What Exactly is a Solid State Drive?

These days, most computer retailers are offering systems with solid state drives in addition to or in place of traditional hard drives.  Since SSDs are a fairly new offering to PC buyers, most people don't even know what they are or what advantages there are to them.

What is it?

Simply put, solid state drives are built with semiconductors as opposed to magnetic media like hard drives.  SSDs are much like USB flash cards in terms of how they store memory, but their capacity is much greater, and an SSD is designed to reside inside a PC as opposed to being a removable storage device like a flash drive.  

Why would I want one?


Solid state drives do have some advantages over magnetic hard drives.  This is because SSDs have no moving parts, while regular hard drives have motors that spin the magnetic platters and drive heads.  SSDs storage is carried out by flash memory chips.  This means:

1. Faster access to data
2. Higher reliability and durability
3. Doesn't use as much power

For portable computers, the power usage factor is important.  Since SSDs use significantly less energy than regular hard drives, laptops with SSDs will have faster access to data and increased battery life.

Faster data access, of course, is always a plus.  For people playing MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings Online, which has a very high texture quality and can be very resource-sucking, having the game installed on an SSD means you get much better loading times even if you're playing the game at its max settings.

The main downside to SSDs right now is the cost.  Because of how efficient they are, they're still much more expensive than traditional hard drives.  Their capacity is also limited, meaning they can't hold nearly the amount of data that regular hard drives can.  Typically, they're ranging between 64-100 GB right now.

If you're thinking of getting an SSD, consider using it as your main hard drive and then adding on an additional drive with 320-500 GB to make sure you have enough space.