So, what can we say about the new SSD hard drive technology? Well, if you've already been reading some of the comments from people who have purchased these drives, you might already have a good sense of what is happening in this area. The shift from mechanical spin-and-seek hard drives (even the fastest ones) to solid state technology is most likely to be the most significant upgrade you can make to your computer, whether it is a laptop or a desktop machine. When you think about it, this outcome makes sense.
Over the years, computers have been loaded with ever increasing amounts of RAM memory, which has certainly improved overall performance since operations in RAM are much faster than those depending on a mechanical hard drive to store and retrieve data. In addition, computer processors, following Moore's Law, have been increasing in performance which results in such number crunching capability for even the least expensive computer that would have only been dreamed of ten years ago. There are lots of others advances, as well, that have improved speed: PCI-express technology, faster RAM, and even improvements in the bus speed linking processor to RAM. So, we ask, why does my darn computer seem no faster than my computer of ten years ago? Why does it always take 30 to 45 seconds to boot up, and why do I have to wait for a program to open when I click its icon?
In most cases, the reason is the hard drive. Hard drives have increased in storage levels, and yes, there are some newer, high performance drives (which spin at 7500rpm or even 10,000rpm, instead of the more standard 5,400rpm), but taken as a whole, the hard drive has become what is called the "bottleneck" of most systems. That is, while your fancy processors and piles of RAM are waiting to be put to work, they are often waiting for the mechanical hard drive to serve them the very data they need to complete a task. And, unfortunately, that hard drive is performing at about the same level as it did ten years ago, and the result is the slow boot, the slow access times, and more waiting.
Solid state "hard drive" technology, then, is a significant factor in boosting system speed because it eliminates the access and latency times associated with most standard hard drives and replaces them with high speed, random access of data in solid state memory. This means that the "drive" can both read and write data at extremely high speeds, and that our bottleneck, the venerable old hard drive, has been taken out of the equation.
Can you expect miracles? It depends. On some systems, you will see your boot times more than cut in half, in others, just a basic improvement. Most systems will see programs leap open the minute you click the program icon, and the bottleneck can now be seen to shift to the program itself (i.e., how efficient and complex is the programmatic code). My own experiments on three modern computers - one, a HP Pavilion laptop with a AMD NV-40 dual core processor, two, an HP desktop with a T9300 quad core Intel processor, and three, a MacBook Pro with a dual core i5 processor) show significant performance improvements in all three, with boot times cut in half and overall performance improvements throughout the system. (My desktop HP and my MacBook Pro are both so fast now that I can see little reason to replace either system with newer ones, even though they are two and four years old, respectively.) To boot (no pun intended), these drives use significantly less power than the traditional mechanical hard drive (think about the energy required to keep a platter constantly spinning, and moving an access arm back and forth every time data is needed to be written or read), with the result that my HP laptop has almost doubled its battery life on a single charge (from about two hours to now about four hours) although it must be kept in mind that this particular laptop uses an LED-lit screen, which also reduces power consumption). And it is silent, with little heat generation. It's really nothing short of incredible.
This technology is the future of computing. Prices will continue to come down, and traditional hard drive manufacturers will be forced to offer larger and larger drives at cheaper prices, as it will be the only way they can compete with a clearly superior technology. In the meantime, if you can, putting one of these drives in your system will probably the single best performance increase you can achieve. My system uses about 30 Gb of storage for Windows 7 plus an entire slew of installed programs, and so an 80 Gb SSD drive is more than adequate for my laptop. In addition, since I use secondary drives in my desktop machine, I can use the 80Gb SSD drive as my primary boot drive (containing operating system, installed programs, and the paging file) and leave all my data libraries (music, documents, photos, etc.) on the secondary drives, resulting in incredible performance gains even in this type of machine.
Although this unit is the "Generation 2" type drive, now being replaced with the third generation drives, it shows none of the problems being reported with Intels 3rd gen drives (there are conflicting reports on whether the firmware "fix" released by Intel for the 3rd gen drives actually fixes the problem or not), and it nevertheless provides significant performance gains over any traditional drive. (Windows 7 provides "TRIM" support for SSD, but my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard does not; for Mac's Lion operating syste, you will have to manually enable TRIM once you swap out the drive.)
Five stars for performance, and four and a half stars for price (it is coming down). This is the easiest of recommendations for anyone wishing to improve system performance.
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