SD Cards vs Solid State Drives

[jbc]

I am comparing costs of Solid State Drives to SD cards and I find that I can get SD cards, same capacity, at approximately $10 cheaper then the solid state drives. What advantages do solid state drives have over SD cards? What do I get for the extra $s?

 

[zmatt]

SSDs are faster and are designed to act as primary storage devices. they are more robust and will last longer as far as read/writes. SD cards are meant to be portable storage, so they are cheaper, slower and to an extent expendable.

As a general rule of thumb, anything you would use a hard drive for, you use an SSD for. And anything you would use any external data storage for (cd, flash drives portable HDs etc) you can sue an SD card for.

Just keep in mind that most PCs don't automatically come with SD card readers so unless you have some kind of adapter to carry with you it can't fully replace flash drives or CDs.

 

[CPierce]

usb card readers are super cheap!

 

[Trotter]

Cheap or not, SD cards are useless for running an OS or computer.

 

[jbc]

What does a standard drsktop PC cost with an solid state drive instead of a conventional hard drive?

 

[Puddle Jumper]

What does a standard drsktop PC cost with an solid state drive instead of a conventional hard drive?

Pretty much whatever you are willing to spend. Personally I would avoid buying a pre built system with a SSD as most manufactures tend to use low quality samsung or jmicron drives.

Here are a couple of good SSDs

Newegg.com - Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 2.5" 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - SSD
Newegg.com - Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2XXX 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - SSD

 

[zedman3d]

I heard you can run OS's off flash memory (compact flash is the one i hear about) rather well. (But i wouldnt)

 

[synergy]

Well most portable storage won't format as NTFS very easily. With a FAT file system you can't store more than 4GB files on the disk. Also, the R/W speeds are loads slower than SSD speeds. SSDs have a built-in controller that controls the speed and has it's own dedicated memory.

 

[zmatt]

Well most portable storage won't format as NTFS very easily. With a FAT file system you can't store more than 4GB files on the disk. Also, the R/W speeds are loads slower than SSD speeds. SSDs have a built-in controller that controls the speed and has it's own dedicated memory.

Not quite, with FAT you can't have a single file over 4 gigs in size, although you can have much more than 4 gigs of files. Some people in the mini-itx scene have good success with compact flash cards. But readers for those are even less common than SD.