My OperaThrow out those old-fashioned HDDs, get a SSD instead.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 9:53:41 PM
This is possibly the most exciting news in computers since... oh I don't know, the introduction of the Hard Disk Drive 25+ years ago. No more waiting for your Hard Drive to spin up, find files, load applications. No more constant vibration, heat and background noise from your main file storage.
It's such a simple, obvious idea really. The Solid State Drive (SSD) is a hard drive for your computer that uses flash memory - the same type of memory used in MP3 players, digital cameras, memory cards such as SD, XD, CF and memory sticks. My cellphone has one the size of a fingernail that stores 1Gb of data. What's new is that companies such as Samsung, SanDisk and PQI are offering flash memory drives which have the same interface as a Hard Disk Drive - ATA or SATA - meaning you can get rid of that noisy, slow, loud HDD, plug a SSD straight in the same slot and you're away.
It's such a simple, obvious idea really. The Solid State Drive (SSD) is a hard drive for your computer that uses flash memory - the same type of memory used in MP3 players, digital cameras, memory cards such as SD, XD, CF and memory sticks. My cellphone has one the size of a fingernail that stores 1Gb of data. What's new is that companies such as Samsung, SanDisk and PQI are offering flash memory drives which have the same interface as a Hard Disk Drive - ATA or SATA - meaning you can get rid of that noisy, slow, loud HDD, plug a SSD straight in the same slot and you're away.
What they offer:
- zero noise
- zero vibration
- MUCH more robust: no moving parts means nothing to break
- more reliable - they tend to come with 5 year guarantees standard.
- much lower power usage
- more than twice the data transfer rate of the fastest Hard Drives currently, both in burst and sustained rates.
- most importantly, almost no latency. Regular HDDs can have a seek time of up to 20 milliseconds. Multiply that by the millions of file fragments it has to look for all the time and it adds up quickly to a lot of waiting time for software and data to load. This is the main reason why a computer will seem slow - it will always be waiting for the hard drive.
These are not new, they've been around for a couple of years. Up till now though, they've been quite small in size - 8, 16, 32 Gb. The thing that's really got me a bit excited about this:
Samsung introduces 64GB flash drive.
They are getting faster too... Of course, it's still going to be a bit of a wait before they start becoming affordable. They are currently about 20 times the price of a similar sized regular HDD. It shouldn't take long for that price to come down though, once large-scale production comes online.
Meanwhile I have visions of my money-is-no-object PC with a 64Gb SSD for the OS and programs, and a 500Gb HDD or two. You know, just for extra storage.
