The Sound of Silence

New toys are always fun, especially when you’ve heard about them but never actually gotten to play with one. The hard drive in my laptop at work had taken to making slightly disconcerting clicking sounds — nothing really ominous, but the kind of noise that makes you notice, if you’re a computer geek. I mentioned this to my supervisor (also a techie). I figured he’d agree I ought to get a new hard drive. What I didn’t figure on was his suggestion that we look into a solid-state drive. (It’s a great idea — but I didn’t think it had a chance of being approved.)

Well, it did. I just finished cloning the drive across this afternoon, and it’s amazing. These things are probably the future of storage (at least until the Next Big Thing comes along); they’re fast (think NO access time to speak of and better throughput), durable (no moving parts means I don’t have to worry as much about the laptop rattling around in my backpack), and efficient (running on the old HD yesterday, the batteries gave up after about 2 hours of note-taking in class; today, with the new HD, it ran for 3+ hours, with intermittent Wi-Fi use, and still had juice left when class ended. No need to put an ammeter on it — I’m convinced. This will definitely help in my classes (one of which is in a turn-of-the-last-century building designed long before students had a need for power outlets).

Solid-state drives are also silent. Not “quiet” — not “whisper quiet” — SILENT. When running non-CPU-intensive tasks, it’s amazing how quiet the laptop is, now. If you hold it up to your ear, you can hear the CPU fan. I never realized just how much noise the old HD made (relatively speaking).

I gotta get one of these for my desktop. Well, someday — when I’m not broke.

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One Response to The Sound of Silence

  1. Dosquatch says:

    Ooooooh! Nice. I want one. I've been watching the prices fall, but they're still pricey enough to keep me out.

    I worry about lifespan of these things – how their length of life will compare to conventional moving parts, and whether or not they fail "gently". USB flash drives have the same nasty tendency that floppy drives (used to) exhibit – they work, they work, they don't. I don't know if the same is true of SSD or not.

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