Solid State Drives

To the average PC user, speed is an important factor. To someone like me, it's everything! Just recently I learned that there are people out there installing their main operating system on solid state drives. By doing this they are, in some occasions, booting Microsoft Windows 7 in less than thirty seconds. This is because there are no moving parts and they use flash memory instead of spinning platters and read heads. SSD's have very high read and write speeds giving them yet another advantage over HDD's Here is an image to show you the difference between a solid state drive and a hard disk drive:

Up until recently complaints were surfacing about solid state drives slowing down after time. It was soon discovered that the solid state drives didn't completely delete a file, it was merely flagged as deleted and then when that space was to be used again the file would be written over top of. After the entire drive had been used, every new file would have to overwrite a flagged file taking up time. With the use of Trim technology the file is deleted the first time giving you the same write speed as when you first started using the drive. 

Solid state drives are much more expensive than hard disk drives. Right now the cost is not worth the lack of storage to the average user. For a 1 TB HDD you can get a 40GB SSD at the same cost(depending on the manufacture these numbers can vary). However, if you are just trying to speed up your OS, applications, and even your games then you can still use a 40GB SSD as your primary drive and back up all other data on a secondary HDD. Below is a video showing the difference between the two drives with Windows 7:

 Source: The Best HDDs and SSDs For Your Money December 2010