Solid State Drive: Shaken, Not Stirred
Sometimes you've just got to prove a point. The point that Super Talent wants to prove? Just how vibration resistant its line of MasterDrive MX Solid State Drives (SSD) are. And what better could prove the point than to attach a working, 120GB MasterDrive MX drive to a paint shaker, and show Windows humming away normally all the while:
The test consists of a Super Talent MasterDrive SSD mounted on top of a paint shaker. The Windows® Vista® operating system and Tomb Raider game were installed on the SSD and the game was played for over 40 minutes while the SSD was shaking like crazy. Super Talent Marketing Director, Joe James said, "It's obvious when you see this video that no hard drive could sustain that kind of beating. Our MasterDrive SSDs, on the other hand, with no moving parts, are made for exactly this type of torture.
SSDs use NAND-based flash memory instead of the magnetic-based platters of traditional hard drives. In addition to their ruggedness, other advantages of SSDs are that they weigh much less than traditional drives, are much quieter, consume less power, and produce less heat. Super Talent's MasterDrive MX line comes in a standard 2.5-inch form factor, which can be swapped with traditional 2.5-inch hard drives. The MasterDrive MX drives use a 3Gbps SATA-II interface and come in 15GB, 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB capacities. The 120GB drive Super Talent used for its paint shaker demonstration presently sells for $669 on Newegg.
And this is where one of the primary disadvantages of SSDs come into play: price. SSDs still carry a hefty price premium versus traditional hard drives. Retailers sell traditional 2.5-inch 120GB hard drives for less than $100. Another advantage that traditional hard drive technology still has over SSDs is that traditional hard drives come in much higher capacities than SSDs currently do. SSD technology is still young and over time prices will be sure to come down and capacities will come up. When SSD prices and capacities are finally competitive with traditional hard drive technology, the door will be wide open for SSDs to replace traditional drives. Until that happens, the primary market for SSD appears to be rugged laptops, mission critical and environmentally harsh embedded applications... and apparently, painters.
