Why the Limitations of SSDs Are Actually Good [Ssd]
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5742045/why-the-limitations-of-ssds-are-actually-good
The Higher Cost Will Pay Itself Off
Let's take the higher cost of $500 for example and say you've purchased a 256GB SSD to upgrade your laptop. Straight out of the gate you have a leftover internal hard drive that you can either sell for about $50-75 or turn into an external. Being optimistic, you're down to $425. That's not a big savings overall, but if you upgrade your laptop every 1-2 years you can keep using the same SSD. When you buy a new laptop, remove its hard drive and swap it with the SSD in the old one. The old laptop you're going to sell will now have a larger capacity hard drive and you can charge a little extra when you sell it. Over three sales you'll probably make an additional $100, bringing us down to $325. When the time comes to upgrade to a new SSD, you can sell the original SSD alone or with your old computer. Mark up the cost of the machine by $325 and you've covered your original costs. $325 for an SSD laptop upgrade is a pretty good deal. Of course you'll need to buy a new SSD, but you'll have made back your money at this point while using your SSD for several years.
Note: SSDs don't last forever and performance can degrade over time with some models, so make sure you get a high-quality SSD that's rated for a long life if you're going to do this. You can use a tool like SSD Life to keep an eye on things.
Size Doesn't Matter (Sort of)
For some of us, we have a massive collection of crap we find comforting. For others, the space is necessary for large media projects. I fall into both of these categories, but external drives solve the problems far better than trying to manage huge amounts of data on the main internal drive. First of all, you get the benefit of virtually limitless space for your stuff. Second, you can organize your stuff by the drive if that helps. Third, if you need additional protection offered by, say, RAID, you can get that with external drives whereas you're not going to get that with a laptop and some desktops. Ultimately, the size of the internal disk in your computer can actually be bad for you after a certain point. For me it's around 250GB (I only use 200GB but I like to keep about 50GB of space free). For some of you it may be as little as 128GB, a size where SSDs are significantly more affordable.
In the end, the size limitations are going to be better for you. You can hoard your crap on external drives, stay more organized, and reap the benefits of a super-fast solid-state disk in your laptop or desktop computer.
When you decide to take the plunge, be sure to read how to take full advantage of your solid-state drive.
You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
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