SSD or not SSD, that’s the question
This time around, when you make a decision to buy a new laptop, you will be asking yourself to make another choice: Solid State Drive or Hard Drive. We hope this write up will help to to better understand the trade-offs of each technology.
You probably understood the tradition spinning hard drive, so we don’t need to go over. But since last year, we start seeing more and more SDD. SDD is basically has the same functionality as hard drive, but it uses non-mechanical memory chips. SSD have actually been around for a while, but have only started going mainstream as its price failing off to more affordable level. So let’s see what that ho-hum is all about.
The best part of SDD is it has no moving parts, therefore, it should offer better reliability. The access time is excellent since it is acting as memory chip with direct access instead of head positioning with rotational delay like the hard drive. Direct access implies file fragmentation is not a concern. SSD requires less cooling and produces practically no noise. Since there is no mechanical part, the SSD withstands shock and temperature extremes better.
However, you should know the considerations with SSD. First is the cost per mega byte is still substantial. Before writing this, I looked at my Sunday newspapers, the netbook equipped with 8GB SSD (+8GB SD as bonus) is about $50 more the same netbook equipped with a 120GB hard drive. Definitely, you have to shift your computing paradigm toward cloud computing if you have not yet jumped on this bandwagon. SSD is known for a limited number of writes to the same location, the widely published limit heard is about 10,000 writes to the same bit. But modern design should overcome this problem, should the single bit error occurs. I am not so sure about the double bit error occurs within the same byte though. But the hard drive also has the MTBF (meantime between failure) about 3-5 years so I think on this risk factor, they are comparable. Please backup regularly regardless.
Today you can also replace your current laptop hard drive with SSD but beside paying attention to IDE or SATA connector, you also have to pay attention to 2 different types of SDD technologies. The more prevalent MLC type tends to be slower, and have really long write times while the read operation is still excellent.. The other more expensive type called SLC has faster write times but still inferior to the hard drive.
The last consideration from my point of view, unless you buy the Apple Macbook AIR, most netbooks today run Windows/XP. And XP was created few years back, at the time where there was no SDD. So the OS is not optimized for SDD. So be ready for some tweaking with the operating system. The tweaks essentially to mitigate the slow write speed focusing on the Write cache, PIO and reallocate files that require intensive write operation, etc.. gHack has an excellent tutorial on this.
So now you have it, just make the right decision and enjoy your computing experience!
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Thanks for informative article!