“For example, hard drives feature platters that take a fair bit of energy to keep spinning at thousands of rotations per minute. Power consumption is of course a greater concern for mobile applications, but it’s become a key metric for desktops, as well. Those spinning platters also introduce a measure of rotational latency that severely impedes seek performance. The drive head can’t just go and grab data from a given target; it has to wait for that target to come ’round on the platter. And then there’s the not-so-trivial matter of fragility. Hard drives have become considerably more robust over the years, but moving parts are still prone to damage from jostling and other physical abuse.Solid-state drives (SSDs) aim to solve the problems associated with hard drive mechanics by replacing them with memory chips. On paper, it looks like a great idea. The first batch of SSDs did offer low power consumption and quick seek times without moving parts, however, actual throughput was dismal and capacities were quite limited.”
Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:
- 1GB IronKey USB Flash Drive With Hardware Encryption @ Legit Reviews
- Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 2.5″ SATA Hard Drive Review @ Bigbruin
- Corsair Flash Padlock Pen Drive @ TweakTown
- Seagate Momentus ST9160823ASG 7200.2 160GB SATA Notebook Hard Drive @ I4U
- Kingston 8GB DataTraveler II Plus Review @ The TechZone
- Corsair Flash Padlock USB Drive @ Bjorn3D
- Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive @ TweakTown
Revisiting Solid State Drives
Super Talent’s new SSD drive offers 128GB of storage, a significant increase in size from the first SSDs to hit the market, as well as cost. They estimate ~$4600, though I guess that is cheaper than 128GB of RAM. When The Tech Report did their testing, they proved that the drives technology has come a long way from the first batch, and it’s random access times are awe inspiring. Unfortunately, the drive cannot perform that well for all of the tests.