For those of you not in the know, SSD’s, or Solid State Disks, are a new high storage medium that is quickly replacing hard drives in laptops like the Macbook Air because of its small form factor and low power consumption. But the cost to upgrade worth it for the average PC user? We take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of SSD’s after the jump.
Most SSD’s use flash memory, giving them several advantages over standard hard drives:
- Lower Power Consumption - the average SSD consumes .5 watts of power during read operations and 1 watt of power during write operations.
- No moving parts - SSD’s contain no moving parts, this means increased reliability over standard hard drives.
- No Noise - thanks to aforementioned lack of moving parts.
- Faster Startup - up to 30x faster; SSD’s don’t need to spin up like their magnet based counterparts.
- Extremely Fast Read and Seek times
Despite the many advantages SSD’s have compared to standard hard drives, hard drives still have a few added benefits:
- Price - Standard hard drives have an average cost of less than $.40 per a gb while SSD’s cost an average of $3.50 per a gb.
- Capacity - Hard drives currently have larger capacities available. With the largest hard drive reaching in at whopping 1.5tb and the largest SSD available weighs in at 128gb. Though, with the rapid advancement of SSD technology this may soon change.
So should you upgrade? People attempting to maximize the performance of their high-end machines may feel the cost is justified. The average PC user, however, will want to wait until prices come down significantly before jumping on the SSD wagon.
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SSD’s, right now, are good for two things. Incredibly fast boot ups, and rugged machines. Laptops for the average klutz would benefit from an SSD, but not much else. Those that want ultra-fast response from their OS’s might install it on an SSD, or have media waiting on an SSD, but honestly, not all that useful now considering the cost.