When you buy a new computer, you’re always quoted exciting figures about how fast the processor is, how big the hard disk is and all the nifty features that are included, but manufacturers often gloss over the fact that one of the most limiting factors of computers is the speed of the hard disk.

Why is the speed of hard disks important?

Operating systems and applications are constantly reading and writing large quantities of very small files. Hard disks are particularly bad at this kind of operation – imagine your hard disk is a big library, the actual reading of books is pretty quick, but if you spend 10 minutes finding each book – reading one big book becomes much quicker than reading hundreds of smaller ones. This time spend locating each book is referred to as ‘seek time’.

To lower the seek time we must remove the mechanical boundary. A motor in a hard disk will never keep up with the speed of electricity running across silicon.

What are solid state drives?

If you’ve bought a new digital camera you’ll notice that they generally use small memory cards, these use memory chips to store the data, not a spinning hard disk. Solid state drives (SSDs) are effectively larger versions of those.

Because there are no moving parts, SSDs are totally silent, are less likely to fail and use much less power than a hard disk. But that’s not the best thing…

The throughput of a SSD can be upto 300mbps – that’s almost 10 times that of a hard disk, but the killer statistic is the seek time – it’s measured in nanoseconds, not the ~9 milliseconds you can expect on a hard disk.

Summary of pros and cons

With a solid state drive, you can:

• load your documents and programs in a split-second, even Photoshop, a very large application, takes about a second!
• boot your computer in a fraction of the time it does now.
• give your ears a rest, because there will be no crunching noise.
• save a tiny bit of your electric bill. (every little helps…)
• worry less about losing the data on laptops due to dropping or damaging them.

The only downside is the cost, the price per GB is much higher than standard hard disks. Currently a 60GB SSD will set you back around £130, whereas you could comfortably get a 2TB hard disk for that price. For some it might not be a worthy investment just yet, however, as with any new technology, SSDs will drop in price and soon the price difference will be insignificant.