Don’t care if their data is stored locally or in the Internet
SHERMAN BLACK, a senior vice president at Seagate Technology, a leader in hard drive manufacturing, lies awake at night worrying that his teenagers are part of a new generation of computer users who don’t care if their data is stored locally or in the Internet “cloud.”
It matters to the hard drive industry, because a growing number of consumers are eagerly eyeing a new wave of solid-state drives. Made from arrays of Flash memory chips, these new drives are smaller and many times faster than traditional hard drives that read and write magnetic 1s and 0s on a rotating disk or platter. They are also, of course, more expensive. Small 2-, 4- and 16-gigabyte solid-state drives are now already standard components of the so-called netbook laptops being sold by Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others, and a 128-gigabyte drive now sells as a $500 upgrade to the MacBook Air from Apple.
This shift in storage technology is now possible because of the growth in Flash chip usage. They are now ubiquitous in hand-held devices like digital cameras and MP3 players. The other reason the shift is happening now is that these solid-state drives (so called because, unlike magnetic-disk drives, they have no moving parts) are being designed to fit in the same space in laptops currently used by the industry-standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch disks used in hard drives.
There are many benefits to this newer technology. Information can be stored permanently in Flash chips even when power is turned off, and the chips can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. They make no noise, give off little heat and consume far less power, while transferring data on average many times faster than rotating hard disks.
Of course, there are caveats. While solid-state drives can read information more quickly than hard drives, some models write information more slowly. That means that, on average, performance comparisons may depend on a particular manufacturer’s design or running a specific application or style of computing. There are also big differences in quality within the solid-state market, and there can be extreme differences among drives in the number of times that 1s and 0s can be stored and erased. Because individual transistors can fail over time, Flash chips come with extra transistors that can be turned on automatically in the event of failure. Perusing the reviews on Web sites like Amazon.com and Buy.com suggest a wide range of consumer satisfaction — from awestruck to angry.
Caveats aside, a properly designed solid-state drive can make a world of difference. Windows can boot in just seconds, and switching to a solid-state disk can add roughly 30 minutes to the battery life of a common laptop computer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/technology/personaltech/11basics.html
