The goggles – they do nothing!

Or, "How to cook your thigh with the Transcend 2.5″ Solid State Drive?"
I was very excited to have had the opportunity to test out a new 32 GB solid state drive. For those of you who don’t know, a solid state drive serves the function of a hard drive (hard disk drive) in your computer, but performs this function in a completely different fashion.

A traditional hard drive consists of one or more spinning disks onto which bits of information are read and written. For anyone who remembers them, the hard disk is a more robust, but less portable, version of the "floppy disk." It is used to store the data that you want to continue to be able to access when you turn the computer back on, or everything you want to "save." This is as opposed to the information that disappears when you turn the computer off. This is what is known as "volatile" memory; it gets this name because its "state" is dependant on the flow of current from its power source. It can go away if power is lost.

Years ago, I remember on the Apple Macintosh OS System 7 there was a Control Panel called "RAM disk." This was a feature that allowed you to temporarily partition a section of the volatile memory into a disk. You could even set this disk boot the computer, if you could get the operating system to fit on there. I remember at the time I was using a Macintosh IIcx, which was, at the time, the second-best Mac you could get (the premier model was the IIci).

The Macintosh IIcx was the first Mac that had a "snap" together set of modular components. One could install additional memory without tools. Anyway, you could configure the operating system to take some of your memory and turn it into a “RAM Disk” which made whatever was on the “RAM Disk” accessible with much less delay than anything that was stored on the actual hard disk drive. It was the opposite of virtual memory which would take your hard drive and use it for RAM.

I remember trimming down a system folder as small as possible to get it to fit on the RAM disk. The Mac only had about 16 MB (yes, that’s megabytes) of RAM and the OS needed a full 8 MB to load. I was able to make the OS run at 2 MB a, load itself into 8 MB of RAM and still have 6 MB available for running applications. This was back in 1991 or thereabouts. I truly felt I was at the pinnacle of home computing technology at that point.

As it turned out, that was an interesting crossroads of sorts. Cheap volatile RAM intersected low-overhead and small footprint operating systems. Semiconductor prices increased, chip architecture became more complex, and due to the dawn of the Windows era and the reduced instruction set processors a few years later, the OS began to grow in size tremendously.

My laptop is a Dell Latitude D600 which originally shipped back in 2003. Considering how old it is, I’ve managed to keep it together quite well. A few years ago I upped its RAM to 2 GB and I’ve acquired a secondary battery for the modular removable media bay.

But for a while I’ve known that the hard drive was getting older. I’ve had enough drives fail on me to know that if something was going to give out it was going to be the disk drive. That would have been a catastrophic loss as I was not actively backing up the data that the drive was holding for me. It would have been personally catastrophic. Ever once in a while I would hear it clicking and that’s never a good sign.

My old hard disk drive had a capacity of about 30 GB, so I went and looked for a company that made a SSD of similar capacity in a compatible form factor. It was actually a little tougher than I imagined. The capacity was obviously a stumbling block, but more importantly the fact that it needed an IDE interface seemed to pose a greater problem.

I’ve long felt that the greatest bottleneck in desktop architecture has been due to the I/O for disk-based data. So the idea of a solid state drive has always been very sexy to me. Cut down that seek time, already.

I wasn’t disappointed with the performance of the drive. As it turns out, I’m probably more penalized by the bus speed of my motherboard than anything else. I’m sure on an decent desktop you’d see much more of a performance bump. The proof was really visible when I ran a defrag. If you’re looking for a good free defrag suite, I recommend JK Defrag.

The biggest drawback overall, however, has to be annoying thermodynamics! Now I get why none of the major manufacturers are pitching this thing.

The Goggles! They do nothing!

This thing is hot! I’ve taken to putting a newspaper under the left side of my laptop, the preserve my lap’s top.

I’m not sure how visible it is, but there is already some discoloration on the left wristpad on my Latitude.

All in all, I’m swayed by the technical concept of this drive and will most likely continue using it. I like the idea of no moving parts. It consumes far less power, is less vulnerable to vibration, and is generally more reliable – until it immolates.

And if I ever start smoking again my laptop will have a built-in cigarette lighter.

I got mine on buy.com, but if you want to shop around the part number is TS32GSSD25-S.

IMPORTANT
Transcend makes an almost identical drive (much cheaper) with an almost identical part number, but is not designed for use as a boot disk. Make sure you know which one you want or you might wind up unnecessary shipping costs.

The difference is the type of “flash” memory used – MLC vs. SLC. For a discussion on the differences, visit edn.com.