What would you trade you mechanical hard drive for? One that didn't make
any noise? Or could not be damage it by dropping it?
Memory sticks or USB Pen drives have been around for some time. And Solid
State Disk has been a dream for a long time that has now came true and the size
is large enough and cheap enough to accommodate your Operating System.
With a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of over 1.5 Million hours and NO
moving parts this is the wave of the future today!
And they are fast! Just about as fast
as the memory in your computer. Can you say instant on? Or very close to it
considering how long it takes to load a Operating System from a mechanical hard
drive regardless of the speed.
Think about it - is my hard drive running? Don't know can't hear the
platters spinning! What happens if you drop it? Uhhhhh, nothing! Well if you
dropped it from the third floor of you office building it wouldn't be worth much
but if it slipped out of your hand and hit the floor it would not break!
So what good is this new technology? What can I use it for?
What is the storage capacity of you laptop hard drive? 40 gig? 60? You can
get a 128 Gig drive for almost the same price as a replacement 60 gig hard
drive. The one I am reviewing is a 2.5 inch 32 gig SSD and it sells for less
than $250. I know you can get a 500 gig 3.5 inch SATA hard drive for you
desktop for less but it has some moving parts, this does not have any moving
parts! Less heat, no noise, less chance of failure. And as time goes on the
size of a SSD will increase and the price will come down.
Note: On the www.fix-it-blog.com I answer questions about the SSD and how you
can use it
here.
As with all new technology the early models have problems and are expensive,
but as with the SATA hard drive the technology development is moving very fast
and I do think that soon you will be able to buy a 500 Gig Solid
State Disk for less than
$250 in the very near future.
The possibilities are limitless,
install your OS on the drive, pull it out
of your desktop and put it in your pocket, or your laptop computer case and
no one can tamper with your data. Real 'Plug and Play'.
Or maybe you are an experimenter, have two or three drives with
different
Operating Systems loaded on each one, power down the computer and change the
drive, power up and your back in business. This is a possibility now with the
what is called a removable drive tray but it requires time to take the current
drive out of the tray and put in the new one taking a chance on damaging the
drive connectors.
Featured:
OCZ 32Gig OCZSSD2-1C32G Internal Solid state disk (SSD) By Newegg.com
(note -
place you mouse pointer over the image to view a larger image).
General
Brand
OCZ
Series
Core
Series
Model
OCZSSD2-1C32G
Device
Type
Internal Solid state disk (SSD)
Dimensions
Width
3.95"
Depth
2.76"
Height
0.38"
Weight
0.17
lbs.
Expansion / Connectivity
Form
Factor
2.5"
Capacity
32GB
Interface Type
SATA II
Features
RAID
Support
Performance
Max
Shock Resistance
1500G
Sequential Access - Read
120-143
MB/se
Sequential Access - Write
80-93
MB/se
MTBF
1.5
million hours
Consider this:
Now that the size of the SSD reaches 500 gig and you have three of them you could do
a RAID array with a Tetra byte of storage. And with 1.5 Million hours between
failures you would never have to buy another drive, unless of course a Tetra byte
of storage became to small... :)
Read this
article about using this type of drive in your computer. If you are thinking
about using this type of drive in your laptop read this article about my
laptops.
Note:
When I wrote this article in Dec of 2008 SSD had been on the market for about
six months. Now a year later and Intel has jumped in to the game. The new Intel
drives are faster, larger, but as of yet not cheaper.
The drive featured in this article is still going strong and has not caused me
any problems, I have since upgraded three laptops with SSD IDE drives (which are
getting harder to find everyday) and none of those drives have caused me any
problems. However one drive did cause me problems read the
review here.
Dec 2010
After two years my OCZ SATA II 64 Gig drive has failed. I am giving OCZ Tech
and Customer support a zero because they have failed to respond to my query
about repair of the drive. Even though OCZ has some good products if they will
not support them once they have sold them to the public what good is buying a
product that may fail just after the warranty expires?
For comparison I have two SATA II drives that are over three years old in
the same computer with out any problems. Way to go WD and Seagate.
This site contains a lot of information. As
with any publication not all information is available due to space, time, or
subject constraints.
If you have a question that you did not find the answer
on this web site you a can
ask your question here and we will endeavor to get you the most up to date
answer possible!
