• Home

Welcome to the new solid-state era

Mar4th
2013
Written by Mike Pontillo

We all like to have our purchasing decisions validated by experts. I don’t think I’m the only one who gets a little thrill when I decide to buy some home appliance and then see it highly rated in the next issue of Consumer Reports.

That’s why I was pleased this morning to see the technology site ars technica reporting that Seagate has decided to cease production of most 7200 RPM hard drives.

For years, most PC hard drives have had a platter rotation speed of 5400 RPM. To increase performance, manufacturers started offering drives that spin at 7200 RPM. The faster speed results in shorter access times and reduced latency. However, 7200 RPM drives run hotter and louder than 5400 RPM drives. The additional heat is especially problematic in notebooks.

(On high-end enterprise servers, which I tend to on my day job, disk drives have speeds of 10,000 to 15,000 RPM. That’s why we stash them away in data centers with big honking air conditioners.)

Solid-state drives have been available for a few years now. An SSD is flash memory, similar to your USB memory stick, but faster and shaped into a hard drive form factor. And in terms of data access speed, SSDs are anywhere from 10 to 40 times faster than mechanical hard drives.

As with any new technology, SSDs were prohibitively expensive when they came on the market, but as they’ve caught on, capacities have increased and prices have shrunk to the point where they are now a viable alternative (or complement) to mechanical drives.

When I built my new desktop, I wanted good disk performance but needed to keep the system as silent as possible. A 7200 RPM drive would have compromised that, with the drive’s own additional noise plus the extra heat making the PC’s cooling fans run harder. So I put in a Seagate Barracuda “green” drive running at 5900 RPM, and an Intel SSD to serve as a 64 GB cache drive (using SRT, which is mentioned in the ars article).

The results had already demonstrated to me that it was a sound (no pun intended) strategy, but the report reinforces that. Obviously I’m not the only one that came to this conclusion, and Seagate has decided that the modest performance pop you get with a 7200 RPM drive isn’t worth the additional cost (and heat, and noise) now that SSD prices have come down.

We can expect to see manufacturers like Seagate turning more and more to hybrid hard drives, which contain the flash memory cache and mechanical hard drive in the same unit. This would make the performance advantages available to everyone, since Intel SRT is only supported on certain motherboard models. But even the hybrid drives are only a stopgap measure until SSDs become sufficiently inexpensive and reliable to replace mechanical drives entirely.

SSDs have already proven to make great notebook upgrades. I recently replaced the hard drive in my wife’s 2007-vintage Dell laptop with an SSD and installed Windows 7. She and I were both surprised by how dramatic the improvement was. Any technology that makes my wife happy is a definite keeper.

So SSDs are here to stay. And while mechanical hard drives aren’t going away just yet, they’ve begun the long slow march toward technological obsolescence, just as vacuum tubes did when the transistor ushered in the first solid-state era sixty years ago.

RELATED POSTS:
The Wizard’s latest build (Windows 7 edition)

Hardware
← Coming to you live from Windows 7!
You’re careful, but what about your kids? →

Need help?

  • Call (847) 201-6416
  • E-mail info@pctechwizard.com

Search pctechwizard.com

Recent Posts

  • Now what?
  • Free Windows 10 upgrade ending soon – should you care?
  • The world is NOT ending
  • Anatomy of a scam
  • The twilight of Windows XP
  • You’re careful, but what about your kids?
  • Welcome to the new solid-state era
  • Coming to you live from Windows 7!
  • Windows 8 first impressions (not mine)
  • The Wizard’s latest build (Windows 7 edition)

Categories

  • Hardware (4)
  • Scams (7)
  • Security (12)
  • Software (1)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Windows (19)
  • Wireless networking (3)

Archives

  • January 2020
  • July 2016
  • April 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • September 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • June 2012
  • April 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • September 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • October 2009
  • October 2008
  • July 2008
  • April 2008
  • September 2007
  • July 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007

Audio commercials (just for fun)

  • "No Geeks"
  • "Wizardy"

EvoLve theme by Theme4Press  •  Powered by WordPress PC Tech Wizard
On-site PC services, Chicago north and northwest