I've held off jumping on the SSD bandwagon for the longest time; partially because Solid State Drives were astronomically expensive until quite recently and in part because SSD storage capacities were too small for the applications I typically load onto C:\. The PCSTATS test system has relied on SSDs for a couple years now, though. SSDs are much quicker to install an OS onto and boost system performance very nicely, improve boot and application load times, etc.

In the latter half of 2012 the cost of a 240GB SSD - a size well suited to desktop PCs - finally fell to earth. Since this Hallmark moment happened, I've put together a few PCs with the OS and programs installed to SSD, with critical data safely backed up to a RAID 1 array of Western Digital RE4 mechanical HDDs. From this point on, I don't think I'll ever install another operating system to a mechanical hard drive... the era of solid state drives has indeed arrived.

In this review, PCSTATS is testing out SanDisk's Extreme 240GB SSD, a 6Gb/s SATA III drive rated to 550MB/s Read and 520MB/s Write (sequential) in ATTO Disk Benchmark. SanDisk's Extreme SSD uses 24nm Toggle Mode MLC NAND Flash and the popular LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller. The 2.5" SanDisk Extreme 240GB SSD retails just over $220 USD/CDN at stores like NCIX.com , other models are available in 120GB and 480GB capacities. At this cost, the 240GB SDSSDX-240G-G25 comes in just under the $1 per Gigabyte price point, or $0.91/GB to be exact. By comparison, a 2TB Western Digital RE4 hard drive costs around $0.12/GB.