Flash boot drive recommendation

[dixonpete]

Taking a riff from Tex's Twitter post I've decided to give myself a flash boot drive for Xmas/New Year's. Has anyone had any good experiences? 64GB should be fine I would think for my purposes.

[Texstar]

Taking a riff from Tex's Twitter post I've decided to give myself a flash boot drive for Xmas/New Year's. Has anyone had any good experiences? 64GB should be fine I would think for my purposes.

I don't have any prior experience but I got a Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue.

My Reasons:

1. Established Name Brand. Western Digital been making hard drive storage solutions for many years.
2. A recent review gave it good points for lasting a very long time before failure.
3. Lower defective return rate that OCZ
4. No need to flash the drive. I read some SSD drives may need to be flashed to fix bugs or support certain features.

PCLinuxOS detected the drive without issue. I installed the 2010.12 KDE version on it. I read up on some Firefox, fstab and kernel scheduler tweaks to reduce writes for the drive. It boots from Grub to a fully ready KDE desktop in about 10 seconds. Applications open instantly. I love it. Only downside is they are still pricey per gigabyte. I've seen the 64 gig version around 120 bucks now down from 150 if you can find a place with stock.

[menotu]

This is quite informative dixonpete

http://www.micron.com/products/nand_flash/choosing_nand.html

Another type to consider are the Hybrid devices which incorporate both formats of Nand Flash and "normal" platters - which speeds up access times but also gives the benefit of larger storage.