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Solid State Drives vs Hard Drives – 2012

Solid state drives (SSD) have become popular because of their speed but they are still more expensive than a hard drive. A few things to consider:

Solid State drives are at least 10x faster than your hard drive so booting up your computer and loading large programs goes FAST. In a desktop, it makes sense to put those programs that require time to boot to be in a small SSD and then get a large 1TB drive for your data, photos, etc.

A SSD of 120GB is roughly the cost of a 1TB hard drive. So having one of each in a desktop makes sense. But in a laptop that is not an option. If you can live with a 120GB or so drive in your laptop and periodically move videos and photos to an external drive – you will be happy with the speed of your computer.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the SSD is its reliability. Hard drives have an infant morality issue when they are new but are very reliable after the first 6 months of use until they are 3-5 years old. Then the failure rate can be as high as 15% per year. SSD have a slightly better overall failure rate for the first few years of use but they last much longer. Wearout failures that start at 3 years with hard drive but wearout for a SSD is 15-20 years . So if you are happy with your laptop but your hard drive has died – consider replacing it with a SSD. You will think you have a new computer because it runs so fast and your concerns of it dying should be much less (however always backup your data). Even if it is only a 1% chance of failure – do not tempt it to fail. The good news is that if your hard drive or SSD fails – we can do data recovery .