Analyst: Solid state drives save money

Lower failure rates help accountants warm to SSD.

New research suggests those organisations that splash out on SSD (solid state drive) fitted notebooks for their employees will save money in the long term despite the higher initial purchase price.

Since SSDs became a buzzword a year ago, firms have been wavering over whether the extra expense of the supposedly more robust and higher performance solid-state storage subsystems is actually worth their significant additional cost.

But now IT market research outfit Jack Gold Associates has come up with an answer, delivered in full in a study entitled Solid State Drives in Business Notebooks: Cost Benefit or Cost Burden?

The long and short of the research favours SSD investments. Despite having to dig a little deeper and pay some US$200 more for a machine with a solid state drive rather than a standard HDD (hard disk drive), companies could end up saving themselves US$214 over a three-year lifecycle and US$493 if the machine is kept in service for five years.

As a result, according to the report, "the SSD expenditure has an ROI of 107 per cent for a three year lifecycle and 247 per cent for a five year lifecycle."

The report claims to have taken into account "the true costs associated with business notebook failures including variations in failure rates over the life cycle, costs of repairs both in and out of warranty, IT tasks and labour rates, end user effects, etc."

The report added that the cost of repairing a failed notebook under warranty with an HDD was US$970 vs. just US$715 for SSD and that the average failure rate of a notebook was reduced by one-third due to the higher reliability of SSDs.