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Getting Rid of the Disks

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yeah-that'll-happen dept.

Kneht writes "Dan's Data has an interesting article on what it would cost to get rid of your HDDs and replace them with SSDs because hard drives suck. Several aspects are examined, such as required UPS, compact flash, etc. Read the article and you may get a new appreciation for your lowly 7200rpm drive." Funny, I was just thinking that I should start using 120GB disks as my removable media.

4 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. HDD as removeable media. by roseblood · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm finding that the lack of a universal DVD standard has left me looking at HDDs as my removeable media of choice as well. CDRs are nice and cheap, but I have files that would span multilpe CDRs. It's a little bit of a hastle to have to WINRAR up my data into small chunks, only to have to UNRAR it back into oen big chunk. DVDs aren't readable everywhere. I'd love to see faster solid state storage available at a price competitive with today's HDDs, but alas, it's just no there. I already have a great deal of respect from my 7200RPM HDDs

    --
    There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
  2. RAM swapfile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I find it amusing that it mentioned using a RAM based swapfile. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a swapfile???

  3. Hang on just a second.... by grahamsz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This guy mentions that compact flash dies after 100,000 to a million rewrites... and that you'll reach that surprisingly quickly if you put your swap file on it.

    It seems highly unlikely that any sane person on any desktop system would choose to spend money on compact flash to use as swap, when they could spend less money and buy dram instead - which shuld be faster.

    Anyway potentially you only need fast solid state diskspace for your operating system and main applications, since few people need that sort of speed on their 'data files'. I could build a bootable linux box that ran off a 256Mb compact flash - doesn't seem like it'd be too bad at all.

  4. Bah. by silverhalide · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Until SSDs get an order of mangitude cheaper, HDDs will continue to rule! For the thousands that SDDs cost, you can built a huge striped RAID of quick 120 GB drives that will perform more than fast enough for any existing applications. Paintbrush and minesweeper will run like they've never run before.