Is a SSD worth it?

SSD (Solid State Drives) have hit the market with a small boom. No moving parts, almost instant read times, no heat, and shock resistant. This all sounds like great benefits for Solid State Drives over the classic HDD (Hard Disk Drive) that have heating, read and write heads, and fragile disks spinning at over 7,000 rpm.

But the question is: Is a SSD worth it?

After reading articles on the new SSD, I decided to write an article letting you know the truth. Extremely fast speeds, but extremely expensive and small data storage sizes. SSD’s are being offered in several high end laptops for obvious reasons, No heat, extremely shock resistant(no moving parts), and are faster. Noticed I said high end because yes, you are going to pay for those benefits, which is why the title is called, is a ssd WORTH IT.

At the end of this post is a group that did a test on how fast they could make a computer with SSD Drives. They RAIDed 24 SSD drives together to create a BLAZING fast workstation. My personal opinion on SSD drives is that unless you are doing extremely data intensive tasks I would not recommend them, one for the price, and two for the storage space. The only way I would recommend these drives is for a high end notebook or a Desktop with 2 SSD drives with a  RAID 0 configuration that needs some seriously intense work done on it. A desktop computer with 2 SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration would give you very fast access times for your programs, data files, and boot times. You will need an external SATA drive (or something like it) for your storage of files that you are not constantly accessing. Reason being that SSDs are too small right now for actual storage.

Pros:

• Security - When using the previous HDD, after deleting a file it just tells the system it can write on that space. That doesnt always mean that the next file will write over that space. If for some reason someone buys your computer or HDD and scan it for deleted files, they may be able to uncover data you wanted deleted for good. SSD’s have no tracks of data and when a file is deleted, its deleted.. like really deleted.
• Instant - No initial spin-up is required to start reading data from the drives. Todays fastest HDD do not have anywhere near the read times of todays SSD’s.
• Power - Since the drive does not have to spin disks and move read and write heads, they have less power consumption.
• Shhhh - Also without having to spin disks and heads, there is no sound generated by the SSD’s.
• Durability - classic HDD have read and write heads that float right above the spinning disks (a fraction of a grain of sand!). This makes classic HDD’s easily broken when exposed to shocks, nature, pressure, altitude, and humidity.

Cons:

• Costs - EXPENSIVE!!!! Like earlier mentioned, you will be paying almost $8 per GB of storage over a traditional HDD. This adds up very quickly, especially when using RAID configurations.
• Data Recovery - With the gain of data deletion actually deleting data, this can also cause problems when accidentally deleting a file and trying to recover it. Its gone, like… really gone. (Learn to backup your data).
• Smaller Data Storage - With all the great benefits of a SSD, they are not for storing all of your music and movie files. The biggest size SSD drive at the moment is 256GB, @ $619.00 USD (NewEgg). Did I mention they cost a lot?

All in all, Is a SSD worth it? Not for the average person that surfs the web and does some Word Processing etc. If you are a developer of some sort that makes money on how fast you can manipulate data etc, yes. The upfront cost of a SSD RAID will be paid off within weeks of speeding up your tasks.

Another SSD video:

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