The Pros and Cons of Solid State Drives: An Indepth Outlook To The Latest Technology On The Block

Jonathan Lovelock | Dec 02, 2009 | Comments

ssd2 A lot of computer manufacturers are resorting to use of SSDs in place of the conventional hard disks. SSDs used to be quite expensive but now their prices like many computer peripherals are plummeting. Microsoft has tweaked its newest OS Windows 7 to utilize the speed benefits that SSDs offer and this has also encouraged various manufacturers to introduce new model of SSDs. However, SSDs do not necessarily offer better overall performance compared to regular hard drives with rotational parts.

This is owing to the fact that an SSD reads data faster than conventional hard disks but when it comes to data writing speeds it offers equivalent performance of the standard hard disks. As a result, they are ideal for storing applications and OS but one would not benefit much from these drives in areas like image editing or media encoding. The price difference between a HDD and a SSD is still quite high and this has prevented mass adoption of these drives. For instance, you can buy a 1TB Hard disk for $90 on an average but for a SSD having the same capacity you need to churn out close to $3000. SSDs are ideal for laptop users as they consume much less battery power than the hard disks.

However, the interface supported by a user’s computer needs to be considered before buying an SSD. Computers using older IDE interface will not benefit much after adding an SSD but the SATA enabled systems would offer improved and faster performance. However, a user needs to act carefully before installing an SSD in his laptop or PC. If opening the computer results in nullifying the warranty it will be counterproductive. Some laptops need careful handling and they can get damaged while installing new devices at times. However, it is easier to install SSDs in desktop computers.

Intel has been a pioneer in popularizing SSDs but now other manufacturers like Transcend, Seagate and OCZ have entered the field. Just like the HDDs, the solid state drives also have cache and their amount of cache is much higher. Since the SSDs are devoid of any moving parts their longevity is far better than the HDDs. The OCZ Vertex drive for example, can absorb a shock of 1,500 Gs while traditional HDDs offer 350 to 500Gs. As far as faster system boot and restarts are concerned the SSDs beat the standard Hard disks by a large margin. Even in systems running resource hungry applications and OS, boot time and application load time improves significantly after an SSD is installed.

Some SSDs tend to consume more CPU resource compared to the hard disks though the difference is not significant. Large scale SSD adoption is yet to take place as the SSDs suffer in storage capacity. It is not easy to find SSDs having higher capacity than 500 GB. Therefore the users who need to store huge amount of data and media files in their systems still opt for the hard disks over the SSDs.