Tech Blog

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One of the ways the MacBook Air, netbooks, and other devices conserve battery power and get a little speed edge is using a Solid State Drive (SSD). An SSD works like your little USB flash drive in that there are no moving parts and the data is stored in memory on chips instead of physically on drive platters. So, SSDs don't generate as much heat as mechanical drives and because they are memory-based, the read-write and access times are often vastly superior to a mechanical drive. All of this is great, but there is a little detail: cost. So the question is then, Are they worth it?

Cost? How much are we talking here? Well for a 120GB drive about $200-300+. Compare that with <$80 for a 500GB mechanical drive.

Ouch.

Okay, SSDs cost a lot, but you get  rapid boot up (people talk about booting in seconds) and near instantaneous application launches. Aren't those pluses worth it? MacLife did a review/showdown of SSDs recently— Solid State Drive Showdown | Mac|Life —that was pretty instructive. Sure you probably get more battery life out of your laptop (SSDs don't need as much power to run as mechanical drives), but you lose a lot of drive space. I have a 320GB drive in my MacBook Pro, switching to a 120GB SSD (if I could afford it) would cost me over half my drive space . Right now my drive has about 155GB on it. Which means just to start using it, I'd have to clean house. No simple "clone and dump" for me.

My friend Andy Peatling made the switch and told me that he used a combination of external drives and Dropbox to make up for the loss of local space. So looking at my own setup with a MacBook that doesn't leave home often, a large array of external drives on hand, and a 50GB Dropbox plan I could make the switch. When I go out and about I would get better battery life and things would run faster. But…

But I'm thinking that I can't justify the huge expense…yet.

I say yet, because like all things in tech, the prices will go down. In a year or so I'm betting you'll see more and more laptops offering SSDs of respectable size as an option. I'd also expect to see more people looking at extending the life of their laptops by switching to an SSD for the speed boost. I doubt SSDs will ever be as cheap as mechanical drives, but I don't doubt that they will be an affordable option in the near future.