Hard drive prices are starting to flatten out, but SSDs continue to get cheaper over time as manufacturers scale their production. Budget hard drives cost roughly $0.05 per gigabyte, where consumer-level SSDs are ten times that at about $0.50 per gigabyte. On the downside, SSDs tend to be more expensive than hard drives. A read or write operation on an SSD takes a fraction of a single millisecond, and because of they do not rely on spinning platters beneath a read/write head, can transfer data at a much higher rate than a traditional hard drive. The biggest advantage of an SSD is that it can read and write data from anywhere on its chips in the same amount of time, regardless of where on the chips the data is stored.

There are no moving parts, so they are not fragile like a traditional hard disk. SSDs store data on computer chips, like the memory card in a digital camera.

In the last few years, Solid State Drives (SSDs), have become increasingly common. Because data is scattered all over the platters, there is a lot of seeking that happens when you launch applications, open documents, or reboot the computer. It’s incredible that this can be done in 9ms (0.009 seconds) on average, but in computer time that’s very very slow. In order to read data from different places on the disk, a traditional hard drive has to reposition, or “seek”, the read/write head, and wait until the right section of the spinning platter is under the head before it can start. It came with a 500GB Western Digital hard drive (aka “spinning rust”) that can transfer about 120 MB/second with a 9 millisecond (ms) average seek time.Ī traditional hard drive stores data on spinning platters, and reads data using a read/write head – much like a record player. I upgraded it to 8GB of RAM soon after we got it, which brought a good speed improvement, but it seems that it’s been chugging away at reading and writing to the hard drive lately. Our almost four year old iMac has felt a little sluggish compared with my work laptop (a new MacBook Air).

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