What is an SSD?
An SSD is known as a Solid State Drive. It achieves higher transfer speeds than a traditional Hard Drive. A regular hard drive can only work as fast as the disk spins; typically the speed is around 7200 rpm. Therefore, the limit for transfer rates can only go so high, roughly 1030 Mbits/s (or about 103 MB/s, depending on the hard drive). Further, because the traditional hard drive has a metal platter that spins, the faster it spins the more heat is generated. This means it has a tendency to degrade faster over time. So, the trade-off is longevity for performance. If one were to use high powered cooling e.g. water cooling, the life of the hard drive could be extended by keeping the case cooler than a standard set of fans. However, with Solid State Drives this no longer becomes and issue.
Why are transfer rates higher? How fast can they go?
Because there are no moving parts in the Solid State Drive, the speeds of the drive are significantly higher. Since the SSD stores data in blocks, the recall time on the information stored is incredibly fast. Many computer functions, such as boot times and saving/loading documents will occur at a much faster rate than the HDD. Rates of around 500 MB/s are achievable with this new technology. The downfall, of course, is the cost. SSD's at the moment are rather expensive when compared to traditional hard drives. Yet, the benefits far outweigh the additional cost. Some folks, such as myself, would get an internal SSD to load applications like Photoshop and Steam (to store all the games) and use the HDD for storing movies. Also, as the technology becomes cheaper to produce on a massive scale, larger SSD's will become available for a lower price.
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