Solid state hard drives are the future. They aren't just a little faster, most of them are at least twice as fast as their mechanical grandparents. If your computer has enough ram, upgrading your primary drive to a SSD is the cheapest way to boost your computer's performance, especially with these deals.
The first thing you need to decide is how much space you actually need. My work station at home has a 256gb SSD in it but it also has 3 other internal standard hard drives as well as an external mini server. I try not to keep any files on my C: drive so that I have room for my applications. If you can live like this, then you will want to check out this SAMSUNG 850 EVO MZ-75E250B/AM 250gb drive on eBay for just $85. This is probably the lowest price I have ever seen on a quality SSD.
Even though it is possible to live with just 250gb on your primary drive, it hasn't been easy for me. Applications and games are getting bigger and bigger and programs like Adobe Premiere love to hide hundreds of gigabytes of "render files" all over the place. I find myself constantly deleting files to free up space and it gets tiresome. That's why my office computer has a 1tb drive SSD in it. If you're in the market for a high capacity SSD look no further than the 500gb or 1TB version of the same card.
If performance is your goal and money is no object, check out the Pro level SSD at Newegg. Use the code EMCAVNP22 at checkout to save an additional $40.
LOVE that these prices are coming down. I'd also like to make a recommendation for Crucial drives. They are occupying the same price points as the 850evo drives.
Pair them with a cheap USB3.0 portable enclosure (saw one today for $14).
Yup I only run Crucial and Sammy drives at the office I work at.
My lightroom library alone is 300GB :/
Hope they can bring a 1TB or 2TB affordable SSD drive soon
If this is from your whole history of shooting, i would suggest splitting it up into years so that you can start archiving them and pulling them out when you need them. This is also a good idea because if your catalog gets corrupt, you can salvage the rest of your years while working on getting back just the year you were working in.
Makes sense Rob. I spent two hours today in splitting in different folders and collections. Now it feels 50x faster.
It doesn't still solve my storage problems... Ideally I can put all the pictures on the main hard drive and then have copies in various external (cheap) hard drives.
Between my SSD and fiber line, there's never really any waiting.