That’s right, after my next hardware upgrade, I am going to be ditching hard drives. Seriously, why does my computer still have gears and motors in it? It’s not a freaking adding machine from Babbage’s lab. My transition away from hard drives will most likely happen in the next desktop that I build. I am going to be switching to solid state drives. There will still be a place for HDDs in a backup roll for me, but not as a device that my OS runs on.

Solid state drives (SSD) are rapidly falling in price, making them a reasonable cost for the performance gains. Most SSDs can achieve about 200 MB/s access speed. In a desktop, this can be dramatically increased by putting a few SSDs in RAID 0. I posted a video a few weeks about a guy that put 24 SSDs together in RAID 0, who got insane access speeds of about 2 GB/s. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to afford 24 SSDs (unless someone  donated some to me ), but I can see buying about 4 being practical in the near future.

Below is the results for an HD Tach test that I just ran on my laptop. My current 5400 rpm hard drive had just of 70MB/s peak access speed. I just can’t deal with these number anymore. Hard drives are by far the bottleneck in today’s computers with fast processor and memory. It is time to start ditching hard drives.

If you’re not convinced yet, check out this insanely quick boot accomplished by putting two OCZ SSDs in RAID 0. It’s not as impressive as the last video that I posted, but it is still pretty darn quick.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.