Solid State Drives - any experience

[Laszlo Nagy]

Hi everyone,

Does anybody have any personal or indirect experience with the speed advantage the Solid State Drives can provide for a guy using ArchiCAD, or a computer in general?
This new technology seems lighting fast compared to today's hard drives, so I am curious whether this could be part of my new notebook next year.

Here is description of it on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk

And a notebook with solid state drive options from Dell:

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1730?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~tab=bundlestab

[Thomas Holm]

You could always start by testing an USB flash drive like this:
http://www.sandisk.com/OEM/ProductCatalog(1290)-Cruzer_Micro_with_Skins_USB_Flash_Drive_UFD.aspx
For now, up to 4GB. But growing.

[Anonymous]

In my experience drive speed is of very little consequence in ArchiCAD. The main bottlenecks are in processor intensive tasks (modeling, rendering, updating views) where, as far as I can tell, the processor isn't waiting for the disk to serve up the data.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Well, I actually believe that solid state drive can actually give a boost. Of course this is an assumption, this is why I am asking about someone's real life experience.

For example, my notebook has tended to slow down as there were more and more programs installed. With a solid state drive, the whole operating system gets a boost, so all programs start up faster.

A friend of mine saw a video of a op. system booting from a solid state drive. XP was up and running in about 8-10 seconds!!! That's not bad, if true.

Also, I can imagine that this can be important when working with large projects that require more than the available physical memory (e.g. more than 2GB under XP). In that case the swap file comes into play, which, if stored on a solid state drive, can make the whole operation much faster.

Let me know what you think, guys.