So these storage devices are here and they are not going away. The Solid State Drive is getting cheaper and it’s swift… and semi-standard especially for Notebook/Laptop machines. There’s no pesky moving platters AND they are not prone to jostles and drops like the older Hard Disk Drives we’ve used for decades.
In the last few years many advancements have been made in how we store our information. What used to be stored in massive rooms at NASA, or on tape, ‘physically’ large discs, various floppy disc sizes, on IDE, SCSI and then SATA hard drives now is finding homes on SD cards, USB keys, Solid State Drives, and even the Cloud.
Although you may not be aware of what is really happening on the inside of a standard HDD, these older drives have one (or multiple) silver disc(s) that spin around at 5400 or 7200 RPM, with an arm that flys, reading and writing like a classical music piece. Think “Flight of the Bumblebee” on digital vinyl folks… BUT on a mission based cat and mouse game on “speed”. Without adding more detail this can mean that those moving parts can stop working correctly and this can cause misery if you are not prepared with donor drive parts (carefully in a clean room) or a good backup of everything. If you can’t afford recovery options or can’t justify the cost it can turn into a complete loss of precious data.
Solid State Drives store the info in semiconductor memory chips, similar to what is found in flash drives. There are drawbacks as far as the lifespan of this kind of storage product but with backups and proper optimization it’s worth the extra and immediate speed. These too CAN fail but SSD technology is getting so much better all the time! (I’m a Samsung guy.) It is the future and in some cases the PERFECT upgrade when you need a new drive, if you don’t already have an SSD in your newer computer right now.
Point is, when you have the chance to breath life into a machine that needs an extra boost or you’re about to replace a drive anyway….just do it. SSD is now a welcome and well adopted storage option these days. Truth. However…. there is still room for bigger storage capacities at a more affordable price and regular old hard disk drives are still awesome for archive and backup purposes and I utilize both technologies. Sing “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof and Be Happy!
– Sun