Internal Solid State Disk - SSD

What would you trade you mechanical hard drive for? One that didn't make any noise? Or would not be damaged it by dropping it?

I have been working on computers for a long time, even before I had a job working with computers I came in to contact with some of the first computers that were not in a big block building, such as the IBM Main Frame. I am talking about small (this is relative by today's standards) computers that were about four inches wide, six inches high and eighteen inches long. My first contact with a computer was in fact in an aircraft. It was the internal navigation computer. It was programmed by the pilot by turning 'thumb wheels' to select the latitude and longitude. It had no memory storage what so ever, what was previously used was what the next pilot had until he changed it.

Today as technology marches on the new kid on the block is SSD - Solid State Disk. This is a flash memory type device, similar to the 'Pen Drive' or 'USB Flash Disk' that has been around for some time. The difference is these drives are of higher capacity, are a lot faster, are more rugged, and consume more power.

A SSD is resistant to the 'head crash' that mechanical drives suffer from because they don't have any heads or platters inside the case to crash. In other words no moving parts at all. These drives can take a shock of up to 1500 g's! That is 1500 times the force of gravity. The Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is an astounding 1.5 Million hours. Consider a hard drive of today. even an expensive SCSI, is only 200,000 to 300,000 hours!

At this time the capacity of these drives is still low, the maximum capacity has just passed 128 Gig. By today's standards this is an average size drive, some manufactures are building 1 Tera byte mechanical hard drives and they cost half as much as a SSD. But the SSD with the MTBF that is over five times as much you will definitely get your moneys worth from the drive.

What can you use this for? Well for one thing the drive has the speed approaching the memory in your computer. If you had say a 32Gig drive and loaded your Operating System on it your computer would start in about eight seconds, almost instant on! At this time as with all new technology the cost is the determining factor, how much do you want to spend and how bad do you need the technology?

In areas where security is of the utmost priority a user could take the SSD out of their computer at the end of the day and put it in a safe, thus making it harder for thieves to steal important data.

Monte Russell with over 20 years experience, AAS degree, MCSE, CNA, A+, and hardware certificates. The free monthly newsletter at: http://www.diy-computer-repair.com/newsletter-signup.html always intriguing, full of insights about computing. Read more about this at http://www.diy-computer-repair.com/solid-state-disk-SSD.html

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