Originally Posted by
WIRunner
Few years ago I swapped out a platter hard drive for a ssd from crucial. I won't say that it didn't last long, but the life expectancy was much shorter than anticipated. It was easy enough, and they sell a cloning kit for like $15 that copies everything, and there was no windows activation needed. (Oddly, I could never get web root to work on it again.)
A cheap alternative would be just getting a low profile usb flash drive Amazon has them on sale for a reasonable amount for the size.
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-...C1S0CWBW98EEQ7
The longevity of SSDs has improved dramatically over the last few years, and now approaches (and in the "rough use" arena, definitely exceeds) that of regular "spinny" hard drives. I've been using SSDs exclusively in my laptops for the last 2 years and don't have any intention of going back.
USB flash drives won't offer the same performance as SSDs. Even USB3 isn't as fast as SATA3, and you'll find that the controllers built into flash drives aren't generally as intelligent at I/O operations as SSDs. For example, the flash drive you referenced supports a read speed of 120MB/s while a SATA3 SSD supports up to 550MB/s. That's a very noticeable difference on today's hardware.