New Generation Hard Disks

We all tend to take our hard disk drives very much for granted; they start each day and provide sterling service,  with a little care and a bit of housekeeping such as defrag and clean-up.

A disk drive consists of disks of magnetic material spinning at relatively high speeds with a reading head flying less that the breadth of a human hair just above it. The smallest deviation will result in the reading head crashing into the magnetic disk with disastrous results. Add to this the mechanics and electronics of the thing, it is not surprising that ALL disk-drives will fail.

I visit a lot of clients each year and my laptop spends a fair amount of time bouncing around in the boot of my car, so it is not surprising that the number of sectors which have become damaged has increased.  At one stage nearly half of the hard drive became unusable. Time for a new laptop or just changer the hard drive?

I decided that instead of fitting a normal hard drive I would fit a SSD drive instead.  This is a solid state drive which has no moving parts. It looks similar to a normal hard drive and fits into the bay on the laptop.

What are the pros and cons?

Pros:  Boot up is quicker, the laptop is quieter and  the drive will not get damaged in the boot of my car.

Cons:  The cost is higher than a normal drive.

On balance I think that I made the right decision and unless something else fails in my laptop it should last a bit longer.

Of course taking a good back-up of the contents of the drive must be carried out to ensure that this is available when required.