I, too, thought solid state drives (SSDs) would help the battery last
longer. However, the inexpensive SSDs used in small notebook
computers don't seem to improve battery life much at all, compared to
the mechanical hard drives typically used in notebooks and Sound
Devices products.
Over the years, hard drive technology has been tuned and tweaked to
reduce power consumption. Hard drives are very efficient when
sequentially writing data to the disc, as would be the case when
you're recording audio.
I think engineers will find ways to reduce SSD power use as time
passes, too. For example, the new version of Microsoft Windows
(Windows 7) is supposed to have features that help SSDs save power.
If SSDs and hard drives use the same power, it seems logical that they
will produce about the same amount of heat during operation. I have
not read any reports that verify this, however.
My gut feeling is that SSDs would prove to be more reliable if your
recorder was bouncing around in the back of a Land Rover for hundreds
of kms of African roads. But I have to acknowledge that small hard
drives are durable, too. Millions of music players like the original
iPod live happily in children's school bags. So it's hard to give
much advantage to SSDs in terms of reliability when switched off.
I can think of two ways that SSDs have the advantage. First, the SSD
performs better when operating in the presence of strong vibration.
Hard drives don't handle vibration well at all. Even recording while
walking with the recorder can be more than a hard drive can handle.
Second, the SSD is not affected by altitude. Hard drive manufacturers
warn that their products should not be used above 3000 meters / 10,000
feet elevation. I know that people do record at high elevation
without damaging their hard drive, but it's living on borrowed time.
SSDs certainly come in second to hard drives when considering the
price per megabyte of storage. Flash memory has come down in price to
the point where the cost is $2 per gigabyte. But hard drives cost
less than $0.25 per gigabyte.
Personally, I don't have a need to carry 80 GB or 160 GB of recordings
around inside my recorder. I'm satisfied with a couple of 4 or 8 GB
flash cards for a day's worth of recording.
--oryoki
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