For the common user, I think this is the most puzzling time to be buying a PC or a laptop and trying to decide on storage. Even for seasoned IT guys this can be a ‘roll of the dice’ type time on system storage.

And this post is really for the general population I deal with, and points to them on looking out in the market to see what’s going on.

What we need to look at is the history and evolution of storage from from IDE – EIDE – SATA – SATA2 – SSD and what’s going to be standard next; because hardware technology changes every 6 months [if not faster].

To start off with, the solid-state drives are progressing at a staggering rate. The creation of the solid-state drive actually starte with jump drives and the hackers of the world using them to create system drives. Ever since that point, jump drives have been progressing in size and in speed and the cost of these items keeps coming down.

From more traditional times only certain manufacturers [Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital] could get into the business of creating and manufacturing hard drives, but now that we’re entering into the phase of solid-state drives pretty much anyone who can create a memory chip can get into the production of the solid-state drive. Many different manufacturers at this time are putting their foot in the door to try to establish themselves as a reputable name for storage within the PC and laptop market.

Solid-state drives are still fairly new device in the PC and Laptop market if your basing this on unit cost. At the time this article, a 1 TB solid-state drive will cost you approximately $2200; not exactly what the typical PC user would consider economical. A typical one terabyte traditional hard drive will cost you approximately $110 [estimated one dollar per gigabyte].

In comparison to prices from1996, when the 500 MB hard drive cost approximately $500. And this is a clear example of the process of creating a traditional hard drive, and the fact that the manufacturer has refined the process to the point of producing the highest gross profit margin. This signifies the decline and death of the traditional hard drives. It happened with 8Track, Cassette, DVD and eventually BR-DVD; hard drive is just another medium on it’s way to the tar pits.

The problem with traditional hard drives is that the transfer rates on these mechanical devices are limited by the RPMs and to seek speed. Typical SCSI drives operate at about 15,000 RPM and traditionally outperform standard IDE and say to drives easily. Not only are the traditional drives limited by their mechanical architecture, they’re also inherently inefficient at managing power.

Your standard hard drive nowadays has several platters mounted inside them and they have to be spinning at a specific rate in order for the system to read information from them, and you’re also limited by the mechanical arm inside the drive that has to jump to a specific location to read the data from the platters. Keeping the hard drive spinning at a specific speed constantly and having to operate the mechanical arm inside drains a lot of power from PC or a laptop. In the laptop world conserving energy is a very high priority; this is where the solid-state drives will excel. With nothing to operate on a constant basis, laptops will function more efficiently resulting in longer battery life and more usage for the end-user.

Solid-state drives our memory chips, there’s no moving parts inside, no platters and no mechanical arms. If you drop the drive itself, there’s a very slim chance that you’ll actually damage the information that’s on the solid-state drive. This is a huge benefit for the tops [where most people will drop your laptop].

Performance wise, solid-state drives have shown themselves, more of late, to be able to outperform traditional hard drives with higher sustained transfer rates.

So while the traditional hard drives can provide fairly good performance with a very high level of storage, the solid-state drives can’t deliver the high level of storage [based on cost ratio], but can deliver the performance that some systems need. In my opinion, solid-state drives are not for the public right now, but I’m sure they’re popular with IT shops and server production. IT shops typically have a few more dollars to spend for performance than your average consumer.

The perfect marriage of these two types of storage devices would be to utilize these solid-state drive for the operating system and a traditional drive to handle the storage of large amounts of data. The result should be a system that will boot faster, the operating system should be more responsive, applications should run just a little bit smoother and then having all that space to store your static data; hopefully only needing to use itin short bursts [which should be of the cached by the hard drive itself].

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy.

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