Typically, the main obstacle to getting on
the SSD ladder has been the price. When you can buy traditional hard drives
offering hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes worth of storage, it's tough to
abandon the old mindset that you buy hard drives for their size, rather than
speed.
However, if you don't want to spend
hundreds of pounds on a hard drive smaller than the one you bought in 1999,
there is an alternative: the Corsair Nova 2. Available at sizes of either 30GB
or 60GB, this isn't an SSD that's going to work as a replacement for any hard
drive except the very smallest, but at prices under $96, it's a relatively
cheap way to try out the format and see how interested you are.
Cheap drives like this are springing up due
to the recent release of the second generation of SandForce-based SSDs.
First-generation models (such as the Nova 2) are being sold off quickly and
cheaply, because they're the same price to manufacture but substantially
slower. Companies want them off shelves as quickly as possible.
Although the 30GB model is perhaps a little
too small to be of any use in a world where a 64-bit Windows installation alone
requires 20GB of space, the 60GB model offers space for your operating system
and any software (although you'll probably want to move your MP3 collection
somewhere else). It'll take some work to manage the amount of free space, but
if you're willing to do so, you can get all the speed benefits of an SSD
without spending loads.
The quoted speeds are perhaps a little
exaggerated, with average write performance clocking in at around 100MB/s. That
still fast enough that you'll see benefits, but be aware that it's not quite as
impressive as it looks on paper.
There's certainly a place for drives of
this class, however, and if you're running a normal hard drive you can get a
massive improvement without spending much money, but unless you've got a good
reason to go for the ultra-thifty 30GB versions, there are better options.
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Details
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Price
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$71.98 - $95.26
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Capacity
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30GB I 60GB
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Read speed
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270MB/S
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Write speed
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220MB/S
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Max power consumption
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1.3W
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Idle power consumption
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0.2W
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