This IDC study explores some of the key considerations to take into account when deciding between the deployment of solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs). It outlines the advantages of SSDs and their drawbacks when compared with that of HDDs.

Donna Taylor, research director, IDC EMEA Storage, said, "While the capacities of HDDs have continued to rise, performance improvements have been challenging in a number of sectors not merely in niche markets. As a result, vendors have increasingly introduced the concept of deploying SSD technology as a complement to existing disk storage deployments. At current price points, SSDs first enjoyed positioning as cache but recently have expanded beyond this more limited usage case to become a feature that can have a dramatic impact on performance levels with relatively small amounts of SSD technology compared with that of HDDs."