
You can find lower capacities–as small as 30GB–but for the upgrade described in the following pages, we chose a 120GB MLC drive. Somewhere in the middle are MLC drives with a capacity of 80GB to 120GB these tend to run from $200 at the 80GB point to $400 at the high end of 120GB MLCs. As a result, MLCs are less expensive than SLCs at the same capacity point, since you need fewer physical flash memory components for greater capacity.Įven MLC drives can be expensive, especially at capacities of 200GB or more. An SLC SSD stores data as one bit per flash memory cell, while an MLC drive stores two or more bits per cell. SSDs come in two major types: SLC (single-level cell) and MLC (multi-level cell). That’s a high price to pay, particularly if your current laptop or netbook is a fairly low-cost unit. While it’s easy to find an inexpensive laptop with a 160GB, 250GB, or even 320GB hard drive, a high-quality 256GB SSD would likely set you back over $700. The main drawback of a solid-state drive is the cost: Per gigabyte, SSDs are much more expensive than standard hard drives, which have come down dramatically in price in the past several years.

(Don’t forget to read “ How to Switch to a Solid-State Drive” for more advice.) SSD Basics Here are a few tips for picking out the right model, making sure that it will work with your setup, carefully cloning your old drive, and keeping the install process clean and painless. However, upgrading to a solid-state drive isn’t as easy as buying a drive and throwing it in your PC. They offer fabulous read performance, too, though their write performance varies random small writes can be very fast, but long writes of large block data (as you might have with continuous video recording) can be slower than on traditional hard drives. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they’re more rugged and shock-resistant than standard hard drives–which makes them perfect for laptops that get bumped around a bit.
