And I thought I was erring conservative by waiting as long as I did to get an SSD!
I was wary about getting one, but did a lot of research over a few months; talked to friends in post houses and read every test I could find. What I came up with was that SSDs compare very favorably to “spinners”… and there’s no risk in making a small SSD your boot drive-- the number of writes in such a scenario is pretty much insignificant in terms of wearing the drive out.
In my case: I’ve got my OS and applications on a 128 Gig SSD, mirrored from my original HD, which remains online. The SSD holds ONLY the OS and apps-- all of my 200+ gigs of user data are referenced on the original hard drive. That’s where all the re-writing takes place. I still have the OS on the original drive, and there would not be a hiccup nor any lost data should the SSD spuriously blow up. It’s literally a no-risk situation. Sometimes, for a really big project, I’ll keep the session on the SSD (backed up regularly). Another advantage to SSDs is that, should you want to, you can run pretty much everything off of the boot drive with no performance hit.
And in this configuration, whether running the session off of a “spinner” or the SSD, the speed difference is phenomenal. As stated earlier, it’s pretty much like having a new, much faster computer.
There’s an excellent article on SSD reliability in high-stress real world application on Tom’s Hardware dot com-- not sure what the forum rules are these days in terms of including links, but if you do a search for “ssd reliability-failure rate” you ought to be able to find it. Very informative and even-handed.
Considering that if you shop around you can get a 128 Gig SSD for around 85 bucks these days, and factoring in everything reported above, for me it seemed (and has panned out to be) a win-win situation.
And with that, to each his own!
Chewy