It may be time in the life cycle of your computer hardware to consider swapping out some of your conventional hard drives. Perhaps you’re relying more and more on the cloud for your IT support and have noticed that your hardware has been subjected to less of a load. If so, upgrading hard drive components might add to your return on investment. If you’re considering switching over to solid state rather than the spinning, hotter running hard drives (HDDs), here are the top three benefits of SSD (Solid State Drives) that might help your decision: Reason 1: Cost of acquisition. While SSDs cost more per terabyte than HDDs, they do more with less of a footprint. Inapplications like Exchange email or banking, the high I/O transaction load — how much thecomputer hard drive has to work on input and output — SSDs can carry roughly ten times the load with a resulting reduction in footprint. Reason 2: Power consumption and cooling Best estimates are that SSDs typically save an astonishing 80 percent in the energy required to power them. They have greater power density — IOPS per Watt — that makes the big difference: fewer SSDs provide the same “juice” with less power throughput. The residual benefit is that SSDs don’t need so much space and the energy to cool them. Reason 3: RAID on steroids RAID (stands for “redundant array of independent disks”) is a way of using more than one disk drive as part of a single computer. RAID configurations minimize the delay inherent between the command and execution, known as I/O latency. What RAID does for standard HDDs, new SSD-friendly arrangements double down on the overall performance of SSDs, essentially widening the performance gap. Replacement and repair considerations The jury is still out on whether or not SSDs last longer than HDDs. However, HDDs have moving parts and have a 100 percent failure rate — eventually, that is. Figure on an annual failure rate of your spinning, hot running HDDs from about 2 to 8 percent — about 1 in 12 each year. So far there isn’t any really reliable information on SSD failure rates, and SSD manufacturersdon’t release that type of information. One study by a French hardware review site (Hardware.FR) tracked the product return rates from SSD customers. Read about the study on Tom’s HARDWARE. The bottom line is that it’s a safe bet that with no moving parts, less power drain and cooler running, your SSD is likely to outlive its host computer.