There are a lot of ways a hard drive can fail. Remember, a hard drive has several moving parts and wear and tear will eventually win out. There are acuator arms that move up and down at a tremendous rate to read and write data on high speed platters every second a hard drive is running. Talk about stress and possible problems, these little devils are absolutely in constant motion for the life of the hard drive.
The main reason you get suck a big boost in performance is there are no moving parts in Solid State Drives. Traditional hard drives use spinning platters and actuator arms to read and write data. Not so with the new Solid State Drive design, they have no moving parts and use chipsets to read and write data so there is no mechanical slow down. They also have a new class of controllers that provide huge blocks of data to be transferred at one time.
And in natural disasters like fire, tornados, hurricanes, or flooding it is rare that we can save the data. Or consider the possibility of theft, especially with laptops which is all too common these days. Websites like Dropbox.com offer free (up to 2 gigs) and paid methods that only take about 5 minutes to setup and can be a real life saver if a catastrophic failure hits your hard drive. And there are several other free and paid versions of this type of automated daily backup service. There really is no excuse to not backup data these days.
Hard drive failures are going to occur, it's not if, it's when it will fail. So even if you have the best of luck, that hard drive will go sideways in three to five years based on the mean failure time. As mentioned above, you can do some things to help get the maximum life out of any hard drive by doing the basics. Keeping the computer well ventilated, in a safe location, using power suppressors, and reducing any possible risks.
So what kind of speeds can you expect from these new hot rod SSD devices? I do computer repair for a living and anytime a traditional hard drive fails I mention that they can go with a SSD replacement. I tell them you can get a good 7200 RPM SATA 500 gig hard drive for around $70. Or, you can get one of the new SSD 240 Gig drives for about $185. Depending on their computer (later models are necessary to handle the 6 Gig transfer rate), many go with the SSD after they hear about the actual increases in speed.
Just what kind of improvement can you get from an SSD versus a traditional hard drive? I've replaced the hard drives in both MacBooks and Windows laptop computers and the improvements are very similar. The original hard drives were 5400 RPM Fujitsu drives. Boot time on the Windows laptops went from about 48 seconds to 21 seconds. When you are sitting there waiting for your computer to boot, that's huge. How about copying files? Well, on about 11 gigs the difference was a little over one minute on the SSD and a little over five minutes on the traditional hard drive.And speaking of laptops, there are two other factors that come into play with the SSD replacement. They run silent and take far less energy. And on laptops that's a big deal since you want your battery to last as long as possible and less noise is always a good thing. So there is even more reasons to upgrade on a laptop model besides performance.
The main reason you get suck a big boost in performance is there are no moving parts in Solid State Drives. Traditional hard drives use spinning platters and actuator arms to read and write data. Not so with the new Solid State Drive design, they have no moving parts and use chipsets to read and write data so there is no mechanical slow down. They also have a new class of controllers that provide huge blocks of data to be transferred at one time.
And in natural disasters like fire, tornados, hurricanes, or flooding it is rare that we can save the data. Or consider the possibility of theft, especially with laptops which is all too common these days. Websites like Dropbox.com offer free (up to 2 gigs) and paid methods that only take about 5 minutes to setup and can be a real life saver if a catastrophic failure hits your hard drive. And there are several other free and paid versions of this type of automated daily backup service. There really is no excuse to not backup data these days.
Hard drive failures are going to occur, it's not if, it's when it will fail. So even if you have the best of luck, that hard drive will go sideways in three to five years based on the mean failure time. As mentioned above, you can do some things to help get the maximum life out of any hard drive by doing the basics. Keeping the computer well ventilated, in a safe location, using power suppressors, and reducing any possible risks.
So what kind of speeds can you expect from these new hot rod SSD devices? I do computer repair for a living and anytime a traditional hard drive fails I mention that they can go with a SSD replacement. I tell them you can get a good 7200 RPM SATA 500 gig hard drive for around $70. Or, you can get one of the new SSD 240 Gig drives for about $185. Depending on their computer (later models are necessary to handle the 6 Gig transfer rate), many go with the SSD after they hear about the actual increases in speed.
Just what kind of improvement can you get from an SSD versus a traditional hard drive? I've replaced the hard drives in both MacBooks and Windows laptop computers and the improvements are very similar. The original hard drives were 5400 RPM Fujitsu drives. Boot time on the Windows laptops went from about 48 seconds to 21 seconds. When you are sitting there waiting for your computer to boot, that's huge. How about copying files? Well, on about 11 gigs the difference was a little over one minute on the SSD and a little over five minutes on the traditional hard drive.And speaking of laptops, there are two other factors that come into play with the SSD replacement. They run silent and take far less energy. And on laptops that's a big deal since you want your battery to last as long as possible and less noise is always a good thing. So there is even more reasons to upgrade on a laptop model besides performance.
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