The Next Wave: Solid State Drives
It does not seem that long ago that purchasing floppy discs was part of the routine computing expense. Most stores that sold computer supplies carried them. Now, it is rarely found on store shelves. The product sales do not justify the shelf space.
And so it might be with hard drives. The price of hard drives is dropping continually. The storage capacity to price ratio is becoming more and more reasonable. The spinning hard drive is synonymous with the computing experience. It might be difficult to think of computers without the traditional hard drive but that is indeed the next wave. It is the future.
Erin Bell, in an article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has an excellent review of this next stage in data storage, which is really upon us now:
“…A solid-state drive is basically a computer memory chip, or a group of chips linked on a circuitboard. Each chip has billions of memory cells that can be turned on or off via an electrical charge to represent the zeroes and ones of binary information — the “language” computers speak to run programs and store information.
The lack of moving parts not only results in a quieter machine, it also reduces the risk of hard-drive failures, explains Darren Leroux, computer maker Hewlett-Packard’s product marketing manager for consumer notebooks. If you drop a hard drive, there’s a good chance the delicate drive mechanism will be wrecked, for example, but an SSD can sustains falls and bumps without experiencing any ill effects.”
link: Solid-state drives
There may be a day in the very near future when speaking about spinning hard drives will date you as being very ‘old school’. People will wonder how we ever managed with such primitive technology. And that is when you mention your fondness for the punch card technology…
Catherine Forsythe
Director of Operations
FlyingHamster: http://flyinghamster.com/
Tags: hard drives, the next wave, solid state drives, erin bell, canadian broadcasting corporation
I read an interesting article a couple of days ago (full article URL is posted below). In summary, it talked about how someone benchmarked a brand new 2.5Ghz MacBook Pro and put in a 128GB solid state drive (SSD). The custom rig failed to increase the overall performance according to their benchmarks and doesn’t warrant putting this kind of hard drive into a professional laptop. This 128GB SSD hard drive cost $3,819 and brought the total value of the MacBook Pro to about $6,000. I don’t think SSD hard drives will be the standard in laptops for another 2-3 or maybe 4 years or until a large enough model costs below $350.
http://tinyurl.com/5dcwnr