Magnetic hard drives continue to be compelling products despite increasingly stiff competition from emerging technologies such as solid state drives or SSDs. There are two areas where SSDs offer an inferior value proposition as compared to rotating media.

The first disadvantage that SSDs face is total capacity. The largest commercially available solid state drives have a capacity of 512 gigabytes. Magnetic drives, on the other hand, can easily be purchased in capacities as large as 2 terabytes or approximately 2000 gigabytes. This is a sizeable difference to say the least.

The second disadvantage is cost. Solid state drives are very expensive both in terms of overall cost and cost per gigabyte compared to conventional drives. For example, you can purchase a 500 gigabyte magnetic hard drive for $55 – $90 which gives you a dollar per gigabyte cost of 0.11 – 0.18. A 512 gigabyte SSD will run you at least $1,300 if you can find a retailer that has drives in stock at this price point. This equates to $2.53/gigabyte or about 18 times more expensive than a standard hard drive.

Solid state drive technology is still relatively new and will probably over take rotating media as the preferred mass storage device in most computers in five to ten years. If you disregard price, SSDs enjoy many advantages over magnetic drives. Magnetic drives have several moving parts and at least one component will eventually fail and fail catastrophically. This means that if you don’t backup your data and replace your drive on a regular basis you are guaranteed to have deal with a hard disk drive failure at some point. Solid state hard drives are also significantly less susceptible to magnetic interference which will reduce your chances of having to recover lost photos or files. The final and most exciting benefit that SSDs have over conventional hard drives is fast read capabilities. SSDs can supply the processor with multiple streams of data whereas rotating media is generally limited to only one.