SSD – The not so there yet technology?

For the uninitiated, SSD stands for Solid State Disk which is a new form of storage that was destined to replace the traditional HDD (hard disk drives) everyone is currently using on laptops. What’s the difference? Well for one, SSDs do not have moving parts, kind of like your SD cards and thumbdrives. So it is less prone to data loss and consumes less power which translates to longer uninterrupted productivity on the move. There is also zero latency as there is no read/write head as conventional HDD drives do to move around which makes much faster drives. The new MacBook Air and the Lenovo X300 are sporting the new storage solutions as an option at a premium price point, naturally.

The shocker is that consumers are returning the flash-based laptops at an alarmingly higher rate than their regular laptop counterparts. Could be that for a new technology it is not living up to the hype it has generated for itself this past year. Most of the complaints have been the performance hit in terms of handling streaming video (YouTube anyone?) and surprisingly Microsoft Outlook. Optimistically with speedier drives in the horizon it would address the problem however it still needs to overcome the hefty price tag to opt for one before a real migration happens en masse.