, which I hope will last longer.  I suspect (hope?) the Crucial firmware may have wear leveling problems.

To compensate for the short lifespan I've grown quite diligent about backups.  The most important set of files lives on my laptop, and is backed up to the cloud (Mozy Online) and to hard drives in 2 different physical locations (work and home).  I could still lose stuff if the stars align, but so far this approach has let me successfully and rebuild my laptop's SSD drive 9 times now without any data loss (wow, I just counted, I have a lot of bricked SSD drives I should recycle ).  (Oh no, knock on wood...no jinxes...)

[Dan]

Is an SSD cache setup any less likely to burn out, or just for when you need a hard drive bigger than is practical for an SSD?

[Dennis]

I've been running an SSD (Samsung 830) for nearly a year with no issues, and a lot of tag files have been built and rebuilt and then built again in that time.  A few key things to do.  (1) Make sure TRIM support is enabled if your drive supports it.  (2) Turn off disk defragmentation for your SSD drive.

[Dan]

Incidentally putting an SSD in my netbook (along with some RAM) took it from typical netbook performance to ... something better.  It's still a netbook, but it comes up really fast which is a good thing for a portable computer, to be ready when you need it.