Introduction

Hard drives in their now traditional format have been with us for quite some time, since 1956 actually, but it was not until much later that they began appearing in home computers. Since then we have seen a steady evolution of technology which has increased capacity and added speed or reliability - with the most recent evolution in the desktop market being Serial Attached SCSI’s appearance on enthusiast boards.

It took a further 20 years after the invention of the hard drive for a possible replacement to appear, and that was an early version of a Solid State Drive. SSDs followed a similar timeframe from invention to desktop use and although they have been used by the military for some time now it is only in the last 12-18months that they have been worth considering for home use.

Today we have three such devices on our test bench from Intel, Patriot and Super Talent. Each has a different capacity and cost but all will be placed through a selection of synthetic and real world tests to establish which drive is ideal for consumer’s first leap into the SSD market.