Storage was one of the major components of computers that have been growing, and in recent years, the capacity of hard drives has increased to the point where it is relatively cheap to purchase, say, a 1TB hard drive for under $100. However, with the flood in Thailand and the rise of hard drive costs has seen a trend of nearly tripling of what the market price was for the same capacity drive. The prices will eventually decrease, but, purchasing a HDD at this time may not be the best option for building new systems. Solid State Drives (SSD’s) are much better in terms of performance, power and shock resistance.

SSD’s are still considered a fairly new technology, and we have seen drastic improvement year after year. Being so new, it is quite surprising to know the performance when using one. Intel has published an article about their Value Performance SSD line, comparing between SSD & HDD cost and performance. Intel claims that the random data transactions per second are over 100 times to a traditional hard drive. Some additional significant numbers are: 1.5 times sustained data transfer, 2-50 times power efficiency, and 5-50 times shock resistance. Suffice to say, the SSD outperforms the HDD in almost every single category.

Upgrading your system with an SSD is well worth the steeper cost, as the current bottleneck in system performance is of the hard drive. The performance per gigabyte is second to none and with the costs of hard drives gone up, purchasing an SSD would be the most effective way to improve performance. The fact remains that SSD’s do not have as much capacity in comparison to the HDD is true; however, many more users looking to upgrade already have an external solution such as NAS or an external hard drive device for storage purposes. This allows users to boost their daily tasks, video games, and video watching, all with a blazing fast SSD.

The important issue to note is that, SSD’s uses a 2.5” dimension standard, rather than a 3.5” as seen with traditional hard drives. So, many desktop cases will not be compatible with just an SSD. This prompts manufacturers to create a solution to use SSD’s that can be mounted correctly to systems. Using the Icy Dock MB882/982 2.5” to 3.5” converter product line, one will be able to use their SSD in any system that uses 3.5” hard drive. What completely separates the MB882/982 converters from other brackets and converters is the universal compatibility design of the MB882/982. The converter line uses the exact 3.5” external design dimensions to fully be compatible with PC cases, Mac Pro, iMac, 3.5” HDD duplicator, 3.5” SATA HDD enclosure, mobile rack, backplane modules, DVR system, rackmount server and more.