There's something almost quaint about hard drive technology.
It's an amazing feat of engineering, there no arguing against that, but when
you stop and think about them, hard drives feel almost as if they're left over
from some pre-silicon age, with their moving parts, spinning platters, and
weighty metallic shells. And if they seem a little old fashioned, it's probably
because they are.
SSD (Solid State
Disk)
It's taken a while to get us here since the first USB keys
started to chip away at the old disc-based storage methods, but solid-state
drives (SSDs) are finally big enough that they're capable of replacing
traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). This week, we'll look at the range of SSDs
available on the market and help you decide which, if any, you should spend
your money on.
Solid state drive
(SSD)
Like traditional hard drives, solid state drives are
manufactured by a variety of companies and in a variety of sizes, so choosing
one to buy is a similar process, requiring you to balance a decision about
cost, capacity and manufacturing quality.
One major difference is that most solid state drives come in
a 2.5" form factor, as opposed to the 3.5" of standard hard drives.
Some modern cases have 2.5" bays built in, and some SSDs come with a bay
converter so that they can fit in a 3.5" drive bay. You'll have to check
before you buy whether your case requires a converter and whether the drive
you're buying comes with one, otherwise you'll be left with a drive that slides
around inside your case!
The primary benefit of solid state drives is their superior
access times. Even the slowest solid state drives will outpace a traditional
hard drive, dramatically reducing read times. You won't just see file transfers
complete quicker and thumbnails load faster, you'll also find Windows boots in
less time, and game loading times reduce substantially. The fastest SSDs can
even max out a SATA 6Gb/s connection!
That said, take all read/write speeds with a pinch of salt.
Companies tend to quote theoretical maximums rather than the actual performance
speeds you'd get under normal use. Where possible, we'll give you the
real-world equivalents.
traditional hard
disk drives (HDDs)
The main disadvantage, however, is that SSDs are still
comparatively expensive. You can buy a 1TB HDD for the price of a fairly
bog-standard SSD, and while they make good primary drives, they're a poor
choice if you need lots of storage.
