We’re sure the importance of your work is stupendous, but there are cheaper ways to save time. Why not cut back from eight hours of sleep every night to six? (We just saved you several hundred dollars and added six years to your waking hours.)

Solid state drives (SSDs) top traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) in many areas, but they’ll cost you. They are typically lighter, faster, quieter, and more durable than “normal” drives. For the price, they should also help you quit smoking, lose weight, and improve your tan.

SSDs aren’t new – they’ve been used for years in the military, in factories, and in hospitals, where disk durability and reliability are paramount.

Crack open an “old-school” hard drive and you’ll void your warranty and lose your data. But you’ll also see layers of magnetic platters. Small metal read-write heads are mechanically moved over the platters to read and write data. In contrast to electrons whizzing through circuits electronically, mechanical movements are pretty slow.

Enter solid state drives, which use flash memory chips instead of magnetic platters. They’re similar to USB memory sticks, camera memory cards, and some MP3 players. The advan-tages of a SSD are due to its lack of moving parts.

Writing to a SSD can be (but is not always) faster, but reading from them can be many times faster, leading to faster system boot-ups and wake-ups from stand-by mode.

But even if you spend all day saving documents and searching for files until you retire in 30 years, you’ll only gain back about 12 days by switching to solid state. You’ll save more time skipping your lunch break and swallowing bouillon cubes at your desk, or growing a beard and giving up shaving.

So what are the other advantages? SSDs are lighter than their HDD counterparts, sometimes about one fifth the weight – a big deal in laptops, where every ounce counts.

They’re also quieter, and more resistant to shock. Dropping a hard disk drive is likely fatal to the data it stores; dropping a solid state drive won’t hurt much unless it lands on your foot. Did we mention they’re lighter?

SSDs should consume less power, but tests published in computer magazines show only minor differences. PCWorld has more at tinyurl.com/487ora. This could change as manufacturers begin to focus on optimizing power consumption.

The main disadvantage to SSDs is their price. “Normal” hard drives cost around $0.50 per gigabyte, but SSDs cost $12-$15 per gigabyte. The highest-capacity SSDs available in lap-tops as of early 2008 store only 64 GB of data, with 128 GB models coming soon. The 64 GB solid state drives will set you back over $1000. Compare that to the $30 a traditional hard drive of the same capacity would cost, if you could still find them that small.

Only a few laptop models provide SSD options right now, but this will change as prices come down and drive capacities go up. Years from now, we’ll talk about mechanical drives the way we talk about 8-track tapes today, but see ComputerWorld at tinyurl.com/43vhdc for a contrarian viewpoint.

So upgrade to solid state, but do it for the lighter weight, the quieter operation, and the durability. If you’re just looking to save time, consider foregoing the elevator in your office building and just stepping directly out the window. When your co-worker asks if you have vertigo, tell her “Oh no, only about ten feet more.” (Apologies to Ogden Nash, who offers one last bit of time-saving advice: “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”)