April 18, 2014

The SSD Transition

Filed under: Main — Tags: — admin @ 12:01 am

The main storage device in your next computer will not be a hard drive. Oh, yeah: You’ll call it a “hard drive,” but in fact it will be a digital hard drive. The proper term is SSD.

SSD stands for Solid State Drive. It’s what was once called a memory drive or RAM drive. The memory, however, isn’t RAM but rather flash RAM, which retains information even when the power is off. It’s the same storage you find in a media card.

An SSD is essentially a raft of media cards, tied together with technology that makes the computer believe it to be one large storage device.

One large fast storage device.

I played with a RAM drive many moons ago, back when I wrote a book called The Microsoft Guide to Optimizing Windows. (That was the book I elected to do instead of writing Windows For Dummies.)

In that book, I devoted an entire chapter to speeding up Windows.

Yes, an entire chapter.

In the end, the fastest way to speed up Windows was to load it onto a RAM drive: On my computer (back in the day) I had a 4MB RAM drive configured. My PC’s startup sequence copied the three essential Windows files to the RAM drive, then started Windows from that drive. Total time to start Windows: 1.7 seconds.

Of course, that was Windows version 3.1. Still, 1.7 seconds was a vast improvement, which justified the speed of the RAM drive.

Today’s SSDs are just as fast. In fact, they’re so smoking fast I don’t know of anyone who has an SSD who would dream of returning to a spinning hard drive.

The two big obstacles for SSDs are the same two obstacles that have always hindered mass storage: capacity and price. One should be high, the other low.

For the SSD, the price is currently high and the capacity low. A typical 250GB SSD retails for about twice the cost of a 500GB hard drive. That price, of course, will come down over time. That’s the good news!

Right now, just about every computer manufacturer offers SSD as an option. Most users are opting to be cheap and instead choose the lower-priced hard drives. Those who opt to spend a bit more for an SSD aren’t disappointed: The speed is definitely worth it. In fact, the speed spoils you: Once you go SSD, you won’t think about ever returning to a traditional, spinning hard drive.

Thus begins the SSD transition.

2 Comments

  1. Mmm, One thing that shold be considered is a friend of mine replaced his drive with an SSD to get the speed of his laptop up. It did but the laptop now runs much hotter. So I believe SSD’s run much hotter and at least a case fan should be used if not more, as PC’s in general run hot hence the fan. Also I’m not sure of the construction meaning while it is possible to get some data from a crashed hard drive in general, it might not be from a crashed SSD always back up your data!
    Glenn

    Comment by glennp — April 18, 2014 @ 3:08 am

  2. You know, you bring up an excellent point. Many points, actually.

    1. If they do run too hot, then maybe there’s a hidden failure rate that we’re not yet aware of.

    2. When they ultimately fail, the data may be completely unrecoverable. I know there’s a billion-dollar industry that deals with hard drive data recovery.

    3. On the positive side, perhaps this means SSDs are more secure. E.g., when you retire an SSD perhaps a simple wipe is all that’s necessary. Remember that hard drive retain information, which hard drive recovery experts can find. This fact has been used in many legal cases, but perhaps with the change over to SSDs such tactics will no longer be valid?

    Comment by admin — April 18, 2014 @ 7:01 am

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