Every once in a while I buy a new piece of tech that I just have to share my thoughts on with people. My most recent item is something that was gifted to me over Christmas; something I probably wouldn’t have bought until I buy an entire new computer. I am talking about a solid-state drive, or SSD.

SSDs are a supremely advanced form of hard drive that completely eliminates moving parts. This means that there is no needle and no spinning disc that reads or writes data. Instead, everything internal and external is, well… solid. Shocking, right? In all seriousness, this thing is a beast; let me tell you why.

It is VERY light. You wouldn’t even know you are holding a hard drive. It weighs as much as a candy wrapper, but is more durable than any regular drive.

It is FAST. This is the main attraction of these products. SSDs are known for significantly boosting computer performance, and I definitely saw it in my gaming laptop. I took out my hybrid drive, installed my Windows 7 on the SSD, and everything is much, much quicker now. I even had some room to install a game on the SSD (mine is a 120GB model; these drives are still expensive for bigger storage since they are so new), and the speed increase on that game is phenomenal.

Data transfer speeds are insane. I installed League of Legends in literally about 4 seconds after downloading, which also didn’t take long. My computer is faster, quieter, and all around better since the OS is on this awesome drive. I have my hybrid drive in the secondary slot in my laptop, and that is where I have all of my Steam games. It is somewhat rare for laptops to have two internal hard drive slots, but luckily mine does (I have about 800 gigs of games).

I also saw a huge speed increase in just moving files. I once peaked at 110MB/s while moving files from my SSD to a flash drive. That is simply insane.

SSDs are the way of the future. I predict we will see them in the next set of consoles, and lots of new computers are shipping with them already inside today. The only, and I mean only, downside to SSDs at the moment is that to have the same capacity of a normal HD, you will be paying an incredible amount of money. My model was $80 on sale for 120GB; compare that to 500GB or even 1TB you could get in a regular HD for that price. It’s a new technology, so it isn’t surprising. I cannot wait for the day when we can get a 1TB SSD for only $100 or so. That will be simply amazing.

The day is coming soon, my friends. Just as I thought tablets would become the new laptop, I think SSDs will replace everything we use as standards now. Even flash storage like thumb drives and SD cards. Maybe games will be sold on SSDs, which would be awesome (discs are far too slow).

Side note: I upgraded my Xbox360 hard drive for the first time in 7 years. Turns out that never changing my original hard drive resulted in it getting close to dying, and I hadn’t even realized it. While I didn’t upgrade to a SSD, it sure felt like it. Now I have 60GB of free space after downloading all of my stuff to my console instead of 10MB free. It’s nice, and 360 HDDs are cheap nowadays anyway.

Thanks for reading!