[Wiggles]

Hi, i'm on the verge of buying a new desktop with the parts assembled them myself, but I can't decide between a SDD or a HDD for primary use.

After some research,the SDD's reliability in terms of failure and dataloss seems a lot better than with the HDD, and is obviously the faster one of the two. But the tricky part is that it's flash-memory based, and therefore has a limited amount of times you can write to it before its speed drops below snailpace.
And that's seemingly where the difficulty lies with graphic applications.
Has anyone some experience with these?

[Zentrope]

Firstly, SSD's Flash memory chips differ from the flash memory in USB thumb drives in the type and speed of the memory. The flash memory in SSDs is faster and more reliable than the flash memory in USB thumb drives. SSDs are consequently more expensive than USB thumb drives for the same capacities as well.

The best thing about SSD's is that it's fast and the life span is not an issue in our line of work because we will not be using it for more than 6 years or so.
Life span of every hardware is limited but it is enough for a normal user.(unless you are butter fingers dropping your system from time to time or a gamer banging it on something)

This is an amazing technology but the capacity is still an issue for people in Video industry. that is why they use HDD as well as SSD's.
If you have doubts about SSD's then you can use Hybrid HDD's which uses the best from both the technologies. Or Use SDD as a primary drive and get a HDD with 10,000rpms as storage or vice versa..

[Wiggles]

If I'd get 6 years out of it, i'd be happy! Thanks for the tips

[emoryArt]

Hybrid HDD like the Seagate momentus are a decent choice, since you can store your most commonly accessed files/programs on the SSD portion and keep your music/others on the slower HDD.

Having had used both a SSD/HDD, you will notice the difference, but it might not be enough to justify the cost/GB of SSD storage

[natzuurjk]

SSD's are getting much cheaper (on newegg, you can find sales of 250gb for 170 dollars). As far as the speed dropping off, this is true to an extent. Because it is keeping bits of information on the memory modules, over time the clutter does build. However technology is in place now with SSD's to automatically remove clutter via a management firmware or software. This was only a concern of early SSD's.

What's funny is bits of information get left behind on standard spindle drives as well, and not only that but because they use spinning discs over time information can get split to opposite sides of the drive and significantly slowdown the access time of files. In addition entire sectors on the discs can go bad and become unusable. This causes the information to be forced into new sectors that may take longer to access.

SO honestly the only advantage of an old HDD is the price per GB.

Personally if I had the choice, i'd set up a RAID1 or other redundant RAID for keeping important files on and use a SSD for apps and files I need to load quickly.

Another option is to set up a RAID0 using standard HDD's. This will allow for around 2-4x the normal speed because it can read from both drives simultaneously instead of waiting for one drive to spin around to write to the proper sector. With windows 7 you can set up a software raid fairly easily (BE CAREFUL IF YOU ARE TRYING TO USE A DRIVE WITH DATA ON IT ALREADY): http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36504...-in-windows-7/