SSD Drives - Should We Change?

[tags]SSD Drives, Solid State Drives [/tags]

Recently some manufacturers like Alienware have started to include Solid State Drives (SDD) in their notebooks. SDDs are a new approach to Hard Drives taken by manufacturers. They are simply flash drives with a large capacity. Current SDDs can come in sizes as big as 32GB. Alienware currently offers a RAID 0 configuration of 32GB SDDs to give you a total drive space of 64GB. Why would you want to have one of these drives? Let’s face it 64GB isn’t enough for most consumers now a days, most Laptops come with at least 120 GB of Hard drive space. Well SDDs offer a lot of advantages to users, obviously, because flash drives don’t have any mechanical parts. One of the biggest problems with regular Hard drives is that they use mechanical parts that slow down the reading and writing process.

The advantages would be:

• Increased OS boot up speed by up to 2 times. Application launch and runtimes are also enhanced.
• Faster writing and seeking times.
• No noise given off by the Hard drive since there aren’t any mechanical parts.
• Increased battery life, again, since there are no mechanical parts.
• SDDs give out a lot less heat than conventional hard drives.
• Performance remains constant throughout the entire drive even when it starts to fill up.

Some disadvantages:

• Price. Getting a RAID 0 64GB drive configuration will go for around $900 dollars whilst you can have a 400GB RAID 0 configuration for about $300 dollars.
• Storage Capacity. This is a big downside. Around 32GB on a single drive configuration.
• Vulnerability to things like abrupt power loss and magnetic fields is greater than with regular hard drives.
• About 200 times less write cycles than regular hard drives. Flash drives allow for around 100k to 300k write cycles whilst regular hard drives allow up to 5 million write cycles.

So there you have it. Is it worth it? Well in my opinion it’s not. There are some configurations that allow you to have an SDD and a regular hard drive, allowing you to have the benefits of both drives. Using the SDD to store things like the OS and your applications and the regular hard drive to store your regular files sounds like a good, although expensive, option.
Users that find the need to run their applications faster (providing they depend on HD speed to run smoothly) should find this as a good solution. Gamers could probably get a lot out of this if the game needs to constantly read from the hard drive to load everything it needs.
For users that require portability and need their battery to last as much as possible, this is also a great option.

I guess it’s all about if you have the money to spare :). Comments welcome.