Are Solid State Drives Worth It?
The absolute quick answer to this question is an unequivocal YES(unless you need more than 1TB of storage). Let’s explore why!
Speed Matters
Solid-State Drives will commonly outperform a regular hard drive speeds by 5-10x. You can pour through the benchmarks and drill down to each individual drive, however it will generally fall into the 5-10x rule. This means that when moving a file around the drive, it will perform faster.
Boot Time
This is also a benefit of the speed. If the operating system is installed on an SSD, you can expect it to boot lightning fast. Now, Windows 8/10 and the UEFI bios are able to do a ‘quick boot’ with regular hard drives, however this is a bit different. It is still faster with an SSD. Windows 7 can have a boot time of 1-1.5 minutes on a regular hard drive, while with a solid-state drive can have a boot time of 10-15 seconds. This is a game-changer.
Lifetime
Samsung’s 850 EVO series has a mean time between failures(MTBF) of 1.5 million hours. This is 171 years! Just an astronomical number considering that a typical hard drive has a MTBF of 300k hours(34 years). Now don’t go expecting your hard drive to last 34 years and your SSD to last 171 years. This isn’t what MTBF means, however we only care about the difference in age. SSD’s are rated/expected to last 5x longer than a regular hard drive. That is all we end up caring about anyway.
Cost & Storage Size
Here is the main downside to SSDs. Their cost is much higher than hard drives, and their storage is much less. The cost/storage size gap is closing every day though. I expect HDD’s to completely disappear by the year 2023, as SSD’s will be the only type of drives needed. Currently a 1TB SSD costs roughly $330, while a 1TB hard drive about $60. A year ago, the 1TB cost $550, so that is quite the drop! Expect prices to drive down further every year until the gap is completely closed.
If you are in the Phoenix or Tucson area, contact us today to discuss replacing your hard drives with an SSD.
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