Why you should consider a Solid State Drive investment

Many gamers and power users know that for better performance, you need better and more powerful hardware. There was a time during the 80s and 90s where hardware improvements flowed thick and fast. In the span of a year, processors could end up double as fast as their predecessors, while graphics power kept on increasing year-on-year, with 3D games blowing minds as they continued to be better and more splendorous.

The ever-advancing tech industry may have left a lot of good things behind, but in their place faster, better, and more capable systems popped up. CERN’s little research project created the World Wide Web. IRC chat rooms and news servers gave way to forums, social networking sites, and torrents. 56k dial-up gave way to (in some countries) world-class Gigabit ethernet using fiber cables. 8-track cassette tapes gave way to Compact Disks and finally the iPod.

In every case where old technology was replaced, the new thing always improved on it and had huge benefits.

Today the slowest component in your computer is the hard disk drive – but why should you stick to one of these anyway? Below is a table summarising the benefits of the modern-day solid-state drive (SSD):

Solid State Drives (SSD) are, pretty much, like a giant flash drive. They store information in binary format by using electricity to change the state of memory cells to represent 0 and 1. They are composed entirely of memory chips and electrical circuits and contain no moving parts.

They are impervious to shock damage and vibrations and consume very low amounts of power. They have incredibly fast seek times, searching for information and returning results in split-seconds because everything operates at lightning speed (literally, because the whole thing is electrical).

The hard drive platters on the spindle and the read/write heads poised above them.

Mechanical hard-disk drives (HDD) by contrast, can be considered an evolution of the vinyl LP. They store information physically in binary format on spinning platters covered in a magnetic material, using electromagnets on the tiny heads to change the state of the magnetic material on the platter to represent 0 and 1. They are composed of the rotating platters, drive heads positioned micro-millimeters from the platter’s surface and contain many moving parts, including two electric motors – one drives the head, one moves the platters on a spindle.

They can be shock-damaged, vibrations can cause data destruction, and they consume relatively large amounts of power – at least compared to a SSD. Seek times are slow, requiring the drive head to move to a place on the platter to read information, returning results in seconds.

In today’s fast-paced world, we have obscene amounts of computing power and more efficiency than ever. We’re slowly abandoning disk-based media and at the rate we’re going, we’ll soon be chucking our hard drives away too before the decade is over.  With an SSD, combining the low seek times with the high read and write speeds, almost any system can be given a monumental speed boost, sometimes giving rigs close to ten years old a new life.

Intel X25-M SSD

SSDs can be used to improve server performance, enable completely silent operation for your HTPC, lower overall system power consumption and increase usability and system responsiveness. If you’re a power user reading this, you’re already thinking about investing in one because it means less time waiting and more time getting stuff done. If you’re a gamer, you’ll definitely see some drop in level load times and installing games as well as your other apps.

In most cases, the first thing people are told to upgrade when they get a new computer is the RAM, because you can never have to much of it. Today, I think that SSDs should be the first port of call for someone looking to upgrade their computer’s performance. Despite the higher prices per gigabyte, the benefits really do outweigh the cost when it comes to this particular component.

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