The delay is because of starting the hard drive, which has to awaken and rev up to retrieve stored data. There is a faster way to get started. Solid-state drives, or SSD, which are made up of microchips and have no moving parts, easily cut the boot time in half. And opening applications happens in a blink, as does retrieving documents, images and movies.
The catch is that solid-state drives cost 10 times as much as hard drives, gigabyte for gigabyte. But the cost is a fifth of what it was three years ago when solid-state drives became widely available. With prices coming down, more computer users are buying solid-state drives, figuring the increased performance and productivity are worth the extra expense.
“It’s one of those things that once you have one, you can never go back,” said Doug Crowthers, 37, a quality manager for a printing company in Lynchburg, Ohio. “Replacing a hard drive with an SSD is like going from driving an old VW bug to driving a Ferrari,” he said.
Hard drives are stacks of disks coated with magnetic material that rotate on a spindle like an old-fashioned LP record. But instead of a needle, there are little drive heads that pivot back and forth across the disks to read and write data. Solid-state drives have no moving parts so there is no waiting for disks to spin or the dither of drive heads to execute commands.
Solid-state drives are also quieter than hard drives and don’t consume as much power, which extends battery life. Solid-state drives also generate less heat, which can make computers run cooler.
Moreover, solid-state drives aren’t as susceptible to failure after being bumped or jostled because, again, there are no spinning disks nor frenetic read/write heads hovering, perilously, less than a hair’s-width away.
Solid-state drives have been around for decades, but the technology to make them practical and affordable didn’t emerge until 2008, when manufacturers like Intel, Toshiba, Samsung, Kingston, Corsair and OCZ began selling them for around $10 a gigabyte.
While prices have come down, solid-state drives today are about $2 a gigabyte vs. a mere 20 cents a gigabyte for a hard drive. Nevertheless, sales of solid-state drives have been brisk, according to Jeffrey Janukowicz, an analyst with International Data Corpopration. He said revenue increased last year by 150 percent to $1.3 billion compared with 2009. He expects sales to double this year.
Apple this year began offering solid-state drives as an option on all its computers. But they come at a hefty premium. For example, a 256GB solid-state drive adds around $600 to the cost of a MacBook Pro.
While price is the biggest drawback to solid-state drives, there is also a limit to how many times you can write to one. After a while the transistors in the memory chips wear out and no longer hold their charge, which means the chips can no longer write, or store, data. But the number of times the drive can write is in the tens of billions and thus probably not a concern to most computer users.
More of a concern perhaps is the difficulty of encrypting data on a solid-state drive. On a hard drive, if you change a file, you are overwriting the data on that same file. That’s not the case on a solid-state drive, which has to write any changes to a new location on the disk and mark the old location for deletion before it is eventually cleared of the old data.
So typical encryption software doesn’t work. You will get an encrypted file in a new location on the disk, but the old unencrypted file is still there awaiting deletion. Steve Swanson of University of California, San Diego, advises looking for the drives that have a so-called secure erase feature, which often involves 128-bit encryption. These work by encrypting all data saved on the disk and requiring users to enter a password to activate the key.
And if you want to wipe the entire drive, there’s a poison pill command that will destroy the key, rendering everything gibberish. On a hard drive, the sanitisation process involves multiple overwrites and takes much longer.