SSD drives explained

One word:

Wait for Windows7, it takes full advantage of SSD's. But who told you SSD

is faster? Nothing beats a magnetic harddisk, even today, for a regular

home user. In a lab, science or industrial applications there're faster

methods of storing information, but for an average person harddisk is the

best large-volume/daily access medium except for

its mechanical fragility/wearing out & sensitivity to Magnetic fields. Also

extremely large harddisks already today enter the domain of Quantum

Mechanics

where reliability of storing a Logic 0 or 1 is described by Theory of

Probablity.

In plain English, very large harddisks might be unreliable unless you pay

extra for Redundancy (hard or software-level erroro correction circuits &

codes).

My preference for ultraimportant information is to be backed up to Optical

media, made by companies like Verbatim, 3M or HP, not by junk like Memorex.

I make 3 folders - 3 identical copies spread over DVDR or BD (BlueRay) disk

in case surface

getrs scratched, then I copy a 4th image to a portable harddisk stored 60

miles away from home. Plus I upload the same to a server 2000 miles away.

Because my data is my life. I still can peek at naive letters I wrote in

college 9 years ago, and my high school rubbish, it makes me blush. But

often it terrifies me - some pieces are extremely witty, I was a smart guy.

It means i got dumber, if I get impressed by it 17 years later, i am 37 now.

Things I wrote at 20 are still oin disks.

SSD is the same as a USB flashdrive, except of giant size and faster

on-board controller which emulates harddisk cylinder structure. OK?

That means it's subject to wearing off logical cells, and SLOW sequential

access. If you're reading a giant single file, harddisk is FASTER, its head

spinning for example at 10,000 rpm will pump data way way faster than any

SSD can, and if you find an SSD which can compare to harddisk it probably

costs more than imaged in a vile alcohol-induced dream.

Where SSD beats harddisk is accessing numerous small files because SSD's

random access is nearly linear versus Address it's accessing. But harddisk

needs ot constantly move read/write head to random sectors on diks platter

to access such fragmented files.

So.. you can never say SSD or HDD is faster, it depends.

If we had this conversation just a year ago, I'd faltly say SSD is too

crippled for professional use, well now it's not too bad for many small

files, but still - watching a video or pumping CAD data which I do daily as

an Engineer, nothing can beat harddisk even today.