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Article Title: The Advantages of Solid State Flash Disk Drives for Business

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: Hardware Related
Times Read: 615
Date: 2009-04-19 00:00:00
Pages: 1

Only recently has technology caught up with the hard drive industry with the development and manufacture of Solid State Disk (SSD) Drives. Before solid disk drives the only technology used in mass produced hard drives was rotation hard drives. In rotational hard drives the media rotated around a central spindle typically at 4200rpm, 5400rpm, 7200rpm or 10,000rpm in consumer speeds or 7200rpm, 10,000rpm or 15,000rpm in the enterprise or server market. As a wise instructor once said most of you in this room have had a hard drive fail, as for the rest of you just wait.

Solid State Disk drives are actually closer related to traditional digital camera memory cards and computer memory then rotational hard drives. In solid state disk drives there are no moving parts so most of the traditional issues with rotation hard drives have been eliminated by utilizing superior technology.

The first issue with rotational hard drives is because they're are spinning parts there is a lot of power consumption, and depending on the speed of your drive a lot of heat being produced. With solid state drives there are no moving high speed parts so a lot less power is required, and in turn there is little to no heat produced. A side benefit to the fact that there are no moving parts is the drives typically use the 2.5inch laptop hard drive form factor. There is also nothing worse for a computer user then to hear a hard drive head crash, and the data loss associated with it.

The second issue with rotation hard drives is because all the data is generally laid out on a round medium with a disk head that has to seek the data it can take time to find data that was written non-sequentially. For instance a Western Digital 640GB 7200rpm hard drive has a seek time of around 14.1ms to find data. With a good solid state disk the data is allocated similar to random access memory all that needs to be specified is a reference location to the data to read it, so access times are around 0.2ms.

That final issue with rotation hard drives is that given the fact that most rotational disk drives use circular medium the laws of physics specifically circular motion come into play. What this means is you can read and write data to disk drives faster at the outer edges of each platter, and slower at the inside because each time the disk spins more or less media can be accessed in one rotation. With solid state disk drives you generally get a consistent linear data access speed. High quality Solid state disk drives can have average read speeds of 100-260mb/s!

So far we have looked at the advantages solid state disk drives, and now we should look at some of the disadvantages. The first is the cost, whenever a new computer technology comes out the cost generally doesn't justify the innovation current solid state disk drives typically cost $150+ for a 64GB disk drives. The second is solid state disk drives currently is the individual bits can only written so many times although they still boast a MFT of 1,500,000 hours.

Conclusion

Solid state disk drives can drastically increase your computers performance and responsiveness for every day operations. With an average seek time of 0.2ms and speeds of over 100mb/s sustained read speeds operations that require loading hundreds or thousands of smaller files such as loading Windows Vista or XP you won't even recognize your computer after installing a solid state disk drive based on performance. If you have large business datasets or archives such as Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, or years of business email seeking information may seem nearly instantaneous.