Hard disk drives vs. solid-state drives: Are SSDs finally worth the money?

MacWorld by Lucas Mearian

Three years ago, I wrote a story comparing hard disk drives to solid state drives (SSDs) based on capacity, performance and cost. A lot has changed in three years. For one, laptops are quickly being eclipsed by tablets, which have NAND flash memory embedded on their motherboards. In addition, operating systems have been optimized to take advantage of SSD I/O performance. SSDs today are far more reliable, have greater endurance and perform better (in some cases, two to three times better) than in 2009.

There are also new SSD categories. For example, hybrid drives combine NAND flash cache memory with a spinning disk in a hard-drive form factor. In addition, in adherence to Intel's new ultrabook computer specifications, manufacturers are beginning to produce laptops with two drive slots, one for a hard drive and the other for a low-capacity cache SSD which works with hard disk drives to speed up boot and application load times.

Perhaps the single biggest change, though, is price. In 2009, SSDs cost around $3 per gigabyte. That meant a 120GB SSD cost more than $300. If you were paying $700 for a laptop, it wasn't reasonable to expect to pay almost half that for a new drive.

Today, however, SSDs cost close to one-third of what they did in 2009—in many cases, less than $1 per gigabyte. For example, Crucial in July announced its new low-cost v4 SSD that costs $100 for a 128GB model and $190 for a 256GB model. This isn't unexpected; in January 2012, research firm IDC predicted that prices of SSDs would tumble this year. (Of course, hard drive prices have also plummeted. These days, you can pick up a 7200-rpm, 1TB laptop hard drive for a little more than $100.) read more...