Solid state disks

Intel SSDSA2MH080G1C5

If you're looking for a lightning fast reliable drive, and budget is not an issue, solid state drives are the top of the line. Solid state drives (SSDs) can read and write faster than mechanical hard drives, and really shine when your applications eat up all your memory, requiring intensive swapping to and from disk. They're ideal for any task that uses a lot of memory — editing photos, browsing the web, and stitching together home videos. You'll also notice faster boot times. As for reliability, solid-state drives have no moving parts. This reduces the wear and tear, making SSDs much more reliable. Banks use SSDs to record your transactions, and SSDs are the drives of choice for web companies serving millions of concurrent users.

SSDs are based on the same technology as the flash cards you use in your digital camera. They're very fast at reading and writing (especially random reads and writes, which really slow down traditional drives). When your computer is swapping, it's doing a lot of random reads and writes, which is why SSDs really shine here. However, be aware that SSDs are very slow at erasing data. Most SSDs handle this by doing erases in the background, when you're not using the disk heavily, but some cheaper SSDs cut corners here, reducing the write speed to that of a traditional drive. Even in this case, however, reads will be very fast.

Solid state disks come in a variety of form factors, from the 2.5" drives laptops use to the 3.5" drives you'll find inside desktops. They're also available as ExpressCards, which you plug into a laptop ExpressCard slot for extra storage.

SSDs come with a variety of connectors: SATA and PATA, as well as SCSI and Fibre Channel. SATA and PATA are the most common, while SCSI and Fibre Channel are sometimes seen in data centers. PATA is the new name for IDE, so if you're replacing an IDE drive, check the PATA section.