Solid State Drives (SSD for short) are so hot right now. Ok so they have actually been hot for a while now, but it is only now that they are starting to become semi-affordable for a lot of people. The other thing that seems to have put a lot of people off jumping into this technology is the much-touted "stuttering" problem (more on this soon). Either way, I thought it was time that I took a couple home and figured out what all the fuss was all about.

What are SSDs?

Solid State Drives are pretty self explanatory - disk drives with no moving parts. They use flash memory, just like your cheap and cheerful USB keys, however to increase performance they use up to a dozen banks of flash memory which can all be accessed at the same time for up to 10x the speed and capacity of those little flash drives. The drive itself is about the same size as a 2.5" mechanical HDD (the size used in laptops) and uses the same power and data cables as all other modern SATA hard drives, so it's simply a matter of plug and play if you have a modern desktop system.

The main advantage of SSD over a mechanical HDD is access time - any part of the disk can be accessed almost instantly by the drive because there's no waiting for platters to spin up or read/write heads to align to access data. The other advantage of having no moving parts is less power usage, noise, and heat. Your average mechanical HDD uses up to 15 watts when reading/writing and up to 10 watts when idling, whereas an SSD will use about 2 watts at full speed and half a watt in idle. The drives are also completely silent, and don't require any form of heatsink to stay cool.

The stuttering I mentioned earlier is a relic from days gone by. Back when JMicron was the only company making SSD controllers (the chip that coordinates all the activity between the Operating System and the banks of flash memory) they would often suffer from a delay of up to a whole second when writing smalls files, such as saving a text document or even making basic settings changes in Windows. This was commercial suicide for JMicron - they did release an updated chip which effectively halved the problem, and apparently they will be releasing another one which negates it altogether, however it's a bit too late as the market has been flooded with new chips from players such as Intel, Samsung, and newcomber Indilinx. If you find a drive without a controller from one of these companies, best bet is to avoid it.

Testing

Unfortunately for gamers, there is no increase to gaming performance to be had by using a better hard drive - not to your frames-per-second count at least... So to find out what benefits gamers can get out of SSD, I've chosen two of the most popular drives on the market today and put them through a series of common usage scenarios that most gaming enthusiasts would come across, then compared their performance to a relatively high-performance 7200RPM drive.

Test System

(supplied by Computer Lounge):

• HDD1: Corsair X64 Extreme 64GB SSD
  
• HDD2: Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD
  
• HDD3: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB HDD
  
• CPU: Intel Core i5 750 @ 2.66GHz
  
• MOBO: Asus P7P55D Pro
  
• RAM: Corsair TW3X4G1333C9 2x2GB DDR3-1333 CL9
  
• GPU: 2x Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4890 (Crossfire)
  
• O/S: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (build 7600)

A note on SSD performance degradation: while I won't be covering this topic here today, suffice to say that after a bit of use, any SSD can exhibit a bit of performance loss. There are ways around this, like using a wiper tool, secure erase or the forthcoming TRIM command in Windows 7. I have performed all testing on a freshly erased disk to get around this, so results are all a 'best case scenario'.

Next page: test results.