Thursday, February 17, 2011

Solid State Hard Drives - They've Finally Done It!

Tired of hearing your hard drive spin inside your computer?  Even the quiet ones aren't completely silent.  Also, that spinning uses extra power that could be saved: if you invested in a SSD (Solid State Drive).  By now, everyone probably owns a USB Jump Drive of some kind, but now you can replace your internal hard drive with the same kind of technology.  It's a storage device that does not require spinning disks within itself.  Also, you may remember when a 1 GB hard drive existed and was the same size as hard drives today (just much lighter).  Now we have 32+ GB thumb drives that are a FRACTION of the size.  In the picture above is a 120 GB SSD for only $230 at NewEgg.  That may seem like a lot, but regular hard drives that size were once that price too.  (It will come down in time)


Right now, they have all the various sizes of conventional spinning hard drives even up to 2 TB.  However, I would never spend $8,200 for one.  That is the current price tag at NewEgg right now.  But it's a great advancement in technology. 

The pros are that magnets do not affect SSD, the use 1/2 to 1/3 power, make absolutely NO noise, runs cooler, faster start up and data accessing times, no defragmentation required (my favorite!), and no moving parts means virtually no mechanical failures!  I look forward to seeing the sizes in hard drives grow exponentially in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a petabyte (1 PB) within the next decade (that's 1,000 GB)! 

Sources:
120 GB at NewEgg.com
2 TB at NewEgg.com

7 comments:

  1. I won't buy anything that is smaller than a single Tera, I will have to wait until the big ones get cheaper. But I know they never will, I'm sure we will get a new technology very soon and solid state drives will be outdated.

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  2. I've actually been thinking of getting one. Are there any other advantages other than sound?

    http://ipiliviensomewhere.blogspot.com/

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  3. Lendo, you might be correct. But usually the current technology increases in capacity before that happens. The increased capacity will cause the price to fall. Soon they will have a 10 TB SSD, and the 2 TB one will fall drastically in price.

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  4. Ootori, thanks for asking that. I updated the blog to reflect more pros.

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  5. Technology keeps progressing :D
    Soon youll be able to put your 10000 gig music on something the size of your pinknail!

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