Not much has changed with the hard drive over the past 20 years. While densities have increased and drives now hold more storage than anyone thought possible in 1984, things really haven't changed all that much. The drive still has heads and platters that spin and a block of data is accessed every time the platter spins around to the head. The traditional HDD has pretty much remain unchanged. The SSD however changes everything. These new Solid State Drives have no moving parts, have no head or platters and they can access a block of data immediately when queried. Today we are looking at the possible successor to the traditional HDD and have the Crucial 32GB SSD on our bench for a little testing.

http://www.bcchardware.com/index.php...1&limitstart=0

his Crucial SSD



one WD740GD Raptor SATA HDD



Can somebody show me the "destroying" part? The write speeds for the SSD are on par with the Raptor as long as the file size parts are larger than 32k. It seems that SSD and USb sticks and Compact Flash have real issues with small file sizes. If you have a bunch of small read/writes that needs to be done (page file, .inf files, config files, etc) you will see that a normal HDD wins by a very healthy margin...

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Yeah, "destroy" is a bit ridiculous, but it definitely shows that SSD's have a definite advantage in large read scenarios. While page writes would be hellishly slow, we're coming to a point that most users can afford enough ram to not even utilize the page file at all especially if they have $800 to blow on a 32GB disk. I see SSD's in their current form as a boon for gamers (tons of data being read and almost none written) and average desktop users (anything that speeds up boot/load times is always nice) but awful for anyone doing production work (a rendering machine would get about zero benefit from one of these and the drive would fill up in about an hour). I'm probably going to pick one up here soon as an OS + a few games drive and keep around my HDD for everything else.

hi welcome to the forums!
I agree that if you have money lying around at the moment for SSD, getting a maximum amount of ram in your system should not be an issue.

splitting pagefile & data up would indeed be best, current Microsoft OS can't do without a pagefile as caching and older applications rely on it

RamDisk will be the real speed booster



read/write speeds at 700-800Mb/s!