SSD drives in education

[CyberNerd]

Has anyone here made the jump to SSDs in class / staff rooms?

This year I have put a proposal forward that for one classroom which currently has Pentium D machines in (About 4/5 years old) rather than replace all the systems at a cost of around £300 each (15 PCs so £4500) we buy 64GB Crucial M4 SSD drives at a cost of approx £60 each (£900).

Theoretically this should extend the life of the base hardware by at least 2 years, just trying to see if anyone else has gone down a similar route!

I'm in a similar situation. The machines will never adequately run windows7. We are proposing ripping out the drives altogether and diskless booting them into a VDI environment.

[Greenbeast]

i'm intrigued by all this hype over ssds

[localzuk]

i'm intrigued by all this hype over ssds

It isn't hype... Hype is unfounded, SSD speed is definitely real...

[SYNACK]

It isn't hype... Hype is unfounded, SSD speed is definitely real...

Yeap, I have dealt with a couple and they are stupidly quick but if you have real performance bottlenecks in other areas already you will never realise this fully. This is why we go for new gear as it will reap the most benifit and will keep running for longer meaning that they are unlikely to end up in the situation where Cybernerd is above of not being able to run the modern software in the short to medium term.

[CyberNerd]

in the situation where Cybernerd is above of not being able to run the modern software in the short to medium term.

I can run modern software, just not windows :/

[sonofsanta]

I think, with Windows 7, Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM is a realistic baseline for reasonable performance for most tasks, such as Office, browsing, etc. Such computers would see the full benefit of an SSD and it is absolutely worth doing. An SSD really does improve performance in every metric - not only 10 second boot times with instantly usable desktops, but even my Firefox performance is much snappier with the weight of tabs I tend to have open.

If you're getting custom built from Novatech/Stone, with hard drive prices as high as they are still, there is no way you can't justify the extra £10/£20 to bump up to a 64gb SSD over an entry 320Gb hard drive - drop the processor down to afford it if you must, because it will make much more of an impact than a couple of meg of L3 cache and hyper-threading.

[googlemad]

Thanks for the comments!

I think I'll alter my proposal to mention if we can save a few quid on not replacing the entire hardware in certain rooms then we can put the savings into speccing SSD drives for the rooms which do get new hardware!

[3s-gtech]

Very interesting topic and debate.

My plans, now we have replaced 90%+ of the student PCs around the school, is to get more life out of them with SSDs. So next year where one of our IT suites is due replacement on our 3 year cycle, I'll put Crucial M4s in instead (Core 2 Duo PCs with 3GB RAM). I'll work my way around the school doing that, damn sight cheaper than replacing the PCs and the boost will be more significant for our budget. I'll draw the line at our Prescott P4/PentiumD machines though - not sure it's worth bothering.

[Arthur]

I'm intrigued by all this hype over SSDs

There aren't many computer components that can give you a > 6,000-30,000% increase in performance for not a lot of money. Once you use a computer with an SSD, you can never go back to HDDs (at least not for your OS drive).

HDD (2.5" 5,400rpm)



SSD

[sidewinder]

Well this thread has certainly convinced me to go for SSD's when buying replacement PC's this year.
I'm hoping to be amazed, because I've NEVER used one. I've got very close to buying them for home computers but capacity has always won out in the end

[glennda]

I did a comparision loading Adobe PhotoShop Cs3 on windows 7 one on a HDD one of an SSD - the ssd have fully loaded Photoshop before the HDD had even shown the photoshop splash screen.

[3s-gtech]

Also, in real usage terms, I have not found any usage difference between a 64GB Crucial M4 on SATA 2 versus one on SATA 3. Similar host machines, no noticeable gain in normal usage.

[Tallwood_6]

Just ordered some new HP's with factory fitted SSD's and was amazed at how reasonable the pricing came out. Planning to refurb a large batch of machines with SSD's over the summer you can get 64gig Cruicial or 90gb kingston SDD's quite cheaply now and the warrenties and reliability looks to be pretty solid now.

[glennda]

What do you class as reasonable for the HP Desktops? Also what proc and ram you get out of interest as I need to recommend some to clients next week (saves me a job )

[Tallwood_6]

HP elite 8200 core i5 4gb ram 120gb SSD 3 year warrenty well under £450 excl vat for just the base unit keyboard and mouse.