Why SSDs are not as cool as they should be

Tom’s Hardware has published an article that establishes that SSDs (Solid state Drives) are not saving battery life (that was already confirmed during the Macbook air tests) or increasing performance. To explain quickly, conventional wisdom would say that SSD drives should be faster because there are no moving parts (faster access time) and they should consume less because they don’t have a motor that spins at several thousand rounds per minute.

While it seems logical to blame the drives themselves for failing to deliver on the hype, there is a need to understand that it’s everything around them that needs to be improved. That means the disk interface, but most importantly the software. Today’s SSDs are built to look just like a mechanical drive to the operating system (OS), and therefore the OS manages it in a sub-optimum manner. That partially explains why SSD drive aren’t as cool as they are supposed to be.

The bottom-line is that today, they are expensive, and for many reasons, you don’t get the benefits that you thought you had paid for. Stay tuned as we will keep an eye on this problem, but we can certainly say that it will take many years before SSD can deliver on its promises.

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