Slashdot Mirror
The Joy of the Flash Drive
An anonymous reader writes "A post to the C|Net site covers the numerous benefits of flash drives, such as speed, temperature, and battery consumption. The perk author Michael Kanellos is most fond of? The distinct lack of noise. 'The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises. Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee. '"
I don't know how I'll ever use Windows again. I'm so accustomed to the way the hard drive grinds until the platter is most likely covered in scratches. When it finally settles down, you move the mouse and it starts again. It's almost as if the software is designed to scrape any magnetic material off the platters of your hard drive. A hard drive that takes away these sounds and makes things faster is a real bummer. When using Windows, you're supposed to "please wait while this," "please wait while that," "please wait," "please wait," "please wait," all while listening to the beautiful music of your hard drive crunching away. This is one of the biggest benefits of Windows, and one that inferior systems like a Mac running Mac OS X, definitely lack. On a Mac, you push a button and it just happens. Where's the joy of waiting for it to happen? Where's the suspense?! Faster hard drives without all the crunching noise will take something very beautiful away from mankind.