Best Solid State Drive 2012 - SSD Vs. HDD Reviews

Traditional hard disk drives or HDD have moving parts that take time to get to point A to be. Think of them like a Cassette tape, it takes time to get from the part of the song you were listening to, to the part you want to be at. While a HDD is many times faster than a cassette drive they are both loosely based on the same magnetic recording technology. Unlike a Cassette, a hard disk platter can spin up to 170 MPH to find the appropriate information you are looking for. This can vary based on the number of rotations per minute or RPM that the platter can do (between 3000 all the way up to 15,000 for high performance servers). To improve performance even further people began defragging their hard disk drives in order to put all of the most important information that they were using on the outside of the HDD where the platter could find it the quickest. Despite what may seem like a fast way to do things, consumers have experienced the drag that even the fastest hard disk drive can provide. This is where Solid State Drives come in.

Solid State Drives

You've probably seen the flash drives everyone carries around. Solid State Drives are basically just big versions of these that are used to boot and run your most important information. With USB 3.0 these drives can find information instantaneously and bring it to the user. This is because unlike traditional HDD, solid state drives function without moving parts. No moving parts means your computer and laptop are more energy efficient and have faster loading times. For your laptop this would be especially important as it will increase your battery life. Most solid state drives come with a three year warranty as well. Manufacturers can offer this because SSD are much more durable than traditional HDD (they average around 2 million hours of run time before failure).

What's the Fastest solid state drive of 2012?

Intel's 510 series can read up to 500MB/s while using a Sata III connection. This is because these SSD use Intel's leading 34nm NAND flash memory technology. The fastest SSD overall is the OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS Edition with up to 550MB/s Read and 520MB/s Write speeds.

While it sounds great in theory to have a drive that can load everything much quicker than a HDD it does have its limitations. Most SDD are limited in their capacity and for their size are much more expensive than HDD. For Example I can get a 2 TB HDD for under $100 whereas a 256 GB SDD will cost me upwards of $500.

Why do solid state drives cost so much?

Supply and Demand. SDD cost a lot because they use a NAND flash chip. In 2010, 11 exabytes of NAND memory was manufactured. Most of that went to other devices like tablets, MP3 Players, memory cards, and mobile phones. SSD comprises just 7% of that. Despite a growth of around 81% in the amount of these chips manufactured, there simply is just not enough to go around, yet.

How to use a Solid State Drive:

A Solid State Drive is most useful for loading important programs like your operating system. Since Your OS is only 12 GB, that leaves other important programs, photos, and games to put on your SDD.

What's the Top 120 GB Solid State Drive?

OCZ has consistently had great feedback and ratings from consumers. Because of their low prices, they are hard to beat in the SSD market. Although the OCZ 120GB Vertex 2 series was voted "best of the best" by maximum PC magazine, the best selling 120GB SDD is still the Intel X25M. On the other hand, the OCZ vertex 2 at 120GB is $20 cheaper. While it's more economical to go with the OCZ Vertex 2, the Intel X25M comes with a 3 year warranty.

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