On 3/03/2010 5:47 PM, Chris Sanderson wrote:
Hey Dave, solid state hard drives, while expensive, have a very long shelf
life. They are good because there are no moving parts at all, so less wear
and tear on the parts over time. Something to look into for archiving
valuable data. I saw a video of a guy throwing a laptop out of a second
story window, retrieving the hard drive (solid state one) from the wreckage
and plugging it into a new machine to demonstrate it still worked. Not that
I recommend trying that at home, but it's definitely a promising technology.
It's true that solid state disks are more resistant to physical damage
that hard disks but they
use Flash memory and are prone to the same data corruption as Flash
memory cards and
USB sticks.
It should also be noted that there are two types of Flash: SLC
(single-level cell) and MLC
(multi-level cell.) SLC stores one bit (i.e. 0 or 1) in each cell -
it's either charged or not charged.
MLC uses fractional charges e.g. no charge = 00, 1/3 = 01, 2/3 = 10,
full = 11.
MLC is cheaper as more data can be stored in the same number of cells,
but has a higher rate
of data corruption - it's easier for a cell to change between the
different charge states since they
are closer together. MLC controller chips generally store more error
correction data to
compensate for higher error rate, but personally I would stick with SLC
where possible.
--
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Paul Taylor Veni, vidi, tici -
I came, I saw, I ticked.
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