If you buy a new processor for your next machine? How about a new graphics card? Have you thought about the status of your storage subsystem? We make a case for the inclusion of solid-state technology, the next refresh shopping.

The verdict is in fans who had their hands on an SSD and felt the difference would not return to the use of a mechanical hard drive as a system disk. The benefits of flash-based storage devices can not be ignored. Their vulnerability (higher prices and a relatively lower capacity) gradually approached by smaller production node, helping to reduce costs and increase storage density.

On the other hand, are negligible access times, high data rates and to introduce an outstanding I / O performance, some of the benefits of SSDs. You can not forget, mechanical robustness, low power consumption, quiet operation, either.

So many vendors are crowding the SSD market today, however, that the average user having a difficult time separating the wheat from the chaff is. We’ve created our best SSDs For The Money column. Flip on the sixth side of the story, though, and you get a diagram to see how the modern SSDs blow away mechanical memory shows. Even if you can be a handful of solid-state drives together mine and extrapolate the performance difference, even the slowest model is much better than a spinning disk.

SSDs: Advantages and Disadvantages

Here’s the problem: it is difficult to assess the benefits of an SSD with the benchmarks we have run to demonstrate to quantify the benefits normally associated with processors and graphics cards. As a result, people who themselves do not spend too hardcore hardware enthusiasts a difficult time placing the reason more to a smaller capacity device, particularly if they have never used one.

Case in point: I was recently asked to look through a PC wish list of parts for the birthday of a friend of the son. It was armed with a Sandy Bridge processor, 4 GB of RAM, a nice graphics card, and a couple of handy accessories. But of course, it contained a hard drive with no evidence of solid-state memory. I’ve tried to convey the message that at a certain budget, it could actually make more sense to give a few hundred megahertz processor clock frequency and the factory-overclocked GPU for adding a 64 GB boot drive, keep the data on the hard disk.

A few days later, the PC is configured and built on a local PC store, without the SSD. Instead of twice with a hard drive.

Fact Check

The perception is usually based on concrete, comparable numbers. A 2 TB hard drive spins at 7200 rpm sounds impressive delivered as the old office PC with a 120 GB, 5400 RPM model. Even the evolutionary path of the interface sounds great as it really is. “Wow, that was 300 MB / s old, and now I can 600 MB / s?” If only it were that easy, right?

There are two things in play here. First, there are too few people that the introduction of a SSD in a system is a tangible feel to their applications. And secondly, from limited capacity and continuing high prices for many people, including what to avoid solid-state technology a shot.

Let’s say it again, though. The SSD, regardless of what you choose, runs circles around mechanical storage. And to show we do a SSD comparable to a popular drive in the same test machine.