Solid State Hard Drives

Posted by ttblogger on 01/11 at 11:53 AM Permalink

Editor’s Note: This issue of Tech Tips marks our 200th, which means we’ve been doing this for just about four years now:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to us! Thank you for your ongoing support and suggestions. Tech Tips exists for YOU, our loyal subscribers, so be
sure to join the Tech Tips Forum and make your voice heard!

There’s been a lot of hype lately about solid state hard drives as well as a lot of computers offering them as an option. What exactly are solid state hard drives, what are their pros and cons over standard mechanical hard drives? In this Tech Tip, we’ll take a look at these drives that seems to have mysteriously appeared on the scene in the last year.

Read Full Article Click Here

Posted by dave macias on 01/11 at 12:53 PM

this was all new info to me
and very helpfull
thanks very much

Posted by Richard Gill on 01/11 at 03:01 PM

You forgot the biggest con of all! Most SSHD won’t let you boot the operating system from them - but they are good for storage!

Posted by Henry on 01/11 at 03:33 PM

Thanks, very helpful.

Posted by Paul Callahan on 01/11 at 03:40 PM

Would it be possible to use this as a place to put your operating system and then save everything else to a hard drive?

Posted by Joe on 01/11 at 03:50 PM

How would one tell if they had a slc or mlc? Mine is made from OCZ, bought last month for my bro’s laptop.

Posted by Benny on 01/11 at 04:06 PM

I have heard/read that SSD can last up to 1.5 million hours before failure. I haven’t done the math yet to figure out how many years that is but at least that lets you know when its time to get a new drive. Unlike a HDD which can stop functioning whenever.

Posted by Joseph Rosenthal on 01/11 at 04:27 PM

I believe that I would keep up with the standard Hard Drive, Because I don’t know just how the other one work yet, I just learned some about the standard type as it is, And I am still learning about it each and everyday, So I am going to stay where I am and that is with the old one’s Like myself LOL
Joseph

Posted by George R. Woodside on 01/11 at 10:03 PM

One issue not addressed in your article was power consumption. For a laptop, this would be a significant factor in the purchasing decision. When I looked into SSDs (about six months ago), I found the power consumption was only very slightly less than a typical laptop drive. I was more surprised to learn that the drive typically consumes only about 15% of the power in a modern laptop. Consequently, there is no realistic power savings in switching to an SSD.

Posted by Mark Dulcey on 01/11 at 10:59 PM

If you’re going to run Unix or Linux on an SSD there are a couple of additional things that you should be aware of. A typical desktop installation of Unix does a LOT of writing to a small number of hard drive locations, but you can reconfigure the system to lessen the impact and increase the lifetime of your SSD. First, you should decrease the level of system logging. Second, any flash-based file system should be mounted with the utime option disabled. Normally a Unix file system keeps track of the most recent time that each file was accessed, but maintaining utime for certain critical system files like the log files will wear out an SSD very quickly.

Posted by AP on 01/12 at 02:52 AM

Thanks for the article. I know that you can get new laptops with SSD drives, but I would have liked to see a bit of info on the SSD drive interface and what options are available for using these drives with existing equipment.

Posted by JOHN on 01/12 at 04:10 AM

IS THIS THE SAME AS WAS REFERED TO AS A HARD CARD
BACK IN THE MID 80’S. IF SO THEY WERE HIGHLY RELIABLE BACK THEN. HAD ONE IN A COMPAQ
386/20E

Posted by John Jamack on 01/12 at 08:06 AM

But the solid state drives are lighter and take less power. Only problem is their life??
They need to at least last 5 years - the normal life expectancy for PC’s.

Future article - now we buy HD Cameras to record on, How do we record from HDMI cabling outputs??
Sure we can convert to lower RCA/Svideo, but I can not find out how or what to use to burn the video to DVD for my own personal future viewing.
Any help??

Posted by Robert Brown on 01/12 at 08:56 AM

I read in an article (Google news, I think) aboutToshiba planning to introduce a SSD of over 500 GB in the first quarter of this year, with it being available to consumers in general in the second quarter. They claim it will have 1 million hour life (114 years!). Anything you know of to coroborate or to refute this? I’m interested to know. Thanks.
- RB