Micron cackles as it unveils its chameleonic FLYING DISK KILLER Micron has a new M600 client SSD that changes flash type on the fly to accelerate writes. It's an update on the M500 series, we understand, and is made from 16nm NAND instead of the M500's 20nm. There are mSATA, M.2 and 2-5-inch SSD formats available with capacities being 128GB, 256GB and 512GB for the mSATA and M.2 formats, …
Not that much, if they're to be believed. I may be wrong, but it seems the chips undergo a system that reminds me of a valet. The first level of the cells are the parts that can be reached extra-fast using SLC tech, but once that's done it can be parked in the MLC part at a more leisurely pace. So IOW it only loses the capacity temporarily while in high-speed write mode, but it comes back.
Once you've enjoyed the speedup from SSD, you'll never want to go back to spinning disks. Boot in seconds, fast loads of software...it's a huge difference.
Hybrids don't cut it. They don't have quite enough capacity to hold Windows plus useful stuff. But they do make it possible to get both SSD and HDD into a notebook. But the reason you do this is for extra capacity, and with the price of larger (256GB) SSD around the price of a hybrid you should ask yourself if SSD alone does the job.
It depends a great deal on your use pattern and hardware. I rarely reboot, so boot time doesn't interest me and Win8.1 greatly improved caching and memory use so most of my tools are sitting in RAM whenever I need them - I don't actually feel much difference after switching to SSD!
More surprising, I added one primarily to help with massive compile jobs, able to max out 6 cores continuously with 100k's of files being processed. Again it's hard to tell if it's helping, The 12 core office build machine wasn't noticeably drive bound either on the same job.
For my work load its obvious throwing 32Gb RAM at it is more effective than a fast 500Gb SSD. Nice things to have but I'm not seeing the magical improvements many claim. Probably much more effective on the low end systems most use though.
My problem is I started by adding 32Gb RAM to Win8, which needed it - was hitting 24Gb RAM use during builds. With Win8.1 it now never reaches 16Gb and hardly hits the drives after stuffing 16Gb+ of ram with cached loads.
By the time the SSD went in there wasn't much left for it to do. If I done it in the other order it would look like the SSD made more difference. More and faster RAM remains the best investment in Windows systems, especially now it's catching up with Linux on memory management ;)
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