Tech Thursday: Solid State Drives vs. Hard Disk Drives

As you know from last week's post, the MacBook Air is coming out in a couple of weeks. It is the thinnest of all notebooks. This is basically because it doesn't have an optical drive or in other words a built in CD/DVD/HD drive in it. There is one option though that made me doing a little research when looking at MacBook Air. There are 2 options when it comes to its hard drive. One option is a traditional hard disk drive that will store 80GB of info. The other option is a flash-based drive or solid state drive that will store 64GB of info. The traditional 80GB version starts at $1799 and the newer 64GB version starts at $3098.

Now why would you want to pay more for less memory?
What are the advantages of the newer hard drive?

A traditional hard drive has moving parts. It uses magnets and wheels to right the information on the disk. This is why you must be careful not to drop your laptop. You could damage those moving parts and loose all of the information that is on the disk. The newer flashed based drives have no moving parts. They are chip based and write the information in a much safer manner and if dropped less likely to be damaged. Also the newer drives access the information more quickly. Because there are no moving parts it doesn't have to "work" as hard. So a solid state drive is a bit faster, more reliable, and a little bit lighter.

Is it worth worth an additional $1300?

I am going to say NO. For $300 I can buy an external hard drive that holds 750GB and software that will back up all my information automatically. I can have the piece of mind of saving $1000 and if needed I could replace the traditional drive and still save money. Now is the future of drives flash-based? Yes and in years to come the traditional drive will become obsolete but not before I am ready for a new laptop that is thinner, more reliable, and has wireless power. I can't wait for that day either.