You don't need to look very hard to see that solid state hard drives are popping up everywhere now. Since 2009 enthusiasts have been shouting about the benefits at every possible opportunity, but for the average user the price of the drives has always been a huge stumbling block. Paying several hundred pounds for a 30GB Solid State Drive just did not make sense no matter what the performance gains were.
OCZ Vertex 2 Recently the overall price of drives has been plummeting, for example you can get hold of the stupidly fast OCZ Vertex 2 SSD in the 60GB flavour for around £90.00 including VAT and delivery from CCL. This is not some rubbish value drive either offering truly scary speeds of 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write. To put this in context a top brand hard drive will be achieving half that.
If it was a case of just considering the read and write speeds then SSDs while impressive would be beatable by multiple standard drives in a RAID configuration. Thankfully that is not the only trick up the SSD drives rather fetching sleeve. They also have the ability to boast 0.something access times which makes SSD drives "feel" so much quicker than a normal hard drive while using your PC.
Access times are great to shout about in benchmarks but it's when you're clicking on internet explorer in Windows 7, it loads up instantaneously before you've even lifted your finger back off the mouse. Loading up a 10GB Outlook Inbox in just a couple of seconds then searching with instant results for emails that even the top hard drives would take minutes to compile. Once you have tried a SSD you just can't look back, it's one of the major upgrades you can do that don't just benefit PC gamers.
With prices continuing to fall if you have a PC that is feeling a little long in the tooth a SSD is the perfect upgrade to give it a new lease of life.
