What’s Stopping You From Purchasing an SSD?

If there’s no SSD installed in your current rig, I have a simple question. Why? When SSDs first launched a couple of years ago, everyone shared the same reason: pricing. A 64GB SSD for $500 was less-than-ideal, and add on the uncertainty of a brand-new technology… it’s easy to see why most people were a little reserved.

But things have changed a lot since then. Today’s SSDs are much, much faster than the original crop (both in terms of throughput and IOPS) and pricing in some cases can dip to as low as $1/GB. We’re also at a point where SSD technology is much more advanced than it was a couple of years ago, and many companies have since jumped on-board due to the potential – even hard drive vendors.

Given all this, what’s the reason that you’re still not ready to jump on an SSD? Is the price still too high? Too put off with the number of recalls or issues that tend to rise up with every vendor’s drives after some time? Or is it that you simply don’t know what an SSD truly offers, and as such don’t feel the need to invest in one?

The latter point is the hardest one to tackle, because it’s hard to simply describe what an SSD is going to offer you. Saying that a drive offers unparalleled IOPS is all fine and good, but what does that really mean? The best way to describe the benefits of an SSD is to comment on personal experiences.

When I installed a Corsair Force F160 (160GB) last spring, I knew that I was overdue for such an upgrade, but despite that, I never felt like it was a true need. Well, after having used the drive for almost a year now, I can honestly say that I couldn’t imagine going back to a hard drive for the OS and applications. It’s easy to write off that comment as an exaggeration, but it’s true. Boot times… I don’t care about. But when applications load without much lag at all, and the entire system as a whole feels far more responsive, it’s hard to not appreciate the differences between an SSD and hard drive. I am sure many other SSD owners could back me up on this.

So, once again, if you don’t currently use an SSD in your main rig, what will it take for that to finally happen?