Throwing a Glance at Solid State Drives - Conclusion
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Conclusion
That's right; we've arrived at the end of this article. Now it's the time for me to draw conclusions and hand out my advice to potential buyers that are enthusiastically researching to find out what's the best decision to make.
At the time of writing this article, SSDs look very promising, however, based on my personal views and opinions and their pros and cons we've been discussing throughout this article, I do not think that they're a worthwhile alternative to our traditional hard disk drives. At least, not yet!
Needless to say, until the price gap between solid state drives and hard disk drives becomes smaller and SSDs gain a bit of sequential I/O overdose, they aren't going to replace HDDs on the market. Sure it looks cool booting into your OS in three seconds...
But are you willing to spend $350 for a Transcend TS32GSSD25-M 2.5" 32GB SSD when you could surprise yourself for $335 with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB? Get real and intuitively decide which one is a better deal! If it's all about speed, then don't forget about RAID arrays or WD Raptors for example. Or intelligently spend the rest of your money on other parts of your system.
Anyway, if money is not a problem then by all means go for it. Grab yourself a ~32-64GB SSD because that's enough for your OS and everyday applications (games, office tasks, mediocre server apps, encoding, editing, etc.). All in all, I am sure you will be blown away by its sky-high responsiveness due to almost-zero access times. But don't forget to hook up a conventional hard disk drive too, mainly for backup storage and to store very large files.
As for reputable companies I'd advocate one of the following: SanDisk, Samsung, Adtron, Mtron, STEC, BiTMICRO Networks, Transcend, Texas Memory Systems, etc.
Check out the following SanDisk SATA 5000 2.5-inch 32GB SSD.
My final conclusion regarding solid state disks is that we should give them time. They look very promising and certainly are powerful and effective, especially since their low power consumption is a considerable factor in mobile computing. But the price gap between SSDs and HDDs is just too much right now, and unfortunately they don't offer a good price-vs.-performance ratio yet.
I truly hope that in the near future SSDs will emerge and replace traditional HDDs in various setups, but both technologies will exist for a few more years. I could see laptops, notebooks, and pocket PCs shipped only with SSDs, but that certainly does not mean that each and every average Joe becomes converted to "solid state."
However, due to the vast interest in the field of solid state disks I can clearly foresee that in the next few years there will be amazing improvements on their (sequential) I/O and manufacturing costs. Someday, perhaps soon, we'll all be running zero-noise disks.
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