When it comes to getting the most out of your PC or laptop, a solid state disk (SSD for short) is one of the best upgrades you can make. Thankfully, they're continuing to fall in price - so much so that they're no longer considered the lust-worthy storage devices of the elite. In fact, you can have half a terabyte (500GB) of super-fast flash storage for under $200 and 250GB SSDs can regularly be found for less than $100.
So what's all the fuss about, and why do SSDs regularly appear at the forefront of deal and discount websites? Quite simply, they're the best thing to happen to laptops and PCs in the last 10 years and quite possibly the biggest improvement in PC storage ever. They decrease boot times dramatically; does your PC take several minutes or more to get to a working desktop when you turn it on? Do games and other programs take a long time to load? An SSD drastically improves things here; so much so that your old PC or laptop can often feel like a new one such is the noticeable boost to performance.
Add to this that SSD's are highly robust compared and power efficient compared to their hard disk equivalents and they're extremely attractive to laptop owners too. It's little wonder, then, that these little storage devices are so sought-after. There are plenty of options out there too. Budget models regularly push the cost per gigabyte down to newer levels and every generation is getting faster too. The big guns, such as Samsung and Crucial are the better-known and most popular players in the SSD market but smaller companies generally rely on the same or similar circuitry inside their models, essentially licensing the technology.
However, Austrian company Angelbird has launched an SSD called the SSD wrk that uses a new controller chip that's relatively unheard of - the Silicon Motion SM2246EN, although it too has appeared in some other manufacturers' drives. It comes in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities using MLC flash memory that's built using a 20nm process. The drive itself is housed in a sleek black brushed aluminum shell that's 7mm thick, so it will fit inside super-slim ultrabooks as well as laptops and PCs.
With the majority of SSDs on the market using similar controllers to one another, read and write speeds can also vary little, although lower capacity drives and some cheaper models do have lower data writing speeds. Angelbird states that the 512GB version of the SSD wrk offers a read speed of 563MB/sec and a write speed of 445MB/sec. The read speed is on par with the fastest SATA 6Gbps SSDs out there but the write speed is somewhat slower, with many modern drives offering above 500MB/sec.
However, this is also noticeably more expensive than some similarly-performing SSDs such as Crucial's MX100 and Samsung's SSD 840 Evo, both of which will leave you with plenty of change from $300 but can't match the SSD wrk's excellent read speed.
Have you added an SSD to your system? Has it made a difference and would you recommend it? Feel free to add your thoughts to the comments below.
