Solid-State Drives Get You to Work Faster - NYTimes.com

A solid state storage snapshot snippet

“It’s one of those things that once you have one, you can never go back,” said Doug Crowthers, 37, a quality manager for a printing company in Lynchburg, Ohio. A computer enthusiast and avid gamer, Mr. Crowthers is on his second solid-state drive, having bought an 80-gigabyte drive for his custom desktop computer in 2009 and then upgrading to a 240GB drive in February. “Replacing a hard drive with a S.S.D. is like going from driving an old VW bug to driving a Ferrari,” he said.

Hard drives are stacks of disks coated with magnetic material that rotate on a spindle like an old-fashioned L.P. record. But instead of a needle, there are little drive heads that pivot back and forth across the disks to read and write data. Solid-state drives have no moving parts so there is no waiting for disks to spin or the dither of drive heads to execute commands.

Solid-State Drives Get You to Work Faster - NYTimes.com