What are the advantages and disadvantages of a solid state SATA drive over a standard hard drive?

Is it worth getting an external solid state drive?

Advantages of a SSD vs. standard hard drive.

1. The first advantage and perhaps the biggest is the speed, solid state performance is generally much better due to faster start-up as no spin up is required, faster random access as there is no read or write head and better read performance as the location of any data is irrelevant as again there are no read or write heads.
2. Fragmentation, this can happen on pretty much any data storing device, but on solid state drives fragmentation makes little or no difference to the access or write speed. (defragmenting a solid state drive can actually be detrimental to the drive as it is just unnecessary wear)
3. Reduced noise levels, as solid state drives have no moving parts the actual drive itself is totally quiet.
4. Resiliency, no moving parts makes solid state drive stronger and less susceptible to physical damage by mechanical failure, knocks or bumps etc.
5. Lower power requirements than standard hard drives, which means longer battery life when used in laptop computers.
6. Less heat generation

Disadvantages of a solid state SATA disk vs. standard hard drive.

1. a) Cost, although the prices of solid state disks has fallen, the cost still far outweighs that of a standard SATA hard drive in terms of cost per gigabyte.
2. Solid state drives are estimated to have limited life cycles of around 5,000,000 cycles
3. Sizes, current sizes are less than available standard hard drive sizes, although this will change in the not too distant future.

Conclusion
If you are looking for a way to increase the speed of your computer a solid state SATA drive is an easy way to accomplish this.

Until recently solid state performance came at very high prices, but over the last 6 months prices have dropped making them a good viable alternative to small standard hard drives.

One word of warning don’t be tempted by the cheaper older solid state SATA drives on the market, this might seem good value as their prices have also dropped, but it’s a false economy, many don’t offer much of a performance improvement over standard SATA hard drives, and in some cases actually a performance decrease.

Older Type SSD Approx
Read Speed: 70MB/Sec, Write Speed: 35MB/Sec

New Type SSD Approx
Read Speed 175 MB/s, Write Speed 145MB/s

As you can see the difference is more than double.

Newer operating systems such as Windows 7 are optimized to make the most of a solid state SATA drive in terms of performance.

Upgrading your slow system will give it a whole new lease of life and could even make it much faster than it was when new.

After upgrading a desktop computer with an Athlon dual core CPU & 3gb of RAM it now out performs our Quad core in many aspects.

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