While the big hard disk drive manufacturers were buying each other out, solid-state drives or SSDs have quietly slipped into the machines of almost every enthusiast in Singapore. SSDs are like hard disk drives, only they don't have spinning magnetic platters and voice coil driven magnetic reading heads--they're filled with flash memory chips. They look like hard disk drives, they work like hard disk drives, but they are a lot faster, more reliable, less power hungry and best of all, they're only slightly more expensive considering the performance.

Although the previous market leader OCZ running short of cash made enthusiasts uncertain of future warranty, there is no shortage of rivals taking its place. Singapore now has Crucial, Plextor, Intel, Samsung, Corsair and several small brands duking it out in PC enthusiast capital Sim Lim Square.

The shrinking of the NAND flash production process has reduced costs so much that a 128GB SSD like the Plextor M5S sells for just S$125 at today's prices, compared to ten times that a few years ago. The size isn't such a turn-off because a lot of our information is on the cloud today, and if one needs more space, network attached storage provides safe, shareable and always-on storage almost like a personal cloud.

Less than 5,000 such drives are sold every month in Singapore--one might scoff at the small numbers, but all this is for Singapore consumers alone without counting the tens of thousands sold via export. This number is growing, and will grow even more once the owners of Sandy Bridge laptops decide that their computer has become too slow and realize that switching to a SSD would be the cheapest way to boost their perceived speed severalfold.

The market in Singapore is just accepting the fastest, coolest SSDs now, because the price difference between the fastest and the slowest is still pretty small. Unlike mechanical drives which employ components which can wear out and hence have a price differentiation between faster drives and less reliable drives, the all-electronic SSDs merely have a controller which, whether fast or slow, cost the same since they're just chips. Perhaps true price differentiation will come when more varieties of NAND flash appear, and when the SSD manufacturers use inferior grades of NAND to meet price competition.

It's the golden age for SSDs now. If your computer doesn't have an SSD, whether desktop or laptop, you're ready for the most cost effective upgrade in your life. All you have to do is just to copy out your media data to a separate drive, and what you have left will probably fit a 128GB SSD.