Photo: Olly Curtis/PC Gamer Magazine (Getty Images)
The evolution of technology can be exciting, but it can also be painfully slow. Take SSDs (or solid state drives). While this particular type of computer storage has been around since the late ’70s, they’ve never been the PC standard. Because of cost or other limiting factors, we’ve all rocked HDDs or hard drives. They’ve become so standard that many folks use the term “hard drive” to describe an SSD, just like Xerox became the defacto slang for the copier.
Trekkie Tech: Lenovo’s Star Trek Enterprise Is The Coolest Gaming PC You’ll See
Despite hard drives being more common, SSD has always been technologically superior. Hard drives store data on a magnetic disc, an option that’s prone to failure over time. Not only that, the movement of the mechanical arm that reads this data (think a record player, if you remember those) is another common point of failure. Comparatively, SSDs have no such moving parts and store data via circuitry. They’re faster, quieter, and generally preferable when available.
In more recent years, SSD drives have become more common. You can grab an external SSD to store media on your laptop or outfit your desktop with an internal drive. Still, it’s always been the case that you can get more bang for your buck with an HDD purchase. While this is still the case across the board, trends suggest that both types of drives will continue to dip in price further and further over the next few years.
As of right now, even discounting Black Friday discounts, SSDs are hovering around 10 cents per GB. That means that you can get 2TB of space for around $200. Unless you’re installing games or video editing, this is more than you’ll ever need for day to day computing. Due to an oversupply of flash memory from certain sources, this will drop to around 8 cents per GB in 2019. At that price, it’s down to a matter of preference rather than price when you’re building your next rig.
Solid State 24/7: Does Turning Your PC Off Every Night Make It Last Longer?
While you’ll be able to drop in a huge amount of space via a traditional hard drive as a backup, computer manufacturers of all sizes will probably look to the solid state drive for primary use going forward. It’s been a long time coming, and we can hope that costs keep going down as time continues its endless march.
