Is an SSD hard drive worth the cost?

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Is an SSD hard drive worth the cost?

pcaulfield49 weeks ago

Man Alive, I need a faster hard drive. I'm thinking #SSD, but not sure if it's worth the cost. Can it keep up?

Topic: Hardware

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dblacharski 49 weeks ago

SSD hard drives are expensive compared to rotating media (old fashioned drives). The average price of a 128Gb SSD is around $200, but one would be hard-pressed to find mechanical drives that small. At the low end, 64Gb SSD’s cost $1.33/gigabyte, and 1Tb spinning mechanism drives cost about 5 cents/gigabyte for a $50 drive. If you have a lot of data to store, it is probably not worth the cost to migrate to an SSD drive.

However, SSD drives are extremely fast. That same 128Gb SSD drive has sequential read speeds of up to 210mb/s and write speeds up to 165mb/s. 500Gb mechanical drives are more in the range of 100mb/s read speeds and 60mb/s write speeds, roughly one third to half as fast as SSD’s. So where using a SSD can pay off is for people who would benefit most from the speed increase. If you’re using a workstation for commodity trading, medical analysis, or audio/video production, SSD’s make an excellent boot drive for holding your operating system and applications. The cost is easily justified if it helps you to avoid market losses, save lives, or meet a busy production schedule.

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