Solid state drives are becoming increasingly popular. Everyone’s raving about them. Everyone wants them, but are they worth it? Just how much can we expect to gain from these new hard drives?

Several companies (including Dell, Fujitsu, Samsung, and Sony) have announced laptops offering these new solid state drives. They all boast similar claims of improved durability, better battery life, and faster boot times, but what does that mean to the average consumer?

SanDisk claims their solid state drive, the UATA 5000, can achieve “a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes/sec”. Other laptop-based hard drives operate in the neighborhood of 32 megabytes/sec. This is a two-times increase in performance. Not bad. This would cut boot time in half. It doesn’t fit into the category of “instant on” by any means, but doubling the disk access speed is nothing to balk at.Power consumption is the next big selling point for these drives.

Using the SanDisk UATA 5000 as our SSD drive of choice. Its datasheet shows 0.22 Watts of power consumed while idling with a max consumption of 0.52 Watts. Western Digital’s Scorpio WD2500 checks in at 2.0 Watts of power while idling and 2.5 Watts at peak times. That’s almost 500% less power consumed! That translates directly into longer run times for laptops.

These are two very good reasons why solid state drives are the next big thing in the laptop and tablet PC market. There are other benefits, of course, including durability improvements as well as little or no noise production. These benefits plus the speed increase and battery life improvements make these drives well worth the extra cost tacked on my laptop manufacturers.

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