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.”
The Intel X25-M SATA solid-state drive is used in laptop and desktop PC storage. It is an alternative to hard-disk drives.
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.
The need for speed in the laptop market is now being satisfied by more than 40 manufacturers, including chip-making giants like Intel, Samsung and Toshiba. Storage capacities have now soared to 256 gigabytes — although currently at a staggering cost. Such a drive from Axiom is currently selling online for $7,426 to $9,125. Prices, however, are collapsing.
For example, it is now possible to buy a 128-gigabyte, 2.5-inch internal drive from the consumer electronics reseller OCZ for as little as $299. Although that price might be twice as much as a comparable hard drive with rotating storage, the combination of faster speed, lower power consumption and heat generation — as well as potentially better reliability — is enticing.
Such a drive might not be just for executive road warriors looking for eye candy in the form of an ultralight MacBook Air. (A 64-gigabyte solid-state drive was $999 extra when the computer was first announced in January.) It is now worth considering as a performance boost on an existing, long-in-the-tooth laptop. And next year, when 128-gigabyte solid-state drives become even more affordable, they will increasingly be offered by laptop makers at a more reasonable add-on price.
In addition to making a play at the high end of the laptop market and as an upgrade option, solid-state drives are sweeping the new consumer-friendly market for so-called netbooks, the under-10-inch portables selling for $300 to $600 that have become the rage in the past six months. These machines come with as little as two gigabytes of solid-state drive storage, helping to fortify the new generation of cloud-oriented computing that Mr. Black of Seagate is concerned about.
“I don’t think they care about having their data with them,” he said of the younger computing generation like his teenagers. “They have faith that the cloud will always be accessible.”
Laptop makers are making the process of swapping drives easier, which makes the idea of upgrading even more tempting. Turn over one of the new aluminum Apple MacBooks and a single lever opens a compartment revealing a disk that is held in place by a single screw. I had already upgraded the standard MacBook 250-gigabyte drive with a faster (but still old-fashioned magnetic) 300-gigabyte Hitachi drive for which I paid just $99.
However, for the purpose of testing the speed of the new solid-state category, I chose an 80-gigabyte Intel X25-M SATA. The Intel drive is expensive — about $540 online — but comes with higher performance specifications and a three-year warranty. Swapping drives was easy; it took less than a minute. The hard part was cloning all of my programs and data to the solid-state drive before swapping it in for my mechanical Hitachi hard disk.
For that I used another peripheral — a hard-disk USB docking station made by Thermaltake (around $33 at Amazon). With this device, you simply snap the new hard drive into a dock and connect it to your PC via a USB cable. You can then copy all your software and data — a time-consuming proposition, to be sure, but many backup programs can make this a straightforward procedure. I used SuperDuper, a $28 Macintosh utility program made by Shirt Pocket that can be used to make bootable drives. The process was made simpler because I had partitioned my original Hitachi drive (that is, created a digital “wall” between different kinds of files) into two spaces: one for work and one for music, video and images. That division may suggest what is likely to become a standard computing style for many home computer users in the future: a laptop with a fast solid-state drive and an external high-capacity standard hard drive for storing media and other large files. (Unless, of course, you belong to the new generation of computer users who have come to trust the cloud of Internet computer servers to store their personal data.)
In any case, the results were impressive. Using a standard Macintosh performance measurement utility called Xbench, the Intel solid-state drive increased the computer’s overall performance by almost half. Disk performance increased fivefold. The computer started more quickly and applications seemed to open nearly instantaneously. Most laptops do have small fans, but the computer was definitely quieter; gone was the telltale whirring of the drive motor.
Solid-state drives are obviously an expanding niche in the world of laptop computers. Still, there is apparently no reason to mourn the hard drive industry. The explosion of digital data is so overwhelming that even if our notebook disks become smaller, we will still have to keep our data somewhere.
“I rest easier every time I hear that someone buys one of those netbooks,” said Mr. Black of Seagate, whose company is focusing in part on drives for large corporate data centers. “I know all of that data will be stored in the cloud.”Original here
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