Ask any computer technician around, and s/he will tell you that your hard drive is one if not the single most piece of hardware to fail on your computer. Hard drive failures are never good, especially when users’ do not have a backup of their data. Many users are now turning to a new solution for internal storage, known as the SSD or solid state disk. SSD gets it’s name due to the fact that there are no moving parts inside the hard drive, unlike its predecessor the hard disk drive.
Most people are typically not even aware of this, but your traditional hard drive spins anywhere from 5400 – 10000 RPMS! These little mechanical wonders called read-write heads are so close to those spinning platters it’s scary to think about, so it’s no wonder why vibrations, air pressure, temperatures, and other external forces can damage and/or ruin your hard drive.
So what makes the SSD such a big shot compared to our traditional hard drives? Well for starters, they are non-moving, which eliminates so many of the possibilities that can ruin your standard HDD. Due to the fact that the do not have to start spinning from a powered down state, they tend to startup your systems faster. Boot up time is not the only speed improvement, the read and write times have been recorded in some cases up to 100x faster! One last key feature that the SSD possesses is that it consumes considerably less power, which in hence produces less heat. When hard drives are operating at a high temperature, they tend to lose a great deal of performance, but with SSD this is not a concern any longer. What is a concern is the cost of them. They are not cheap, but with time like all computer technology prices will drop. Consumers can expect to pay about $9 more per gigabyte than your traditional hard drive, which is huge when we’re talking about a 500GB hard drive.
