Review: Hard disk vs. solid-state drive -- is an SSD worth the money?

Next I transferred a 1GB folder filled with photos and video files to the drives from a USB drive. Both the SSD and the HDD accomplished the file transfer in about 50 seconds (the Seagate was 2 seconds slower).

For the battery test, I used MobileMark 2007 benchmarking software from Business Applications Performance Corp. (BAPCo). The software simulates more than a dozen programs that people use in everyday life, so it's considered a very accurate measurement of power consumption, and the results from this test were the biggest surprise of all. The battery lasted 132 minutes when powering the Seagate drive and 137 when powering the OCZ -- only a five-minute power difference.

Conclusions

While the SSD outperformed the HDD in most benchmarking tests, as well as handily beating out the competition for boot-ups, whether or not as a consumer you should choose an SSD over a HDD will depend on your needs. HDDs, especially those with 7,200-rpm spindle speeds or higher, offer respectable read/write rates and vastly higher capacity levels.

Typical notebook or desktop users probably won't notice a big difference between an SSD drive and a traditional hard disk drive other than a faster boot-up and quicker application-launch times.

According to Jim Handy, who co-authored a report about digital storage in consumer electronics, SSD will continue to dominate in small handheld devices because the cost to produce flash memory-based drives is significantly cheaper than hard disk drives. So in some cases, SSDs make sense for products such as MP3 players that can store large numbers of compressed music files on drives with relatively small capacities.

"You can buy a $50 HDD with 120GB of storage. A 120GB SSD will set you back around $250-plus. You can buy $30 worth of flash, though -- as long as 16GB is enough for your needs," said Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis Inc. "That way you can pocket the other $20."

But for laptops and desktops, where consumers will continue to seek as much capacity as money can buy, Handy said SSD adoption will likely suffer for years to come.

The final word: For most users, this a good time to consider buying a higher-end HDD that should deliver more-than-enough performance -- and plenty of room to grow -- while you wait for SSD prices to drop further.

That could be a long wait.