Complete Systems Design Information Technology Solutions

November 14, 2011

Sold State Drives are starting to pick up steam although Intel will not be the consumer base player for SSDs it once had been.  

The question is, are they worth the price? Consumer level SSD drives can be as much as 20 times as expensive per megabyte as their old spindle drive counterparts. As they are a new technology, there are some kinks to work out despite their incredible speed benefits. The speed gain is undeniable as a SSD computer can often boot in 1/10th the time as a nearly identical system with spindle drives and the apps load in a blink of the eye.

One advantage of SSD is that they shouldn't be as susceptible to damage from falls as spindle hard drives. On the other hand some solid state drives do not yet support TRIM and other refinements which ensure your ability to use them long term as they have a limited number of writes before they become far less functional. Most have an extremely high number so some people who exchange their systems ever 3 years should be fine however some who believe a computer that is 5 years old is a "new" computer may start to experience issues.

OCZ Revodrives are some of the fastest SSD drives available and are some of the most expensive. Many people (myself included) have experienced issues with the units completely stopping to work completely. Some say the issue is the Sandforce controller. I've also had experiences where they lose their RAID configuration and just resetting makes them functional again.  OCZ will be rolling out drives soon with a different brand controller; hopefully they will be more reliable.  OCZ makes more than one type of SSD drive including both SATA drives that go in your drive bays and PCIe SSDs that go in your PCI express slot directly on your motherboard.

Samsung makes some of the most recommended SSD drives for reliability however they aren't the fastest. On the plus side, they still blow the doors off old spindle hard drives for performance.  

With any drives, I recommend backing up often. Since spindle drives are very inexpensive per megabyte I recommend backing up to an old spindle drive even if you have a really fast SSD drive.  Many people as of late have had bad luck with spindle drives from major manufacturers so as SSDs mature, they will probably be far more reliable than spindle drives.

SSDs on a laptop may usually don't need to be too large so a 256GB SSD would be fine for most people unless you need to keep a copy of your video and/or movie collection on your laptop.  On my computer I have my OS, documents, swap file and applications all installed on my SSD card but my movies and music are stored on much cheaper spindle drives where they run just fine.   You may wish to combine technologies on your PC.   I'll be reviewing hybrid drives shortly which are part SSD and part spindle which are often faster than standard spindle drives and not much more expensive but not nearly as fast as SSD for everything.