Regular readers of the Making Music Newsletter will know we’ve discussed the pros and cons of SSDs – Solid State Drives – for use with music applications.
They are fast – oh yes! – but you need to take the usual precautions such as making regular backups. They simply haven’t been around long enough to provide reliable, er, reliability, data.
The main con at the moment is price but, as with all technology, the drives are getting bigger and cheaper.
If you’re thinking of buying a SSD – and why wouldn’t you want one! – our friends over at Tom’s Hardware have rounded up the Best Buy SSDs to save you some legwork. Check out their findings here – Tom’s Hardware Best SSDs August
There’s something for everyone here – even the lower-end drives will improve PC performance. Prices at the budget end start from around £40-50, although that will only get you a 30Gb or 60Gb drive with capacity enough to do little more than act as a boot drive, up to around £330 for a 512Gb Crucial m4.
SSDs certainly seem to be the way forward at the moment. Apple has already discarded the hard drive for solid state storage in its MacBooks and there’s an option to add a SSD second drive to its iMacs.
I wonder when we’ll see a 1Tb SSD for £100.
Another thing you need to consider is installing the SSD and transferring the OS and data to it. It will probably help if you’re a bit techy. There are many disc partition and copy programs; make sure the one you use supports SSDs.
And if you’re going to install one into a laptop, make sure all the pieces fit! Here’s one person’s experience Window Secrets.
Photo Credit – Yutaka Tsutano…
