I have an OCZ Vertex on an IDE-SATA adapter. It works. I think SSDs will become common upgrades for older machines, but right now only Runcore is making any effort to market them as such. I wouldn’t worry too much about SSDs going poof. Even Steve Gibson (author of Spinrite, the HDD utility) has said SSDs are fundamentally more reliable than HDDs.

It makes me think though, with SSDs dropping in price, soon a lot of old computers (think of IDE only 2003 era boxes) can be loaded with a drive that just won’t quit. I have to try an IDE->SATA adapter and see what happens.

Right now I’m not terribly sure how reliable SSDs are though… sometimes I read newegg reviews and I hope mine just wont die *poof*

I do regular backups.

CPU-bound really depends on what you’re doing. I’ve got an SSD in a 2 GHz P4-generation Celeron that I use for word processing and Visio, and it works nicely. The SSD helped a lot. I can’t play current games on that system but have no interest in that anyway. Is the system taking full advantage of the SSD? No. But the HDD it replaced was the big bottleneck in the system, and with an SSD in there, the system will be useful for another couple of years, maybe more. Plus the SSD won’t crash, which is more than I can say for the last few HDDs I’ve bought.

When a computer has good cpu, like say a 2 ghz (intel core 2) which is about a 2.4 ghz amd k8, then an SSD goes a long way to making the next big bottleneck disappear.

It’s great being able to do a search on your hard drive and have it return immediately even when searching through 20000 little files. Also raring (zipping) files and doing something else, just general multitasking. If you can pare down your working data set to something that can fit in 50 GB or so including OS then you are living the vida loca like a speed demon. You also then get the complete benefits of SSDs because your entire working data set is on the drive. Just manage your data and pull in stuff when you need it so all your files can take utmost advantage.

I personally love Sandforce SF-1200 drives like the S599 a-data. Reasonable cost, say 110$ or so, and good enough size like 60GB. I have done quite a few tests and the speeds are still good if you zero the drive using Secure ATA erase, again I use the Parted Magic bootable free open source cd, and then run secure erase.

After secure erasing I partition and leave some space at the end, like 5-7 GB and never touch that (it was secure erased and then never assigned to a partition). That works wonders because sandforce loves a bit of free space. I use XP with that with no trim support and im telling you, even if you fill the space with random data using something like Random Data File Creator (RDFC), and then you run benchmarks like AS SSD Benchmark, you still get excellent speeds. And this is with IDE mode, not sata ahci or anything, and again, with no trim. Create tons of random binary files using RDFC and re-run benches, and still you have superb speeds.

This is why I don’t bother doing any kind of special setups apart from drive alignment to use an SSD. Only 4kb drive alignment is important. The rest is sort of rounding error.