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Solid State Drives (SSDs) - Revisited
17 October, 2009 in Hard Drives
Solid State Drives (SSDs) have come a long way since we first wrote about them 18 months ago. Where the cheapest of the cheap of these drives used to cost a terrifying $14 per GB, the low end is now available for around $2.65 per GB. High-quality, high-performance drives like the Intel X25-M run around $3.80 per GB.
Even though there is still a significant amount of sticker shock, given the fact that a high-quality 500 GB, 7200 RPM traditional laptop hard disk drive (HDD) only runs around 24 Cents per GB, the decrease in total price makes it worth taking another look at SSDs.
An important caveat before we proceed: While SSDs are significantly faster than HDDs in read speeds, especially reading data that is not written sequentially, many of them have little-to-no increase in write speeds (Good quality 7,200 RPM hard drives average around 75-80 MB/s. SSDs average around 80 MB/s, although a few models have up to 174 MB/s write speeds). For most users, this really doesn't matter, as the read speed is what typically affects everyday use, but for professional video and sound recording, traditional HDDs may still be the best choice, simply because they provide far more disk space (vital for recording work), and the performance-boosting RAID 0 is required by many high-end recording programs regardless of whether SSDs or HDDs are used.
That caveat out of the way, SSD read speed has increased tremendously since last year, with an average read speed of around 250 MB/s - dramatically faster than the average 70 MB/s in a 7200 RPM HDD, and access times are nearly instantaneous, with SSDs typically accessing data within .1 ms, compared to 10 ms on a 7,200 RPM HDD (note that access time is not the same as read time. Access time is just the time it takes to begin reading).
SSD manufacturers are still working on delivering their promise of 10% of the power draw compared to an HDD. Right now, power draw is closer to 37%. Just as we said last year, even though this is a significant drop in power draw, HDDs just aren't that power hungry to begin with, so the increase in battery life is fairly negligible, and they will be negligible even if manufacturers manage to hit that promised 10% mark. In real-world terms, current SSDs can increase a 3-1/2 hour battery life by around 10-15 minutes at most.
SSDs are a much better investment than they were 18 months ago, and they will keep getting better as performance increases and prices decrease. We still highly recommend researching all your options, but we are now far more confident in recommending SSDs to customers who need as much read speed as possible out of their systems.