Throwing a Glance at Solid State Drives - Disadvantages of SSDs
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Disadvantages of SSDs
Without a doubt the real and biggest drawback of SSDs right now is their price. Since these have just emerged into the consumer area, their prices are relatively high. To actually give you a sense of how expensive they are just check out the following comparison: US $8 per GB on an SSD versus US $0.25 per GB on legacy HDDs. On a GB-per-GB basis, solid state drives cost 32 times as much as legacy HDDs!
This kind of high price might not be worth it for every computer user. But as tends to usually happen, we could expect prices to be lowering in the near future. Solid state disks are looking very promising and could replace HDDs.
The second major disadvantage is that their sequential and random write speeds are a bit low. This really stands out in synthetic benchmarks where the main focus is raw performance. A conventional hard disk drive will write (sequential + random) and read (sequentially) considerably faster. The benefits of higher burst rates score a slightly higher average transfer speed.
However, once seek times are taken into consideration a solid state drive simply wipes the floor with any of the highest-end HDDs. An SSD could score anywhere from 0.20ms to 0.60ms on access time, while a competitive HDD would vary between 9ms and 20ms. The performance gains can be as high as 50x faster access times.
Due to this, random reading performance can be powerful as well. This is especially important in daily applications where random access is more preferred than sequential I/O (perpendicular disk drives read on 150MB/s while SSDs barely cross 120MB/s.)
Another crucial shortcoming of solid state drives is that they are quite vulnerable to a somewhat common phenomenon like abrupt power loss, electrostatic discharges, magnetic fields, and so forth. Traditional HDDs aren't affected by the aforementioned because their architecture was designed to block out any sort of external magnetic fields, hence their nature (platters), and thus they're enclosed in a Faraday cage.
Ultimately, the last inconvenience that's worth pointing out is their poor recoverability. The data stored inside a cell becomes completely messed up if the drive suffers electrical damage. After this the chances of recovering the data are very low. In the case of legacy hard disk drives, even after a mechanical failure, the data could be recovered if the user paid large chunks of money for expert service.
Nevertheless, according to the latest research in the fields of NAND flash drive technologies it is rumored that it is possible to recover the data even after complete cell damage. We shall wait and see; time will certainly tell.
Next: Conclusion >>
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