Solid State in 2008? New Technology Worth the Price?

One of the big features of the PlayStation 3 was the user-replaceable hard drive. Many gamers replaced their PS3s with higher volume drives to take advantage of the media applications. Now with Solid State Drives beginning to trickle into the market, is the upgrade worth the money?

One determining factor of the worth of a hard drive is dollar per gigabyte. A Samsung 64 gig SSD goes for $699 on Newegg. Granted, there are cheaper SSDs out there, but I’m using a name brand as an example. A 320 gig Toshiba Laptop HD goes for $79.99. That’s about four gigabytes per dollar. For the SSD, 0.09 gigs per dollar. Seriously, that’s nine hundredths of a gig or about ninety-four megabytes for a dollar. So unless you buy all your groceries from the local organic grocer, drive a Hummer, and buy a new house every two years, a SSD is not a sound investment for a standard gamer. Obviously, there are positive aspects of the SSD, with the lack of moving (breakable) parts being the most notable. But like all new technology, the price drops won’t begin for some time.

A test by ExtremeTech, with an original 60 gig PS3, showed game install speeds didn’t decrease. Based on their test, the limit is the Blu-ray drive itself, the read speed being the tortoise. Initial game start load times increase around 30% faster than before and in-game level loads also increased around the 30-40%. Even with the quicker loading, it’s in seconds, not minutes.

At this point, the SSD is a great new technology, but not something a gamer needs in their PS3 yet. Given the next set of consoles and the time until release, SSDs may be the next hardware component added; but as of now, we’re all better off either buying a new console, opening a savings account, or buying the 11.65 games worth of what the $699 SSD would cost.