Hard Disk Drive, Desktop, Computers

SSD - Solid Investment.

Solid State Drives (SSD) have been around for a few years in the commercial market, and they are building more and more hype as time goes on. The fabled drives are shock-proof, beautifully light on battery usage, and perform so much faster than your standard Hard Disk Drive (HDD) it might just make your head explode. Or so the marketing goes. To top it all off, the cheapest of these amazing gadgets will only set you back a cool, inexpensive $14/GB, or $449 for a low-performance 32 GB IDE drive (Team Group TG032G-S24I01S). Go up to an entry-level SATA II 64 GB drive and the price is nearly $18/GB, or $1,149 (OCZ OCZSSD2-1S64G). Before we examine the pros and cons of SSD, let's take a look at that price, shall we? The most expensive HDD costs less than $1.50/GB. The average price for a notebook HDD is $.45 - $.60/GB, depending on the size and speed. A 200 GB hard drive can be had for anywhere from $95 - $180. Desktop HDDs average between $.20 - $.30/GB, or less than $300 for a 1 TB (that's 1,000 GB) drive. SSDs got their start years ago in military applications. When you are on a battlefield, you need a computer that behaves accordingly. You don't have time to worry about things like not shaking the computer, and a fragile disk read head is the last thing you want to have managing sensitive, vital data. Of course, computers purchased for use on the battlefield are purchased by the government, so cost is not really a factor. $50,000 for a shock-proof computer is pocket change when you have multi-billion dollar contracts with weapons, armor, and vehicular research companies. Of course, the number of shock-proof computers that were needed dwindled pretty fast once that initial run had been purchased, so SSD makers started looking for other clients, but they realized that a $10,000 disk drive probably wouldn't fly quite as well with the average consumer as it did with Uncle Sam. Price cuts were necessary, but SSD makers believed that the advantages of SSDs would be sufficient to offset some of the sticker shock when compared to regular HDDs... more>>>