Are Solid-State Drives Definitely worth the Money? [Ask Lifehacker]

Dear Lifehacker,
I’m considering ordering a MacBook Pro with a solid-state drive. Is it worth it to dish out the extra few hundred bucks for one?

Sincerely,
Making a choice on Drives.

Dear Picking Drives,

Solid-state drives (SSDs) make for a fairly great upgrade, but they aren’t without their downsides (most notably, their high cost and occasional amounts of space). While the answer to ” are they worth it?” within reason subjective, there are many factors which could influence the usefulness of a solid-state drive.

What Is a Solid-State Drive?

Photo by Gillyberlin.

Traditional hard drives are made of a spinning disk and a magnetic, movable read/write head. Solid-state drives, nevertheless, use microchips to store data, the same as portable USB flash drives. Thus, they’ve no moving parts, and are much quieter, harder, and faster than regular drives.

Speed is their biggest advantage. Not only do they have got much faster read times since there isn’t any moving head, but in addition they begin faster because they don’t have to spin. Also, since the physical location of information doesn’t matter on SSDs, read speeds is consistent regardless of where your data is stored, and disk fragmentation isn’t really an issue. Additionally, they expend less power than regular drives, so in a laptop, they’ll also afford you a little bit extra battery life. These kinds of things lead them to a beautiful great upgrade in your computer, but they aren’t necessarily worth it for everyone.

Who Will Benefit Most From Solid-State Drives

Because they are able to access and skim data in no time, you’ll find that the largest visible advantages of an SSD are fast boot-ups and application starts. Thus, they’re probably the most useful when you’re the sort of person who likes to launch a variety of applications, or launch certain slow-loading applications akin to Adobe Photoshop. Additionally, when you find yourself restarting your computer an awful lot (perhaps because you dual-boot), you’ll feel free with the decreased boot time of an SSD, lessening the time you spend watching for your computer to start out up and extending the time you’ll be able to spend working.

On the opposite hand, in the event you are inclined to just use your computer to envision email on the internet or write documents, you won’t notice the advantages of an SSD as much. Websites won’t load any faster, and in the event you’re only launching your browser and one or two other applications, it probably isn’t definitely worth the upgrade to have them launch a couple of seconds faster.

Consider Size and price

Note that, while those are the characteristics which will decide whether you benefit, there are other things to think about. Most notable are the dimensions and price of solid-state drives. My 80GB SSD cost a whopping $200, and if you’d like numerous space in your music and other files, you’ll be paying even more. a wiser set-up is to place your OS and applications on the SSD, while having a second, regular harddrive for your entire data. Here is easy in a desktop computer, but requires just a little work for a laptop, since most laptops only have one hard disk bay. It isn’t impossible, but in the event you’re not comfortable digging around inside your computer you’ll must decide whether your data will fit (or whether you’re able to shell out an arm and a leg for a huge enough drive).

Those are the biggest things to think of. I myself upgraded to an SSD earlier within the year, and it was the best upgrades I’ve made to my computer, because I run a number of native clients in preference to webapps (e.g., I get my email in Postbox instead of Gmail, and hearken to music in iTunes as opposed to on GrooveShark). I also reboot my computer often and launch about 10 applications on startup alone, so the 5 to 10 seconds that now takes for them to load is incredibly a step up from the minute it used to take. My brother, nevertheless, does almost everything in webapps, running nothing but Google Chrome and iTunes at any given time (and leaving his computer on for per week or more without restarting). Thus, a solid-state drive would probably be a waste of money for him-it all is dependent upon your workflow. In case you do grow to be getting one, make sure you investigate cross-check how you can install it to your laptop as a second drive, in addition as tips on how to take full benefit of your SSD.

Sincerely,
Lifehacker

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This post is tagged: Ask, Definitely, lifehacker, Money, SolidState, worth