Solid state storage – like that which your camera or iPhone uses – is slowly making its way into laptops, as a speedy and reliable alternative to hard drives.

The biggest hurdles for our clients is the price – a 120 gig solid state drive (SSD) is usually a $300 option, not to mention a step down in size from the 250 or 320 gig drives that are standard nowadays.

The performance benefit can be impressive, however – on a fresh build I’ve seen boot times in the neighborhood of 15 seconds and Microsoft Office applications that load instantly.

It’s not all clear sailing. Managing a solid state drive is a hard job – the onboard controller must attempt to spread out activity to all areas of the memory equally, as memory chips have a finite amount of read/write cycles. Also, solid state drives slow over time, mainly because after they use a block of storage once, they need to perform an erase cycle before writing to it again. It’s murder on applications that do a lot of small writes to hard drives.

Things are improving. Better controllers are out there that help maximize performance for these small writes. Prices continue to drop, although as of this writing an SSD will run you about ten times the cost of a traditional hard drive.

Also, operating systems are getting savvy to the unique needs of these devices. Windows 7 has the built-in ability to wipe freed storage space in the background to eliminate the need for erase cycles during writes. I anticipate applications will follow, possibly minimizing temp files and disk writes.

When considering a new laptop, don’t ignore the SSD option – your money is better spent there than on a CPU upgrade.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.