# You should go with Solid State Drives



## 8675309

Although the price is a bit higher Solid State is worth the cost. You can get faster boot times with most and you get a drive that can handle the harsh automotive environment. 

Review: Hard disk vs. solid-state drive -- is an SSD worth the money? - Computerworld

Solid-state drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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## eviling

although he didnt make much of an argument lol i am on his side, ssd is where things are going, i woudlnt do a carputer with hdd


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## wecode420

eviling said:


> although he didnt make much of an argument lol i am on his side, ssd is where things are going, i woudlnt do a carputer with hdd


for sure or do a PCI-E drive witch is even better then SSD


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## 8675309

I have used the HDD 2 times and both failed. I have been using an SSD now and I am sold on them so I agree with you 100%. Now on that note I have a friend that has used 3 HDD over the last 7 years in his truck and the last one has been going for 4 years and he is not easy on it. One thing cool on the other side of speed is the g-force shock rating on SSD. In a car with good suspension this is not a major issue. In a truck or off-road vehicle on rough roads this is a plus. Cold weather also plays a part in why an SSD should be used. 

In the automotive environment SSD is the way to go.




eviling said:


> although he didnt make much of an argument lol i am on his side, ssd is where things are going, i woudlnt do a carputer with hdd


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## 8675309

small case options are limited for this option but this case would work

Black Box Mobile PCI Mini ITX Case for Carputer Car PC with PCI Slot

I like the PCI-E option. I have looked at it many times but never jumped on it because of price or space. Although price seems to be inline with SSD at this point.




wecode420 said:


> for sure or do a PCI-E drive witch is even better then SSD


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## gregory_

Can't wait until SSD's are the norm so they're cheaper. But yes, an SSD is an amazing upgrade, programs open almost instantly.


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## eviling

wecode420 said:


> for sure or do a PCI-E drive witch is even better then SSD


their the same thing with a different interface. faster speeds, but they really are going to waste for anybody not in a data server situation, we aren't transfering up and down that much data, it's a waste of speed.




gregory_ said:


> Can't wait until SSD's are the norm so they're cheaper. But yes, an SSD is an amazing upgrade, programs open almost instantly.


my gaming rigs 3 years old and my programs open instantly...thats on a standard hard drive. please quit giving out false information.


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## kyheng

gregory_ said:


> Can't wait until SSD's are the norm so they're cheaper. But yes, an SSD is an amazing upgrade, programs open almost instantly.





eviling said:


> my gaming rigs 3 years old and my programs open instantly...thats on a standard hard drive. please quit giving out false information.


Both also wrong..... Must see the CPU and other hardwares used.... Just blind reply like this are very misleading....


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## minbari

think this pretty much says it all. seek time on a Solid state device is gonna be better than a mechanical drive and it shows for random reads. for writes and for sequencial read/writes, the mecanical drive actually out performed it slightly.

Review/Performance tests of 32GB SSD vs 10,000 RPM (VelociRaptor and Raptor) hard disks


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## eviling

kyheng said:


> Both also wrong..... Must see the CPU and other hardwares used.... Just blind reply like this are very misleading....


im saying ssd doesnt make a machine, well planned out parts do. nothing misleading about it.


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## kyheng

^Is it? But your first statement said otherwise.....


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## basshead

eviling said:


> im saying ssd doesnt make a machine, well planned out parts do. nothing misleading about it.


ill have to say that you're wrong here too...

What's is the bottleneck in todays PC, yup IO, and that's where SSD come into play. You take a 3-4 yo machine add a SSD and the experience will be way better than any recent machine with traditional HDD. 

And about the PCI-E card, newer SSD drive that fully use the 6gbps sata bus can compete with those cards.

For me in a car, i would use both, SSD for the OS and HDD for the DATA. This way you have plenty of space for all those files, the machine will still boot and react super fast and if the HDD fail you only need to replace it and load all the tunes on it again.


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## basshead

minbari said:


> think this pretty much says it all. seek time on a Solid state device is gonna be better than a mechanical drive and it shows for random reads. for writes and for sequencial read/writes, the mecanical drive actually out performed it slightly.
> 
> Review/Performance tests of 32GB SSD vs 10,000 RPM (VelociRaptor and Raptor) hard disks


that was back in 2008, todays SSD drive like the OCZ Vertex 3 will be 4 times faster than those drives.


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## 8675309

Yep SATAIII is a plus when it comes to this. Everyone should remember that you need to purchase a board that supports SATAIII 6gbps if you plan on using a drive that can do it. The key things that stand out for me in the carputer environment when using an SSD is reliability and boot speed and in that order. 



basshead said:


> And about the PCI-E card, newer SSD drive that fully use the 6gbps sata bus can compete with those cards.


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## 8675309




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## eviling

basshead said:


> ill have to say that you're wrong here too...
> 
> What's is the bottleneck in todays PC, yup IO, and that's where SSD come into play. You take a 3-4 yo machine add a SSD and the experience will be way better than any recent machine with traditional HDD.
> 
> And about the PCI-E card, newer SSD drive that fully use the 6gbps sata bus can compete with those cards.
> 
> For me in a car, i would use both, SSD for the OS and HDD for the DATA. This way you have plenty of space for all those files, the machine will still boot and react super fast and if the HDD fail you only need to replace it and load all the tunes on it again.



your boot is faster...your transfers are faster, but a CPU upgrade will still yeild more notible results than a HD upgrade. we aren't transfering all that much, we also aren't booting more than once a day for most of us, great in laptop. BUT a car does boot many times a day...this IS the only true gain to this in a carputer. aside from the stirdy more durable platform of an ssd compared to a spinning disk at 7800 rpm's


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## basshead

eviling said:


> but a CPU upgrade will still yeild more notible results than a HD upgrade


I have to disagree, ill give it to you if your going from a single core P4 to the latest i7 yeah the speed and multicore difference will be very noticeable, but if you have a machine with lets say a C2D E6600 (2.4GHz) and add a average performing SSD, for the average user the machine will feel faster than the latest i7 machine they bought at bestbuy. 

With the arrival of multicore cpu on the market, processing power became a lot less relevant for day to day computing. What software use 100% of CPU that's used by most user on a daily basis, none... So like i mention earlier the major bottle neck is now the HDD.

We were up for a desktop refresh at the office and I decided to trial 5 machine with SSD upgrade before going with the traditional replace all machine, the feedback that i got was so good that we went ahead with the project. Also 2 of my test users told me that it was faster than their less than a year old computer they got at home (laptop with i5 and 7200 drive, desktop with i3 and 7200 drive). With this and personal experience, I went ahead with the replacement of all the HDD with SSD. So for a 1/4 less than new machine, i double the life of the machine and helped reduce ewaste. Yes the machine are out of warranty, but the main piece that goes first is the HDD and in the long run if we have to replace a few parts it will be still way cheaper than buying new PC.

For gaming,video editing or any other high CPU usage app the processor speed matter, but not for a carPC even running 4way processing since a cheap multicore Atom cpu can do the job.


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## Carson Dyle

IMO, it'a s pretty simple equation:

SSD for OS, applications and most application data. Faster system boots, faster application load times, and more robust.

HDD for large amounts of data. In my car, 1 TB for audio files in FLAC. I imagine the failure rate in a car PC environment may be marginally higher than use in, say, a notebook, but not terribly so.

Since all data on the HDD comes from my home file server, loss of the drive wouldn't be catastrophic, and other apps on the PC, like the navigation system, wouldn't be affected. If you're not storing media files like audio and video on the SSD, it doesn't need to be large at all - a 32 to 40 GB drive is more than large enough.


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## Ultimateherts

8675309 said:


> I have used the HDD 2 times and both failed. I have been using an SSD now and I am sold on them so I agree with you 100%. Now on that note I have a friend that has used 3 HDD over the last 7 years in his truck and the last one has been going for 4 years and he is not easy on it. One thing cool on the other side of speed is the g-force shock rating on SSD. In a car with good suspension this is not a major issue. In a truck or off-road vehicle on rough roads this is a plus. Cold weather also plays a part in why an SSD should be used.
> 
> In the automotive environment SSD is the way to go.


There are ways to enclose the HD that would help greatly in terms of vibration.


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## jdc753

I would certainly not argue against SSD drives being great in a car environment but I just want to add my experience so that some don't think that SSD drives are you only option. 


When I built my car pc several years back this was a hot debate still, but SSD drives were fairly new and the time, and most would suggest using laptop 2.5" drives in the car due to vibration resistance. So when I built mine I figured I would throw in an already old drive just to see how things would stand up and if the drive failed I wouldn't be out any cash really, so in went my already 7 year old Maxtor 120GB drive (that I bought when 120GB was the bigger of the drives available) also this is an old school IDE drive, not even SATA or SATA II.

Now I am happy to report this drive is still rocking in my truck and its been through some pretty rough times. I have found that firing up the PC in the truck after it has sat overnight in single digit temps takes a couple fires of the power button before it will kick on, but it always kicks on. Also for vibrations all I did was mount the drive vertically instead of horizontally and it has survived the rough ride of my F350 pickup for the 2+ years it has been running. I have actually found where if I hit bumps harder than everyday driving I could make the music skip, however the drive is still running flawlessly. 

Maybe I have just had good luck, but the drive is now 10 years old and has been used all of its life, 7 of those years in my desktop, and now almost 3 years in my truck through New England winters and a rough ride of an F350. I must say I almost hate to remove it for a more advanced piece of hardware since it just straight up works. So my 2cents are to those building a car PC and worrying about what to use, don't discount the regular HD cause they just may work for you.


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## basshead

jdc753, older drives have their advantage, the data density on the disk is much less than newer drives, right now they are able to put 1TB on a single platter, back then it was around 30GB so the newer drives are much more sensible. 

Small note, expect a major price increase for HDD soon, the flood in Thailand is affecting production...


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## Wesayso

minbari said:


> think this pretty much says it all. seek time on a Solid state device is gonna be better than a mechanical drive and it shows for random reads. for writes and for sequencial read/writes, the mecanical drive actually out performed it slightly.
> 
> Review/Performance tests of 32GB SSD vs 10,000 RPM (VelociRaptor and Raptor) hard disks


Around the time this was published even a normal 7200 rpm hdd in raid stripe could outperform the raptors, be cheaper and bigger. My PC is from 2008 and still running smooth with raid 0 and 1 on WD 640 GB disks. The PC before that used raid as well. SSD is going to be faster in random read but if you want to write data just use raid as a cheap alternative. I'm using software raid since 2003 om my home PC's. It's even faster than most cheap motherboards with onboard raid. Here's an example of my swap drive (red one is a raid 0 partition on my 2 sata disks):








I did this test back in 2008 when I set this PC up. Raid 1 (mirror) was just a bit slower than the raptor drive. Access times are the same, my disks beat the raptor while beeing cheaper and have much more space.
I'm an IT manager by trade so I've been using tricks like this for a long time.
For the car I'd go with a SSD drive though. PC? not sure, a raid config with 4 drives is fun! SSD in raid would even be more fun but expensive.

(label reads software raid 1 but this was a test of my stripe partition. OS is running in software raid, stripe is used for swap files, temp etc.)
Here's the numbers:









In windows 7 (at least the Pro version) you can do software raid 0 and 1 as standard. For win XP there's a raid hack using the same setup as win 2003 server (raid 0 (stripe) is standard, raid 1 (mirror) uses the hack). Vista, I never looked at because that was some ****ty release...

The only thing faster back then was SCSI 15K drives in raid.


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## audiovibe

FWIW if I ever do another carpc instal in my own vehicle I will definitely use another SSD. My last install used a full install of windows XP with 2gb of ram. It took 48 seconds from a cold boot to riderunner. I swapped out the HDD for a SSD and the boot time with a full win XP install dropped to 13 seconds from cold to riderunner playing music. Just the boot time alone was worth the added cost in my eyes.


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## Wattser93

I'd be careful running RAID in a car PC. If one drive in RAID 0 fails, your content is lost.

SSDs are nice though. They don't make any noise, you don't have to worry about sudden motion sensors to protect the drive, and they're blazing fast. At $1.50+ per gig, they are expensive. Especially for those of you with complete FLAC collections.


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## AVIDEDTR

Dropped an SSD from Kingston in my 4 year old Mac Book Pro....Holy Sh!t....MUCH BETAH!!!!


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## eviling

Wattser93 said:


> I'd be careful running RAID in a car PC. If one drive in RAID 0 fails, your content is lost.
> 
> SSDs are nice though. They don't make any noise, you don't have to worry about sudden motion sensors to protect the drive, and they're blazing fast. At $1.50+ per gig, they are expensive. Especially for those of you with complete FLAC collections.


but you can loose a single drive in raid 5 and you only need 3 drivers to run raid 5


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## Wattser93

eviling said:


> but you can loose a single drive in raid 5 and you only need 3 drivers to run raid 5


Lol. RAID 5 isn't quite mainstream though. Most people don't know RAID 0 and 1, let alone RAID 5.


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## eviling

Wattser93 said:


> Lol. RAID 5 isn't quite mainstream though. Most people don't know RAID 0 and 1, let alone RAID 5.


we are the 1% here friend. we don't buy things, we build things :laugh:


besides setting up raid is setting up raid, be it 0, 1, or 5. the only difference is in the putting. you need to know what they are refered to by the motherboard too, sometimes they call them stripped and stripped with redundancy and stuff like that.


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## klutchmaster427

Obviously SSD is the only way to go!
No moving parts, so they are shock proof. Literally just an oversized flash drive.


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## 8675309

Raid is cool but not the ideal thing for car. Why not purchase 2 SSD drives and build the pc as you need. Ghost an image of the primary drive and if it ever fails you can put the ghosted drive in and be ready to go instantly.


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## Wattser93

Or you can do RAID, and then do wifi backups to an external when your car is in the driveway.  It would only take one big initial backup, and from then on, the incremental backups wouldn't take very long. 

So once a weak you'd just have to activate the backup, sit for a few minutes while your car warms up in the morning, and you'd have it backed up by the time the windows are defrosted.


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## Wattser93

klutchmaster427 said:


> Obviously SSD is the only way to go!
> No moving parts, so they are shock proof. Literally just an oversized flash drive.


Not quite. The read/write speeds of SSDs are far faster than that of a flash drive.

XBench of my Apple 512GB SSD, Toshiba Gen 1, a slow SSD compared to SATA3 SSDs (it was salvaged for free, there's much better SSDs out there)

XBench of my 32GB Sandisk Cruzer (slow POS... wouldn't have bought it had I know it was so slow)


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## zreon

My first carpc build I had used a standard 2.5" laptop harddrive. After about 4 years of the florida heat, it started to give issues. Not too shabby if you ask me. However, this time around I will definitely use ssd.


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## ChrisB

I dropped a Samsung 830 series 256 GB SSD in my business laptop and man does that thing ever fly. Even with bitlocker enabled, I don't notice a performance hit when utilizing business applications.


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## nobb

I live in Canada where the biggest problem I have to design for is the -40C winters. The OCZ SSD that I've used before started having issues below -10C. Right now I'm using a pair of 80GB Seagate EE25 automotive grade drives which are rated down to -30C and I havent yet had a hiccup. When I first got started CarPC'ing I used standard hard drives, but they never really stood up to the winters very well and after a few months they always started developing bad sectors. 

I would like to eventually switch to SSDs, but the $/GB doesnt really seem to have gone down much in the last few years.


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## ndinadis

Just got a Muskin 120gb SATA 6GB drive for christmas.
Things things crazy, I bought the fastest WD black drive I could find (120mbps read/write) this will do 550mbps read 500 write.
Its funny loading things, it just happens no thinking, no more mechanical drive thrashing.


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## MarkZ

eviling said:


> although he didnt make much of an argument lol i am on his side, ssd is where things are going, i woudlnt do a carputer with hdd


Why not? I've been using and installing traditional hard drives in car PCs for about 12 years. I've never had a problem. Not even a single bad sector. HDDs are surprisingly fine with vibrations and bumps. Heat is the killer, and SSDs are not immune to this problem.

The one area where I think SSDs can be useful in the car environment (aside from boot times) is extreme cold. Mechanical hard drives tend to stop working below about 17 or 18 degrees F (Seagates actually seem to do a little better in this regard according to my testing). My understanding is that not all SSDs have this issue.


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## LGHT_

I don't have any doubt that SSD are faster hands down, but I have a ton of 2.5 160gb laptop drives laying around and wanted to take advantage of using what I have instead of buying new stuff. Since my case is an ATX cube that is made for 3.5 full drives I was thinking about making some sort of foam cushion housing that I can slide the drive into to help cut back on bounces. However my ride isn't that smooth especially with 22" wheels and low profiles on it. 

Anyone try and just cushion a drive?


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## ndinadis

I dont know about the foam idea as drives can get warm and you wouldnt want to cause any damage by getting it hot, I have seen people use suspension mounts in computer cases for sound deadening, this would probably work well in the car as well. 
Hard Drive Silencing: Sandwiches & Suspensions | silentpcreview.com


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## LGHT_

ndinadis said:


> I dont know about the foam idea as drives can get warm and you wouldnt want to cause any damage by getting it hot, I have seen people use suspension mounts in computer cases for sound deadening, this would probably work well in the car as well.
> Hard Drive Silencing: Sandwiches & Suspensions | silentpcreview.com


Well if you look at the pic in the link they actually have foam between the drive. I build HTPC's on the side for clients and I always use a then layer of foam and rubber grommets to mount the drive. However I really like that "suspension" way even better. For 1 drive it's fine, but in my HTPC I have 6 1TB drives so no way would that work. 

I think I'm gonna go forward with my existing drive since it's just laying around collecting dust. If it doesn't work then I'll just pay for a SSD drive.


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## MarkZ

Ugh, that foam looks like a nightmare waiting to happen.

It would be neat if someone (not me  ) could do some temperature testing.


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## ndinadis

LGHT_ said:


> Well if you look at the pic in the link they actually have foam between the drive. I build HTPC's on the side for clients and I always use a then layer of foam and rubber grommets to mount the drive. However I really like that "suspension" way even better. For 1 drive it's fine, but in my HTPC I have 6 1TB drives so no way would that work.
> 
> I think I'm gonna go forward with my existing drive since it's just laying around collecting dust. If it doesn't work then I'll just pay for a SSD drive.


Yeah I noticed the foam in their first pic, in you media pc's have you ever had an issue with drives getting warm? 
I really like the suspension mount too, I am considering taking out my drive cage, sticking my ssd on the back panel and suspending the drives in the remaining 5.25 slots


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## LGHT_

ndinadis said:


> Yeah I noticed the foam in their first pic, in you media pc's have you ever had an issue with drives getting warm?


In HTPC's the cases are actually HUGE and use the same type of drive cage setup as the HP Storage Works SANS so you can run raid as needed. My current HTPC has 2 really big fans just for the drives so heat is never an issue.


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## Kazimir

I am running a Crucial M4 128Gb and it was well worth it. Currently have everything on the 1 drive. Then I start porting more media over, I am looking at getting a USB3 256GB external SSD (Easy to pull from the car, update on home PC, and reconnect 1 wire and the carPC is ready to go again).

The speeds of the M4 are insane. Win7 32 Ultimate heavily tweaked for the OS. Current cold boot times are 17 secs from the power button till music playing in RR. The biggest killer I have is bios. 10-11 seconds bios time and 6-7 seconds for Win7 to load. The boot speed alone makes it worth it, not including the 0 lag in the system.


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## kenikh

Even my home machines run SSD now. I've got a pre UEFI BIOS CarPc running Windows 8 Developer Preview and it boots from COLD to Desktop in 8 SECONDS flat. My factory head unit takes that long to boot!


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## fetoma

No moving parts is the #1 benefit!


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## bmmark

For mobile use it makes sense too because of no issues with vibrations, which can damage regular HDD's. But other than that, personally for me, it isn't worth the gain in speed versus the space on in and the cost.... 1TB HDD costs maybe 100 USD and 128GB SSD cots more....256GB SSD's even more so at over 300 USD.


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## MarkZ

What's the purpose of 1TB in the car? Movies for passengers?


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## ninja6o4

MarkZ said:


> What's the purpose of 1TB in the car? Movies for passengers?


Yup. Very handy on road trips. I run a 64gb SSD for boot and have a 500GB 2.5" seagate for data. The 500 is full with ~40gb music library and 450gb in HD movies, tv shows, music videos, etc. I could use SD media instead of HD, but I would rather continue my quest in the search for a 7" 720p touchscreen.. 

I'm seriously contemplating some rom/mame software for those lonely afternoons at the mall with the wife..


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## MarkZ

Very cool. I don't store videos on mine. If I go on a road trip, I pack a few on a thumb drive.

So what options are there for SD? My OS is small (minimal XP install). I'd love to get a small SSD for it (or is there something even smaller, physically?) and let the ~100GB of music + GPS come off something more portable, like an SD slot. I'm not sure what's out there these days. Been using mechanical HDDs forever. If I can manage to dump the hard drive, I could fit the motherboard in a much more convenient spot.


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## ninja6o4

MarkZ said:


> Very cool. I don't store videos on mine. If I go on a road trip, I pack a few on a thumb drive.
> 
> So what options are there for SD? My OS is small (minimal XP install). I'd love to get a small SSD for it (or is there something even smaller, physically?) and let the ~100GB of music + GPS come off something more portable, like an SD slot. I'm not sure what's out there these days. Been using mechanical HDDs forever. If I can manage to dump the hard drive, I could fit the motherboard in a much more convenient spot.



Sorry, I meant Standard Definition vs High Definition videos, lol!! I love HD, so I need the space of a regular HDD still.

Regarding *S*SD, the standard is 2.5", but there is a 1.8" form factor as well. Of course there's always a premium on that. (See OCZ's offering here, among others)

Regarding SD (the media card, not the 480p variety  ), they do make em as big as 128GB nowadays.. but at a premium, naturally.


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## MarkZ

If 128GB USB sticks came down in price, I'd grab one to hold music, and boot from one of those 16GB 1.8" SSDs. They look small enough to not add much thickness to the mainboard if I can build a mount for it.

But alas, I'm cheap!


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## marvnmars

I saw this today, not a bad price at all on a decent sized ssd Corsair Force 3 120GB 2.5" SATA III Solid State Drive - CSSD-F120GB3-BK Total Price Shipped: $129.99

Buy.com - Corsair Force 3 120GB 2.5" SATA III Solid State Drive


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## Khymera-B

I recently purchased a Macbook Pro 15 w/ 256 SSD. Gotta say, I love it. Loads so fast it seems almost as if its always on and ready.


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## Vecktor

You can pick up an older Intel X25-V 40GB SSD used on eBay for about $50. SSDs are definitely much better choices than mechanical drives for car applications. With no moving parts, they are immune to vibration and shock, unlike traditional mechanical hard drives which don't handle vibration & bumps well at all.


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## Vecktor

I'd also avoid PCI-E hard drives for car PCs - when used in the high-vibration and shock environment of a moving car, PCI cards can come loose and fail or even potentially destroy your motherboard (a loose card can short out the entire board).


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## req

i got a 120gb drive for $90 a few weeks ago. my carpc boots from hybernate to resume with music from the speakers in 11 seconds.


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