Are Solid State Hard Drives Worth the Extra Cash?

On paper solid state drives (SSD) are an amazing technological feat, a hard drive using flash memory. But how much better are they?

The looming arrival of solid-state hard drives (SSD) for notebooks seems like a rather exciting development at first blush. Unlike their mechanical counterparts, which have spindle motors, rotating platters and read/write heads, solid-state drives typically consist of flash memory chips and have no moving parts whatsoever. The benefits that these drivers offer compared to a mechanical drive are numerous, and include lower power consumption, improved performance, increased durability, less chance of data loss (no heads to crash into the platters), no noise and no heat output.

That all sounds remarkable, and it seems quite clear that solid-state drives represent the future of data storage – at least in notebooks. Since hard drives in a desktop machine don’t move around, have fans to cool them and batteries are not part of the equation, the benefits of solid-state storage are more suited to the mobile arena at this time. It’s interesting to note that even though the drives that are currently shipping are for notebooks, that hasn’t stopped high-end boutique PC makers from including SSD drives in their top-shelf configurations, despite their insane prices.

And that brings us to the drawbacks of solid-state drives, of which there are many. The first and most obvious is price. Saying these drives are expensive is like saying Daniel Day Lewis (received an Oscar for his role in There Will Be Blood) sort of gets into a role. Apple is charging an additional $1,300 for the SSD option on its MacBook Air (admittedly, some of that cost covers the faster CPU, but still) and over at premium PC builder Maingear’s website, you can add a 32GB SSD drive to your rig for a cool $1,000. If that’s not enough storage, and it isn’t, you can add two of them in a RAID 0 array for $2,000.

Think about that — $2,000 for 64GB of storage. That’s not just expensive, that’s ludicrous. But hey, given the benefits of an SSD drive over an HDD, perhaps the price is justified, right? I might be inclined to think that, but initial tests across the web have shown that while the SSD does offer some improvements over an HDD, it’s largely a mixed bag that does not justify the steep price tag.

Performance Testing

The crew over at Ars Technica have put both the HDD and SSD versions of the MacBook through their paces, and came to the conclusion that the SSD unit didn’t feel much faster than the HDD MacBook, and their benchmarks largely corroborated that conclusion. Tests showed the SSD drive was faster than the HDD in random reads and writes due to its near-instant access times, but slower in sequential operations. Perhaps more importantly, the author’s personal “feeling” for how the SSD notebook performed was that it, “…felt exactly the same as the HDD model.”

“The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash,” they wrote, adding, “The answer seems to be no.” They did note that the SSD unit felt less burdened when multi-tasking, however. 

Over at Appleinsider.com , SSD’s dominance in multi-tasking was verified by a side-by-side comparison video of two MacBooks opening 17 applications simultaneously. The SSD model is noticeably faster than the HDD model opening the programs, and finished the task 41 seconds faster than the HDD unit. However, the website noted that when it ran the multi-tasking test a second time, the HDD model caught up with the SDD model as Leopard was able to cache the data needed to open the programs. It’s also worth noting that the SSD-equipped MacBook booted to Leopard 18 seconds faster than the HDD model.

Battery Life

Okay, so maybe it doesn’t offer a big speed improvement over an HDD just yet, but surely it’s got to improve battery life, right? You would think that “no moving parts” would be able to offer a substantial improvement in battery life over “constantly moving parts,” but apparently that’s not the case either. 

Ars Technica’s tests showed little to no gains whatsoever in battery life between the SSD and the HDD models. The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg also wrote, “The SSD MacBook gave me just five more minutes of battery life.” In response, Apple explained the negligible difference between the SSD and the HDD models was due to the fact that the hard drive model uses a very low-power drive.

Apparently, hard drives don’t impact a notebook’s battery life very much. According to an article on Dvice, Dave Zavelson, Senior Manager for Precision Mobile Workstations at Dell notes that a hard drive is only responsible for five to 15 percent of the overall power budget.

The Upside

It seems safe to say at this point SSD’s performance and battery life are not compelling enough to warrant their purchase. But the technology certainly has merits that can’t be measured in a benchmark, such as durability and the fact that probability of total drive failure and data loss are reduced since there are no internal parts that could break. Still, SSD units these days mostly use flash memory, which has a finite number of read/write operations (generally around 300,000) before the internal cells go dead, and then what? I’ve never personally had a CF card “die” on me so I don’t really know what that entails. It’ll be interesting to see if SSD manufacturers will be able to implement an early-warning system similar to the S.M.A.R.T technology that is built into all of today’s mechanical hard drives. 

We enthusiasts often times take a “price doesn’t matter” approach when decking out our PCs with the latest in high-end componentry, but there’s definitely such a thing as a “bridge too far,” and sadly, solid-state drives are on the other side of it for now. Prices will come down as production ramps and more vendors begin adopting them, and we can’t wait until they are affordable enough to buy despite their somewhat ambiguous benefits at this stage of the game.