I recently purchased a new laptop. I'm not an Apple guy, so I went over to Dell to do some building. One of my favorite pastimes is building things online -mostly things I'll never be able to afford. When it came to the hard drive section, I noticed an option I'd never seen before: 128 Gb Solid State Drive (SSD). "Faster! More reliable! Lighter! Consumes less power!", it said.
Being the semi-geek that I am (I played D&D when I was younger; full geeks are still playing at my age...), I got all tingly. As is often the case with new technology, the SSD drive was both significantly more expensive than the others, and smaller, so I got to researching. In the end, I decided to pony up the extra cash for the little bugger. Why? Well, um... it's faster, more reliable, lighter, and consumes less power.
I've been using my SSD drive for about three months. Full details and reflections are after the jump...
Solid state drives offer a number of advantages. Ordinary hard drives have to spin up and down in their information
reading/writing process. Not so for solid state drives. What does
this mean? For one, the seek times on solid state
drives are vastly superior. Consider this- the fastest drive you can
put in a laptop generally runs at 7200 rpm (and there goes your battery
life). The fastest drive you can put in a computer is 10,000 rpm. The
solid state drive whoops the 10k drive speed-wise. No more
waiting. Secondly, because the drive doesn't require a motor
to run, it consumes less energy, translating into longer battery life from
your laptop!
Because solid state drives have no moving parts, your data is also much safer. Routinely used by the military (if that tells you anything) an SSD equipped laptop can take a beating and keep running strong. Solid state drives are also marginally lighter. If you're a mountain bike geek like me, you'll understand that saving a gram here and there means everything. And here's a fun bonus: you can pick up your friend or business partner's state of the art laptop and go "Wow... kinda heavy, huh?".
What's the price for all this goodness? A lot. Throwing that solid state drive in your laptop will run you an extra $300 at least, depending on where you get it. Current prices (as is inevitable with technology) should be dropping significantly this year. Also, don't plan on storing your entire life on these babies just yet, as the biggest one you can throw in your Dell is 128 gigs. Other minuses? Write times tend to be marginally slower, and you can't rewrite to an SSD as many times as you can to a regular hard disk.
But the few drawbacks of current SSD technology will be
addressed as time goes on, and many of them sooner rather than later.
It's only going to get better. So if you're in the market for a new
computer sometime this year (especially a laptop), consider a solid
state drive, and save yourself both time and energy.
Currently offered in certain models from most major computer manufacturing companies. Or if you're a build-it-yourselfer, try CompUSA.
[thx to Rochellesinger for the exploded comparison of a traditional Hard drive (left) and SSD (right)]
Because solid state drives have no moving parts, your data is also much safer. Routinely used by the military (if that tells you anything) an SSD equipped laptop can take a beating and keep running strong. Solid state drives are also marginally lighter. If you're a mountain bike geek like me, you'll understand that saving a gram here and there means everything. And here's a fun bonus: you can pick up your friend or business partner's state of the art laptop and go "Wow... kinda heavy, huh?".
What's the price for all this goodness? A lot. Throwing that solid state drive in your laptop will run you an extra $300 at least, depending on where you get it. Current prices (as is inevitable with technology) should be dropping significantly this year. Also, don't plan on storing your entire life on these babies just yet, as the biggest one you can throw in your Dell is 128 gigs. Other minuses? Write times tend to be marginally slower, and you can't rewrite to an SSD as many times as you can to a regular hard disk.
But the few drawbacks of current SSD technology will be
addressed as time goes on, and many of them sooner rather than later.
It's only going to get better. So if you're in the market for a new
computer sometime this year (especially a laptop), consider a solid
state drive, and save yourself both time and energy. Currently offered in certain models from most major computer manufacturing companies. Or if you're a build-it-yourselfer, try CompUSA.
[thx to Rochellesinger for the exploded comparison of a traditional Hard drive (left) and SSD (right)]
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