Are Solid State Drives Better Than Spinning Platter Based Drives?

This is a subject that we have been musing over quite a bit lately  when talking to our clients and one that you will of course have to answer for yourself based on hopefully the information that I am about to give you. The two primary things that you need to consider are how much storage do you need and how much do you want to pay to decrease data access times.

If speed is you major concern, in other words you are after faster boot times and faster program launch times, and this is really important to you then moving into the solid state drive (SSD) market will probably be important to you. If you need massive capacities to store your pictures, videos and music files, then you should consider the more traditional platter drive. If you want both, then pick both! Install a SSD as your boot/work drive and install another platter drive as well as your container for your data. You can move your data on and off your SSD as necessary as you are working with the files to help you make the best use of the increased speed of the SSD.

Today your hard drive is probably your primary bottleneck on your computer when working with files locally. So, where will you see the benefits of this kind of hybrid approach? If you are doing a lot of video editing you will quickly experience much quicker image/video rendering and other processing when it is done on the solid state drive. Photoshop and Flash Editing/Creation would also be speeded up as you are performing different functions on the images.

What is the drawback? Money… SSD’s are still a bit pricey but they are becoming more and more affordable. Capacity is also an issue but we should start seeing that go by the wayside as well over the upcoming year. SO if you are into a lot of production work with video, images and even music or just want that instant on effect you see with your phones, then you can make a good case of making SSD's part of your computer’s configuration.

For more information on what is available don't hesitate contacting us about the best solution for you.