posted on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 12:35 PM
by
paul
The Ultimate SSD
The past month I had an opportunity to test a
Samsung SSD and can affirm this is the future of storage. As microprocessors have followed Gordon Moore's curve higher and faster our hard drives have only increased in capacity remaining a constant 5400 rpm. Magnetic rotating platters appear so Edisonian in design. Solid state drives are like transistors replacing the vacuum tube with
speeds of 10000 rpm or more.
SSD's are manufactured much the same way as microprocessors from wafers in purpose built fabs requiring massive investment. Up till now SSD's have been very expensive, but as the wafers get thinner and larger and with more fabs coming on-line the prices will steadily decrease.
Already we are seeing small laptops with Flash memory on the motherboard and soon it will be the norm for laptops to come this way. The HD in your laptop was installed by a human, SSD's on the motherboard will be done by machines.
I found the
Samsung SSD ideal for software developers because of the decreased latency in opening a large IDE like Visual Studio.
Two things I discovered in my trial was that you need Windows Vista Ultimate to get the best performance and you'll never need to defrag again.