If you find yourself in the market for a new hard drive, you have two options as of the date of publication: There are plenty of traditional magnetic platter hard drives available, ranging in size up to multiple terabytes of data storage. There are also new forms of storage media called solid-state drives (SSDs), consisting of large blocks of non-volatile memory. Each type of drive offers certain advantages over the other, and which you choose will depend on your goals for the device as well as your budget.
Speed
Traditional hard drives must spin up before you can access any data on the platters, which is one of the reasons a computer takes several minutes to boot up when you first turn it on. Once a drive is active, data transfer is rapid -- although if left unused for several minutes, power-saving options will shut down the drive, requiring another spin-up cycle for use. Solid-state drives function more like RAM or flash drives, allowing instant access to programs. Computers that use an SSD as a boot drive load the operating system much faster than traditional machines, and games that require lots of disk access run more smoothly as well.
Cost
The speed of solid-state drives comes at a premium. While magnetic platter drives have fallen in price substantially through the first decade-plus of the 21st century, SSDs are still new enough to be much more expensive. As the technology matures and more units come onto the market, the price will undoubtedly fall, but expect to pay as much as 10 times more per gigabyte if you choose the SSD option than if you go with a traditional drive.
Capacity
The price of non-volatile memory also limits the size of solid-state drives. Magnetic drives have long since broken the terabyte barrier, and multi-terabyte drives are common options for computer builders. Most SSDs on the market are much smaller in capacity, and beyond 128GB, prices tend to spike upwards. Again, the development of the technology will increase these limits, but the day you can purchase a terabyte of non-volatile memory for a reasonable price may be far in the future.
Bottom Line
The speed advantage of a solid-state drive is certainly obvious to any observer, but the cost is a turn-off for most. You can always compromise, buying a small SSD to run your operating system and any games you commonly play while relying on traditional drives for volume storage. That way, you can get all the advantages of solid-state memory's speed for your important programs without breaking the bank.
Tags: non-volatile memory, drives have, hard drives, magnetic platter, operating system, several minutes, solid-state drives