Hard Drives are in for a very welcome change.

I have the Sumsung 830 256GB version in this very machine, fast as hell and this is the bottom of the range one using the slower triple level cells that wear out quicker.

The one you are referring to Mike is available for about 134 quid on Amazon

I am in the market for a 1 TB Samsung drive either this one at 455 quid or this one at 351 quid and I can vouch for the Samsung's so far much better than the Crucial M500 I had which died in just fractionally over a year due to poor firmware improperly wear levelling the drive.

It's an issue with SSD's Stu, each memory location can only be written to so many times and then it wears out when it does it's gone, SSD's have to employ some clever address management to average out the number of writes to each and every memory cell across the whole drive, if the writing process was not balanced then some memory locations would die before the rest, rendering the file system corrupt and losing your data.

In earlier SSD's with less clever firmware algorithms this was a real risk and indeed I bought one that did die on me for this reason.

When you have an SSD it is never really in a situation where it is doing nothing, it is always moving data around in order to level the wear in response to writes and erasures, also memory locations have to be explicitly erased before each use which usually makes write times much longer than read times so the disk is always pre-preparing writeable memory locations, to maximise write speed, read speed on the other hand is usually much faster on all types of SSD drive.

To compound these wear issues some modern TLC (triple level cells) can only be written to as few as 1000 times before failure, a TLC cell can store 3 bits per location MLC (multi level cell) 2 bits per location and SLC (single level cell) one bit per location, TLC and MLC are cheaper than the older much more robust SLC .

Typical Program/Erase cycles per memory cell are 5,000 cycles for TLC, 10,000 cycles for MLC and 100,000 cycles for SLC.

I think the Samsung Pro series are still SLC but I could be wrong.

What the 40 GB a day for 10 years means, is that you can keep writing to the drive at a rate that would fill the drive in a week, and then continue overwriting the data on the drive at that rate for 10 years before it will fail, in theory that is.

In practice all kinds of things can affect the lifetime, bugs in the drive controller firmware, radiation, cosmic rays (when you are flying) and just the usage pattern, although even if the disk is nearly full it will move existing data around in order to even out the wear due to writing new data.

All clever stuff and they really make a difference to boot times, my current laptop (an old Lenovo X220) can boot in about 8 seconds from cold and restarts from sleep in about 1 second.

Hope this helps

They exist already Mike and for laptops at that, I link to one above in my first reply http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00LJ3PY...TF8&colid=140LA72A2PEWW&coliid=I2F7VQ9Z1CJTD2 that's the Pro version but I might get the EVO which is only 351 quid.

On my Thinkpad W500 I installed my first SSD from scratch myself, it was a fresh install of the operating system and really there was nothing special about the fact it was an SSD, however I would not advise trying to clone an old conventional drive and operating system onto a new SSD.

The W500 was configured with the 250 GB drive as the boot drive partitioned as drives C: and D: and I also have a 1TB conventional drive in the ultrabay for a total well over 1200 GB.

On my X220 it came equipped with the Samsung drive and all I have done is wiped it and installed Windows 8.1 from scratch, it has been a great machine though and the drive is great as well.

It's a good idea a bit like the ReadyBoost technology, but I don't trust Seagate spinning platters, I had loads of Seagate drives fail on me in years gone by.

Also the price is a little bit steep for a 1TB conventional drive even if it is a 7200 rpm drive.

And you are right static movies and photos won't benefit from an SSD much. the real benefits are in boot times and program load times, like for example Word loads instantly on an SSD or my Visual Studio development tools load in only 4 or 5 seconds.

One exception I find that the SSD helps with photo library tools like Adobe Lightroom anything that speeds up the Lightroom cache and database is a big help although most of the slowness in Lightroom is image rendering.

It is worth your while checking if your laptop supports mSATA i.e. if it has an mSATA internal port, mSATA drives are much much smaller than standard 2.5 inch drives and often mean that a laptop can accept more than one drive, but you have to check that the bios will support booting from an mSATA interface as not all of them do.

Here's an example of an mSATA drive http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-250...UTF8&qid=1422526003&sr=8-2&keywords=msata+ssd

You can even pick up 120 GB mSATA SSD's for less than 60 quid.

I have two, I liked the first one so much

It would be a lot healthier if I hadn't slipped on snow in Jan 2013 and fell back onto my laptop bag that contained both my W500 and my T61 and my Canon S90 compact camera I managed to smash the screens on both laptops and the screen on the S90 as well as bending the frame of the S90.

However I fixed them myself using screens I got from ebay for a total of 100 quid, the laptops are both still in use today although the W500 does run a little hot on Windows 8.1 as 8.1 does not allow switching between integrated graphics and discrete graphics.

My second W500 runs far cooler than the first but I'm running Windows 7 on it (also it does not have integrated webcam) but it's external and internal condition are mint and I bought it for just 150 odd quid 2 years ago

I'm currently thinking about getting a W520, that was the last ThinkPad with a decent keyboard with the correct IBM layout, after that I don't know what I will do, just try to make them last forever I guess Lenovo sadly have destroyed the ThinkPad in recent generations

The W520 allows up to 32 GB of RAM has room for mSATA and 2 standard 2.5 inch drives if you use the ultrabay, realy fancy one but they are rare as hens teeth.

Also thinking about maybe getting an X230 even though it has the crappy new style 6 row keyboard, I just use most of them in docking bays anyway and for the little portable X230 I could live with the crappy keyboard when travelling, but on a workstation replacement like the W500 and W520 I need a real proper keyboard for real work.

My current machine list :-

One T43 (in the phils)
Two T61's
One X220
Two W500's