I had an $800 one fail on me, so make sure you look at reliability of whichever brands you are considering.

And for SURE, make sure you back that drive up on a regular basis, just in case.

Other than that, you will LOVE it.

I can say that I made a choice to fully return the failed one, instead of replacing it with another SSD, because I found the SATA 3 regular drives plenty fast for Sonar, and the $700 I saved by buying a $100 2 TB SATA 3 drive was put to good use - I bought a 46" HDTV which becmse my primary computer display, AND had enough money left to almost fully pay for an XBOX 360.

Bob Bone

melmyers
I guess at some point I might spring for a 1TB SSD and put ALL of my samples on it, but my system works so smoothly now that I can't imagine it getting any better.

You'll actually get better performance by putting each large library on a separate drive (if you have enough SATA connections). That way the PC can stream all the libraries simultaneously instead of trying to pull all that data from a single drive over a single SATA cable.


Scott

--
Scott R. Garrigus - http://garrigus.com - SONAR X2 Power! - http://garrigus.com/?SonarX2Power
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Sound Forge Power book series: http://garrigus.com/?PowerBooks
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar ProAudioTutor video tutorial series: http://garrigus.com/?ProAudioTutor
* Publisher of the DigiFreq free music technology newsletter: http://digifreq.com/?DigiFreq
* Publisher of the NewTechReview free consumer technology newsletter: http://newtechreview.com/?NewTechReview

If you plan to use the SSD for the OS/applications, you'll see a small improvement.
Apps load a little quicker... and Windows is a little snappier.

Where SSD *really* shines is disk-streaming sample libraries... where you're looking to achieve 500+ notes of polyphony.

Fast SATA-III SSDs are sustaining ~520MB/Sec on reads.
That's about 3 times the spead of the fastest conventional HDs.

As mentioned above, if you're using the SSD for the OS/apps, don't expect a 3x faster user experience.
That's not going to happen...

One other thing to note about SSDs:
To achieve speeds of 500+MB/Sec, you'll want to connect the SSD to an Intel SATA-III controller.
3rd party SATA-III controllers typically result in lower performance.

Connecting to an Intel controller wont be a problem.  I work at Intel so I plan on buying an Intel Motherboard, Intel cpu and Intel SSD. 

Connecting to an Intel controller wont be a problem.  I work at Intel so I plan on buying an Intel Motherboard, Intel cpu and Intel SSD. 

There you go...
You might not want to go so far as using an Intel (brand) motherboard.   
Many motherboards offer additional SATA-III controllers (for more SATA ports).
These work... but typically reduce the performance of the fastest SSDs.
For connecting conventional HDs, they work fine.

I'm thinking about this board... I really want it.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-dx79si.html?wapkw=intel+desktop+board+dx79si

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/product-brief/desktop-board-dx79si-extreme-brief.pdf


And this proc. 
http://ark.intel.com/products/70845/Intel-Core-i7-3970X-Processor-Extreme-Edition-15M-Cache-3_50-GHz?wapkw=i7-3970x

And then the Intel 520 series 240 gig SSD.

redbarchetta, I also looked long and hard at this board before finally going with my ASUS P9X79 WS motherboard.

I can undertand a certain loyalty to Intel (especially if you work for them :-)
but take the time to look at the competition, read what people have to say about them, compare specs.

I did go with a 520 series Intel SSD though, they have the best reputation of all.

NO known issues but you have to take care of ahci.
Google for it you will find alot of answers.
good luck

Quick question guys. On replacing and extant system drive with a new SSD, can I simply image my system directly on to the SSD? I seem to recall something about having to run some other app in order to allocate sectors or some-such. Am I confused? Cheers David