Should You Go SSD?

You may have seen the glowing reviews about how wonderful Solid State Disk (a.k.a. SSD) is. Before continuing, let’s define what SSD is first.

In layman’s terms, SSD is storage media that has no moving parts. You can consider it as you would a USB stick, save for the fact that SSD has a much higher throughput rate.

At the time of this writing in very-late 2009, SSD is still far too expensive and moreover is an unproven technology. More on that in a moment.

At the tail of this article are rather big things to take into consideration if you intend on building a PC using SSD.

What are the advantages of SSD?

Speed, speed and more speed

In today’s modern computers, the biggest bottleneck that slows it down is your hard drive. Prior to that it was all about your CPU, RAM and video memory, but all that hardware has graduated to a point where it cannot be blamed for bottlenecking any longer.

SSD has a latency (which some incorrectly refer to as "lag") that is much lower than platter-based HDDs. This is due to the fact there are no moving parts, so the time needed to access data is nearly instantaneous.

Longevity

A platter-based drive has an average life span of 5 to 7 years. SSDs are claimed to have a life span 8 to 10 or longer.

Silence

SSDs make no noise whatsoever. Once again, this is due to the fact they have no moving parts.

Runs less hot

HDDs have always had the issue of generating quite a bit of heat, especially when put under stress. SSDs also generate heat but not nearly as much as HDDs do.

What are the disadvantages of SSD?

Cost

The cost-per-gigabyte is still far too high for SSD. Something as small as 32GB will run you at least $100 and it only goes up from there.

A reasonable price point for SSD will not be achieved until mid-2010 or 2011.

If you want to know what the prices are now as of December 2009, this is what they are:

64GB – $150 and up

128GB – $340 and up

256GB – $600 and up

Yes, the prices are ridiculous, no question.

Unproven in the field

There are only a smattering of people using SSD for daily use due to the fact they’re so wickedly expensive. We know that they work, but do not know how they work in the long term.

To note, it is absolutely true that SSD will replace HDDs. This will occur. But they will not be in wide use for at least another 1 to 2 years.

At present what most people say about SSD is that they operate with minimal problems – but they do have problems, make no mistake. Keep reading.

Things to take into consideration if building a computer box using SSD technology

Not XP friendly

The only Windows that knows how to "handle" SSD properly is Vista or 7. Windows XP’s kernel is simply not designed to support SSD drive technology. Will XP work with SSD? Yes it will, but not very well.

For those of you that remember when SATA technology was first becoming common as a replacement for PATA, XP used to blue-screen left and right (as in crash, prompting a reboot) if it did not specifically have a SATA driver loaded on installation of the OS. Service Pack 2 fixed that problem later, but for a good long time using SATA was computer suicide if you wanted a properly running XP OS.

SSD at present operates the exact same way with XP. There will be times when that OS will blue-screen for no apparent reason when using SSD technology as the primary storage drive.

If using Vista or 7 on the other hand, that kernel does have much better support for SSD and will run without issue.

If you insist on running XP with SSD technology, you may get lucky and the OS may never blue-screen on you – but I personally wouldn’t do it.

It’s not worth upgrading an old PC from HDD to SSD

SSD works best with newer modern motherboards. If you adapt SSD to an older mobo, it may cause problems and big ones at that no matter what OS you run.

Certain apps may not work at all

Many programs are coded in a way that "expect" certain hardware technologies to be used when running it, i.e. platter-based HDDs. When using SSD there may be issues with certain apps – especially older ones.

The older programs that will not work usually only account for the Windows environment. In Linux you won’t have app issues ordinarily due to Linux’s way of threading apps.

Where is SSD best used at present?

Laptops, no question.

When you use a 2.5-inch SSD in a laptop, it will run cooler and consume less power, so you get an instant boost in battery life. And due to the ultra-proprietary nature of laptops, SSDs usually do not have the weird issues they do in traditional desktop computers. On top of all that, being that SSD has no moving parts, your laptop can be banged around more without fear of the drive busting on you.

And let’s not forget the speed increase. Laptops are slow by nature, so any speed advantage helps.

If your laptop is relatively recent and you don’t mind something as small as 32GB or 64GB for a primary drive, you may really like SSD. It’s definitely a good upgrade.

What do you look for if going SSD on a laptop?

The biggest thing to look for is "Windows 7 Certified". That is a big deal, trust me on that one. The process Microsoft uses to certify hardware for the Win 7 OS is very rigorous. You can be rest assured that with that certification your Win 7 OS will not crash using that particular brand. It really, really matters, so pay close attention to it.