SSD Drives

Should I Fit a Solid State Drive To My Carputer?

Edited by Ferdinand Rinaldy

Solid State Drives provide 3 benefits at one fell swoop. They have better shock resistance, much faster file access and produce less noise than their HDD brethren. However, this has come at a price – quite literally. The initial tranche of SSD’s which were launched into the marketplace came with eye-watering prices and limited capacities. As with all new technology, initially high price levels start falling to a more attractive level, normally coinciding with a general increase in capacity and/or speed. A kind of virtuous circle ensues. Lower prices and better features attract higher sales. Higher sales allow further price reductions as R&D costs are recovered, fabrication plant yields get better and economies of scale kick in. Eventually things settle down.

Hard drives will not disappear overnight as they are still the cheapest reliable option for most mainstream applications. However, SSD’s have already caught on in some niche areas and are increasing in popularity. One of the big success stories of 2008 was the netbook. Netbooks can be supplied with SSD’s or HDD’s, but those people choosing one with a HDD are missing out on one of the main selling points of the original netbooks. A long battery life. This is a comparatively slow, cheap, low power machine, so it is somewhat of a paradox to find fast, more expensive relatively new technology being used in this type of entry level computer.

SSD’s are finding a growing market in laptop PC’s. Until the price level falls far enough to justify complete replacement of HDD’s in laptops, small SSD’s have found their way into another niche. SSD’s are now being used by many people as an additional laptop drive, to speed up access to files and reduce power drain, an ever present issue with laptops. With operating system and application software on the SSD, mainly requiring read access, response times can be improved whilst leaving the HDD to cope with storing the data.

Users who have carputers are also likely to to be early adopters as the prices come down. There are 2 main factors which have a big affect on carputers, but which can be ignored for home PC’s. They operate in an environment where jolts and sudden acceleration/deceleration are a part of everyday operation. Few of us are lucky enough to live in places where the roads are as free from humps and potholes as we would wish. This has the potential to adversely affect HDD life and means that a solid state drive is a viable proposition even with a price premium. It is also important for carputers to have a low power consumption and here, SSD’s win hands down over HDD’s. (SSD or HDD?)

So – will 2009 be the year when SSD sales outnumber HDD sales? It may happen, but I’m not sure it will happen this year. However, I’m convinced it will happen within the next few years. HDD manufacturers have increased both size and speed at a breathtaking rate since IBM first launched the hard disk over 50 years ago. However this rate of change cannot go on indefinitely. SSD’s by comparison have only attracted the developers attention relatively recently, and we can look forward to massive improvements in the years to come.

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