Solid State Discs

[#1]

Anyone got any experience of using solid state discs in a laptop/PC, particularly from the reliability angle?

[#2]

Have they been around long enough for anybody to know how reliable they are?

[#3]

Not in a laptop but the Ipod Nano, Shuffle and Touch are all solid state memories/drives and never heard of an issues with these.

[#4]

Quote from: ReedRichards

Have they been around long enough for anybody to know how reliable they are?

Three years in a decent size format? Not sure. I ask because I want to build a PC that will rapidly process Canon RAW files ready for printing. Samsung seems to think they are wonderful, but they would wouldn't they? 

[#5]

I know someone with one and his only beef was that the one he bought was without an in-built cache and shortly after he bought it versions with caches became available.

[#6]

Quote from: nozzer

I ask because I want to build a PC that will rapidly process Canon RAW files ready for printing.

Will an SSD make a difference in this situation? I personally am not sure. RAW processing is very CPU- (and with certain apps, GPU-) intensive so I suspect that's more likely to be the location of any bottlenecks rather than drive speed. Also, bear in mind that SSDs are much lower capacity than HDDs, and also that unless you buy a particularly fast SSD the sequential read speed - which is what I imagine will matter the most - might be no better than a HDD.

[#7]

You can't just print images - you will need to process using the human eye first.
Minimum is deciding where to crop, perspective correction etc etc...
You could batch process your raw files into jpegs so you could see which photos are worth keeping.

[#8]

Quote from: Crucibleofevil

You can't just print images - you will need to process using the human eye first. Minimum is deciding where to crop, perspective correction etc etc... You could batch process your raw files into jpegs so you could see which photos are worth keeping.

I use CS3 for all of this and I've calibrated my printer/monitor for colour correctness...  however I was under the impression that CS3 uses the discs for cacheing while the final print process is underway. My current discs certainly work hard while the file is spooled to the printer. I just thought that SSDs might improve the speed.

[#9]

All print spooling seems to generate huge files in the printer format - might be worth having a look at your print spooler to get a picture of how much.
It's also very processor intensive
Do you have control over what disk your printer spools to - I assume you are using Windows?

[#10]

Yes the cache discs are selectable in CS3. The final post-process files are around 120Mb in size, start out at 22Mb (Canon 5D Mk II). I suppose it's not worth worrying about how long it takes to spool if the printer is only going at it at its own pace!

[#11]

Presumably the printer is attached via USB too!

[#12]

I had a friend years ago who was building wireless APs using normal PC hardware and PCI cards. They were built into solid industrial steel boxes built to withstand very severe elements (upto 10m below water, in a freezer all night, etc). Anyway because spinning HDDs are not able to cope with these sort of elements he used solid state IDE drives that just plugged straight into the mobo socket and sat there. Very reliable, never had any trouble with them and they would be online for MONTHS at a time.
Just a shame the wifi signal was so tempermental!