I've been wanting one for a while. Prices have finally come down to a level that makes good sense, and it seemed like a good way to celebrate the birth of my son. So instead of finishing the birth story I've been promising for how long now... I've been installing a solid state hard drive into my computer. It will help it run faster, so I can finish the birth story sooner (right!)

Installing a SSD is hardly enough of a reason for an entry. However, I did some reading and ran across some other good ideas of things to do for SSD installs. There's a general fear that all flash media has a limited number of write cycles, which while true is hardly a concern these days. Something to comfort you: if the media is worn to where you can't write to it anymore, you can still read what is on it. That said, computers these days write a lot of files. One big source is web browser cache. Everything you look at in firefox/chrome/IE/safari/lynx/your browser of choice is saved on your hard drive some some period of time to save time in case you reqhdpauest the same exact thing again. This way if you go to a site that uses the same images in the banner across multiple pages your browser only needs to load it one time. So a great solution for data like this, that is data you can toss at any time, is to use a RAM drive. Not only is it lightning fast, but there's no fear of "wearing out" RAM. So if you have lots of spare RAM, try making a ram drive for your browser (or other) caches.