Recently I did my first PC build (more on that later). I've been quite ignorant of PC hardware until now, even though they've been a part of my life since preschool. While learning about the relative ease and affordability of building my own PC, I stumbled upon a new hard drive technology that has been cost prohibitive until just recently.
Solid State Drives (SSD’s for short) are the hard drive of the future. Instead of using clunky mechanical clunky hard drives, SSD's employ flash memory and produce some incredible results with seek, read, and boot times! I got my first SSD yesterday, and the performance boost it gives is incredible!! My boot time for Windows 7 is 30 seconds; Civil 3D 2011 opens in ten seconds; and most other programs open in less than a second. It makes for a quite enjoyable computing experience and I highly recommend trying out this technology. I use the SSD in conjunction with a standard hard drive for music, video, pictures, etc. The two work great in tandem.
A 40GB Intel SSD can be purchased for a little over $100 through Amazon. The technology will drop significantly in price over the next five years to the point that SSD's will become an economically feasible data storage solution. At the moment, they are most cost effective when used as a boot drive and for program file storage.
