03/30/2014
Why Solid State Drives Are Your Best Performance Upgrade And They're Getting Cheaper Too.
Nothing and I mean literally nothing, has done more for general computing performance in the past 3 – 5 years, than the SSD or Solid State Drive. Faster processors, more memory, and even faster graphics cards don’t offer the kind of instantaneous and observable boost in system responsiveness, compared to a system based on traditional hard drive spinning media. Sure, faster graphics cards can deliver higher frame rates in gaming and better image quality. Regardless, in terms of overall system performance, nothing delivers snappy, responsive throughput for desktops, notebooks and virtually any other device like an SSD can.
It’s simple math. Hard drives have access times that are measured in milliseconds, about 10 milliseconds or a little less on average. Hard drives can also sustain IO transfer rates at around 100MB per second or a little more, on average. In short, the lower the access time (latency) and the higher the IO transfer rate (bandwidth) the better system responsiveness you’ll feel as an end user. Currently, the average SATA-based Solid State Drive is capable of access times at sub-millisecond speeds and sustained transfer rates of about 500MB/sec (much higher for PCIe-based SSDs). As a result, when a notebook, desktop or other device is driven by an SSD, you experience dramatically faster boot times, faster app load times, overall better system responsiveness and faster workload complete times within applications. The move to solid state storage is an upgrade you can feel and appreciate
The downside historically is that, though SSDs are multiple times faster than HDDs, SSDs are have also been multiple times more expensive than hard drives. That’s still the case today, with the average 500GB hard drive costing around $60 and the average 500GB SSD costing $260. However, you could, of course, partition off your system, loading your OS and apps on an SSD, while you also maintain an HDD for bulk storage of your files and media. The good news also, however, is that SSD prices are reported to be heading south and evidence is already mounting that 2014 is going to be a good year for driving cost out of SSDs.
NAND Flash memory prices are reported to be on the decline with roughly a 30% drop in 2013 and another 20 – 30% further projected this year. That’s great news for consumers and if you look at pricing for recent offerings from major OEMs, like Crucial’s new M500, OCZ’s Vertex 460 and Samsung’s potent 840 EVO series, prices are running as low as .45 - .65 per Gigabyte. If the market drives down to a point that a 256GB SSD approaches $100, you can bet there will be a run on SSDs. This is the result of major NAND suppliers like Samsung, Toshiba, Micron and Intel moving to smaller and smaller wafer manufacturing technologies and die geometries, currently below 20 nanometer.
