Solid State Drives -- The Good and the BadSolid state drives (SSDs) are now available in laptop computers. These drives are composed of memory modules similar to the ram in your computer. They are available in PATA and SATA versions. The transfer rates are about the same as the mechanical PATA and SATA hard drives but the seek time (the time taken to find the data) should be faster. They have no moving parts so they use less power. They are more resistant to physical shocks. These are all good things. There is one bad thing. They are much more expensive than standard hard drives. They also tend to be smaller. More companies have begun to produce them, and capacities are going up. I just finished doing a price check though, on 250 G.B. drives, the size I'd want in a laptop. At the same large parts seller, the most expensive 2.5 inch 250 G.B. SATA mechanical drive was $139. The cheapest solid state drive the same size was $649. The standard drives were as cheap as $44. Since more companies are making SSDs though, the prices should come down. You should know that the only time I ruined the hard drive in a portable device (an mp3 player) by dropping it, the fall was enough to crack the case and the display. That degree of damage would ruin a laptop even if the drive still worked. RAID DRIVES RAID drives are designed to help preserve your data on the hard drive. Unless the world is going to end if you lose the data on your hard drive, you don't want to get a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) hard drive. As I've said, notebook computer hard drives of this type are expensive and they present problems with power and heat. When I converted my music on CDs to MP3s, I copied the files to DVDs. They're safe there, and I have a little stack of disks I can copy easily or load onto any computer I want. It is easier that way than copying then to a new computer on my network. You can do the same with video or pictures. Write your files to a CD or DVD and keep that in a safe place or get an external hard if you are worried about loosing them. return from solid state drives to laptop-computers-wiz homepage
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