Why Businesses Should Consider Switching to Solid State Drives

Hard drives have served businesses faithfully ever since computers became a mainstay of the modern office. It's hard to even imagine computing without them. However, as IT departments everywhere know, there's a new kid on the block: the solid state drive.

Solid state drives don't have any moving parts, unlike hard drives, and many businesses have already made the switch. If your company uses any type of computer regularly, it's important to seriously consider the advantages that solid state drives offer over standard hard drives. For instance:

They cut down on data loss costs. No moving parts generally means better reliability. While hard drives can crash due to physical shock, vibration, heat, or for a dozen or so other reasons, SSDs are much more resistant. That means much lower data loss costs. Data recovery services, which can cost $1,000 or more per hard drive, don't need to be used as often when an office uses solid state drives.

There's also less lost productivity due to damaged media, which can quickly add up. The dependability of solid state drives is a crucial point to keep in mind, especially when a business stores sensitive data and customer records.

Solid state drives offer improved speed. Although speed's not always a big concern in an office computer, there can be significant performance improvement from switching to a solid state drive. SSD can offer 3.0Gb/s speeds to users, which can make for better productivity at your business. It's a fairly inexpensive way to add power to your computers.

Solid state drives may be cheaper than hard drives in the long run. While SSD drives are expensive, they're certainly less expensive than they were last year, and now may be the time for businesses to switch. The increased dependability of SSD means fewer replacements. They also require a whole lot less power for regular operation, so when you switch an entire office over to solid state drives, you might see some big electrical savings.

SSD offers fast RAID performance. Businesses with servers should be especially interested in the RAID capabilities of solid state drives. Multiple solid state drives can be used in a RAID configuration at incredibly fast speeds, far in excess of what is possible with a hard drive. For businesses that needs serious computing power for servers, this can be a huge reason to look into SSD RAID arrays.

Does your business use solid state drives or hard drives? Post your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.