Solid State Drives Getting Cheap

I’ve jumped onto the Solid State Drive (SSD) bandwagon some two years ago. At that time, SSDs were still small in capacity and relatively costly. The capacity has gone up, and the price has come down, quite significantly, these days. The Samsung SSD I picked up recently cost just US$69 for 128GB. It’s a pretty good deal, and quite certainly, it’s only going to get better and better.

I posted previously about how SSDs are probably the best upgrade you can do for your computer. If you haven’t tried it out yet, you really should. The performance upgrade going from a conventional spinning hard disk to a SSD is really quite awesome.

SSDs in the early years varied greatly in their performance. I still remember pouring through comparative reviews and benchmarks. The flash controller was a significant component that needed to be considered. Then, there were also concerns about reliability and data-loss.

Fortunately, buying SSDs now has become less complicated. It’s like with conventional hard disks, most people don’t even care about the data sheet specifications, or bother to dig up in-depth technical and performance reviews. You just buy based on the capacity needed, the number of warranty years, and the price. Oh well, maybe the brand too. SSDs are getting somewhat like that too.

I didn’t spend much time reading up about my Crucial M4 or Samsung SSDs. All of them are SATA III 6Gbps interfaces nowadays, and have decent throughput and IOPS.

Hard disk prices have stagnated (back to the pre-flood crisis levels, and of course in-between it had spiked astronomically). Warranty levels are plunging. There are no more 5-year warranties. The best you can get are 3-years, and usually just one or two years.

All these seem to telling us to go with SSDs now!