What is the advantage of fitting an SSD Drive?

[Budice]

Hi
Being all of my life a 'PC' user with knowledge I now realise I have been missing out in life (and neglectful of the prospect) of being a Mac owner. I know this will change everything! I would like to buy the 27" Imac buthave held back because of all the problems related on this forum.
What I don't quite understand is what are the main reasons a lot of you are fitting the SSD Drives for and is it worth it?

 

[spinnerlys]

SSDs have up to five times faster read and write speeds than regular HDDs, thus the overall performance is faster, as the HDD is often the bottleneck in a computer as CPU and RAM are quite fast.

More threads: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=011016...e:forums.macrumors.com&hl=en&as_qdr=all&meta=

Also, SSDs are not singular to Macs, they can be put into PCs running Windows or Linux or many other OSs out there.

 

[TMRaven]

You will load programs 5 times faster. Your computer will start up 5 times faster. You can copy/delete files 5 times faster.

There is actually a real impressive youtube video of some kids demoing a bunch of raided saumsung ssds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&feature=related

Right now, SSDs are really expensive though, I really want to put one in my i7 iMac, because the HDD is currently a huge bottleneck, but I'm gonna wait a year or two when they get down in price.


SSDs also have no mechanical parts, so no noise, and produce less heat.

 

[slicecom]

Right now, SSDs are really expensive though, I really want to put one in my i7 iMac, because the HDD is currently a huge bottleneck, but I'm gonna wait a year or two when they get down in price.

x2, I'm also hoping they begin to produce more in the 3.5" form factor for larger storage capacity, it installs easier and utilizes the space wasted from most current 2.5" SSD's.

 

[mystikjoe]

x2, I'm also hoping they begin to produce more in the 3.5" form factor for larger storage capacity, it installs easier and utilizes the space wasted from most current 2.5" SSD's.

with no moving parts they don't need to be 3.5" in form factor. if you open up an intel 160gb ssd one side has no chips on it at all. if they soldered on the memory on that side you would have 320gb in an ssd. the limiting factor now is price. memory in ssd's is expensive and with the demand i don't see it dropping too fast anytime soon!

 

[Techhie]

with no moving parts they don't need to be 3.5" in form factor. if you open up an intel 160gb ssd one side has no chips on it at all. if they soldered on the memory on that side you would have 320gb in an ssd. the limiting factor now is price. memory in ssd's is expensive and with the demand i don't see it dropping too fast anytime soon!

You could use the extra SATA connection from the optical drive (after it is removed) in current iMacs to fit an inexpensive SSD as a boot/apps disk paired with a 2.5" 500 GB hard disk for all other files.

Its a pretty straightforward procedure, if you follow guides to a tee.