How New High-Capacity SSDs Stack Up against Hard Drives

Solid state drives are gradually getting more and more affordable. While they still haven't come close to meeting the storage capacity or economy of platter-based hard drives, they're a favorite stand-by for performance-obsessed enthusiasts with money to burn.  
 
Other World Computing has just announced four new 2.5-inch SSDs aimed directly at those enthusiasts. The Mercury Extreme Pro SSD line starts at a generous-for-SSDs 60 GB model and goes up to a staggering 480 GB version of the drive. At $219 for the 60 GB drive and a massive $1,579 for the 480 GB drive, they still carry the hefty solid-state premium, but the performance OWC promises help justify the price tags. The company promises sustained data transfer rates of up to 285 MB/sec, significantly faster than the 250 MB/sec rates offered by Kingston and Toshiba's enterprise-class SSDs. OWC also says the Mercury Extreme Pro drives consume 1/7 less power than other SSDs, and only 1/3rd as much energy as conventional hard drives. 
While $1500 for less than half a terabyte is still a major luxury, we still see this as a sign of progress for SSDs. One day, using an SSD in your laptop won't come at the cost of exorbitant price or limited capacity. Let's take a look at how current SSDs stack up against their hard drive counterparts.
 
While solid state drives have been in development for years, they only started to gain traction in 2007, when netbooks started to surface. That year, Asus unveiled its Eee PC series with SSDs, while  Dell started equipping some of its notebooks with them. They were originally very small drives; the Eee PC only came with a 4 GB SSD, barely larger in capacity than an SD card, while Dell's notebooks offered 32 GB SSDs as storage options.  
 
SSDs are most popular in notebooks and netbooks because of their small size and low power requirements. Most SSDs used in portable electronics have a 2.5-inch form factor and function just like conventional notebook hard drives, connecting via a SATA II interface. The few SSD models designed for PCs are much different. While some drives are available in the standard 3.5-inch, SATA form factor, performance PC SSDs are generally PCIe cards that that use their own hardware controller rather than the SATA bus. The larger form factor lets manufacturers not only put more NAND memory on the device, but also connect it all through their own electronics. Last year, OCZ unveiled a massive 1TB SSD for desktop computers, essentially a card stuffed with four 256 GB SSDs all strung together with an onboard RAID controller. The drive is now  available for $3,399, with a 3.5-inch SATA version available for $3,200.    

In just 3 years, SSDs have grown from tiny 32GB drives into massive 1 TB monsters, and their prices have grown to match. They offer several benefits, including higher transfer speeds and lower power consumption than hard drives. For sizes above 64GB, however, they're still too expensive for most applications, and most Eee PCs, Dell Inspiron Minis, and other netbooks favor conventional hard drives over SSDs to keep prices down. Per gigabyte, SSDs cost between 10 and 30 times more than their hard drive counterparts: 
    

Storage Capacity	Price	Price per GB	Hard Drive Price	HD Price per GB
120 GB (2.5")	$339	$2.83	$39	$0.33
250 GB (2.5")	$739	$2.96	$54	$0.22
512/500 GB (2.5")	$1,399	$2.73	$89	$0.18
120/160 GB (3.5" SATA)	$364	$3.03	$179*	$1.19
350/300 GB (3.5" SATA)	$729	$2.08	$199*	$0.66
500 GB (3.5" SATA)	$1,419	$2.84	$54	$0.11
1 TB (3.5" SATA)	$3,199	$3.20	$89	$0.9

 
*high-performance 10,000 RPM hard drives 
 
Solid-state drives still show a lot of potential for high-performance and low-power applications, but they just aren't remotely close to replacing hard drives for most users. An SSD for a primary OS partition is a fine choice for speed-hungry power users, but unless you can drop four digits for storage, they simply aren't feasible for general use.