S.S.D. Hard drive
I have had many jobs that all involve the use of a computer. I am a graphic designer so it kind of goes without saying. The computer is a huge part of my daynd night. A huge pet peeve of mine is a slow boot up on a computer. I never really stopped to think about what the reason behind it was but I have always wanted to know! Sure enough, I have a little information that will hopefully help others and has definitely helped me in understanding some concerns with this issue.
I usually let my brothers handle any IT issues I have since they both are much more experienced and work in IS. In the past, when they atttempt to explain IT related information to me it seems to go right over my head and they just get frustrated with me not understanding. Anyways, this article really spoke to me regarding Solid-state drives or S.S.D. which seems to alleviate the slow start up process that computers may have.
S.S.D. is comprised of microchips and have no moving parts. What does that mean? Well, no moving part means that there is no waiting for disks to spin or waiting for drive heads to execute commands. (still very confusing I know… but I think it has to do with less involvement from other parts that typically take place on a hard drive and can make proccess slower.)
S.S.D. is significantly more expensive than a regular hard drive but apparently it cuts the “boot up” time in half. S.S.D. has been around for a while but the technology improved and became more practical only a few years ago. Since this big break in 2008 the cost has decreased and they are not as expensive as they once were. The increased performance and productively seems to be the main driving factor with S.S.D. Opening applications happens much faster than normal. (In my field of work I use multiple applications at a time (graphic/web programs) so this is quite the incentive since I use a wide variety of documents, images and graphics on multiple applications for various projects.
Hard drives are stacks of disks with magnetic material that rotate on a spindle similar to a record. The little drive heads pivot back and forth to read and write data. This process is eliminated with the use of an S.S.D.
S.S.D. is much quieter than regular hard drives and has less power usage than normal hard drives. The battery life is also increased with S.S.D. because of the decreased power usage. These drives also generate less heat and makes computers run colder which is an important thing for computers. The chance of malfunction is decreased because the disks are not susceptible to being tossed around like a spinning disk in a hard drive would be.
Intel, Toshiba, Samsung, Kingston, Corsair and OCZ began selling them for around $10 a gigabyte when they first became technologically advanced back in 2008. Now the prices are more like $2 a gigabyte while a hard drive costs roughly 20 cents a gigabyte
Intel, (who I blogged about recently) tops the market with S.S.D. because hard drives were not keeping up with the increasing speeds of many companies computer processors. Solid-state drives come standard in Apple’s Mac Book Air and iPad tablet computers.
My bro has been building my pc platforms for many years. It is quite the difference from any computer i have ever had at a job. Most likely due to the fact that I am not connected to a bunch of different work servers. So I asked my brother why my personal computer started up so fast and seemed to load applications quite raplidly and it turns out that it is not because I have an S.S.D., it is because I have Windows 7 for my operating system which is well known for its increased start up performance. So for now I am okay with not having S.S.D. but definitely in the future it seems like something that would be crucial for my computer and hopefully the prices of S.S.D will decrease by the time that happens. Either way, it was quite helpful to learn the difference between S.S.D. and a regular hard drive.
The article that caught my attention was titled: Computer Drives to Start Your Day Quicker. This was definitely a part of IT that I wanted to know more about since it affects me quite frequently. Check out the article and weigh in on my blog!
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