Hard disk vs. solid-state drive -- is an SSD worth the money?

Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning there are no moving parts. Because there is no actuator arm and read/write head that must seek out data on a platter like on a hard disk drive (HDD), they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data.

But SSDs are also much more expensive than their hard-disk drive (HDD) counterparts, which offer 300GB of capacity or more for less than $100.

Most consumer-grade SSDs from leading vendors now cost around $3 per gigabyte, while traditional hard drives cost about 20 to 30 cents per gigabyte for 2.5-in. laptop drives and 10 to 20 cents per gigabyte for 3.5-in. desktop drives, according storage market research firm Coughlin Associates Inc. In other words, even the cheapest 120GB SSDs are going to be around $300, though some are available on sale for less. So should you buy a high-capacity HDD for little cash or plunk down hundreds of dollars more for a fast, but lower-capacity, SSD? Or, should you wait?

Coughlin Associates founder Tom Coughlin said per-gigabyte prices for HDDs and SSDs are dropping at the same pace -- about 50% per year -- so the sizeble price gap between the two will remain for years to come.

Gregory Wong, a solid-state drive analyst with market research firm Forward Insights agreed.

"I think the issue with SSD adoption is that prices have not been favorable," he said. "And there's still going to be a gap between HDD and SSD prices, even five years from now."

The average consumer in the market for a desktop or laptop doesn't pay a lot of attention to drive I/O speeds -- he tends to focus more on capacity. So when a drive offers less capacity, even when it's an SSD, it's apt to get passed over, according to Wong.

A lot depends on how you expect to use your computer. If you're a college student writing papers and surfing the Internet for information, the advantages of an SSD are negligible, but if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost, Wong said.