What are Solid State Drives and do you need one?

Define Solid State Drives, please

More and more, we're seeing solid state hard drives being offered on store shelves and being sold with new desktops and laptops.  What's a solid state drive?  Unlike a traditional style hard drive, with it's heavy spinning disk and read/write heads, a solid state drive has no moving parts at all.  Solid state drives store information on memory chips instead of internal spinning disks.  This means solid state drives are more like the RAM in your computer or the USB thumb drive in your pocket.  

 Left: traditional HDD guts.  Right: inside a SSD.

Advantages

 The big advantage solid state drives have is speed.  No moving parts means no disk for read/write heads to physically scour for data.  This physical difference makes SSDs twice as fast as traditional hard drives and even faster in some cases.

The second advantage is durability.  There is no perpetual motion machine.  Moving parts break down, just ask your mechanic.  Solid state drives, since they have no moving parts, should outlast comparable hard drives.  This does remain to be seen, though, since SSDs haven't been out too long compared to standard hard drives.

Disadvantages

So they haven't been out long.  What does that mean to you?  It means SSDs are expensive.

Drive pricing is based on cost per gigabyte.  Traditional desktop hard drives run roughly 10 - 20 cents per gig.  Physical laptop hard drives go 20 - 30 cents per gig.

Cost per GB on a solid state drive?  About $3.

So while you can get a traditional HDD with a terabyte of storage for around $100, that may only get you a 120GB SSD.  The good news is that, like any technology, the cost of SSDs is dropping.

Who Should Buy a SSD?

People with money!  :)

Allright, that's a given.  Anyone who needs -- I mean NEEDS -- ultra fast performance should buy a solid state drive.  I don't mean gamers looking to pwn n00bs in Call of Duty.  I mean professionals who rely on high performance applications.  Anyone who creates movies or music on a computer for a living, for example, would benefit from the performance increase that using a SSD gets you.  IT professionals building servers, to an extent, would also benefit.  I say "to an extent" because of the price to space ratio.  A vmware server, for example, has a small OS footprint and would be a great candidate.

So that's the lowdown on solid state drives, their pros and cons and who should look into them.  Keep in mind that tech prices drop constantly, and they could be a dollar per gig next year, and lower the year after.  SSDs will change computing eventually.  Just not yet.

Thanks for reading!