As the price of Solid State Drives (SSDs) continue to decline, albeit slowly, you may start seeing these types of drives creep into the mainstream PC market.
What are SSDs?
SSDs perform the same basic function as a traditional hard drive (HDD) but use flash-based chips instead of traditional magnetic platters. SSDs and HDDs are where your operating system is installed and all of your pictures and music is stored.
What are the advantages?
SSDs are superior to traditional HDDs for a variety of reasons. The biggest and most talked about advantage in using an SSD instead of a HDD in your computer is the speed. SSDs are capable of transferring data at a much higher speed than HDDs. In fact, in some of the new computers that I’ve built for customers, Windows was able to load in under 15 seconds! According to ServerWatch.com, SSDs typically last two to three times longer than a mechanical HDD. Additionally, because there are no moving parts, power consumption is less and the sound you hear when your hard drive is working is eliminated. They make excellent candidates for laptops because of their resistance to drops, bumps, and g-force (think throwing your laptop on a sofa). Finally, SSDs produce much less heat than HDDs.
Should I get an SSD?
SSDs do have some disadvantages. First, you’ll have a hard time finding SSDs in off the shelf computer systems. If you do find one, or if you decide to do a custom build, you’ll notice that SSDs are much more expensive than HDDs (think ~$175-$200 for a 240GB SSD). Most of the time, I recommend that people get a SSD for their operating system and programs but store their music, photos, and videos on an external hard drive. This allows the user to have benefit from the speed of the SSD but still have ample space to store their files on the external (or internal) HDD.
Please call us today at 931-320-9820 if you’d like to build a new computer with an SSD. You won’t regret it!