Introduction
With the technology developing at such a great speed, performance upgrades have become more of a necessity rather than a luxury. New and improved processors are coming out every year or half a year. RAM kits are becoming faster and larger. Motherboards, WiFi, even cell phones are experiencing exponential growth. But what about the hard drives? It seems that for longer part of the decade mass storage devices have been forgotten… until recently. It seems that all the other components of a system have improved so much that hard drives can not lag behind.
It appears that manufacturers are choosing Solid State Drives or SSDs as the next evolutionary step in the mass storage devices and for a good reason. Generally the main limitation of the traditional hard drives were that they had moving parts. Lets pick one of the top of the line performance drives today: the Velociraptor. The Velociraptor is without a doubt one of the top performers in its class, it has exceptional seek times which are mostly granted to it by it 10,000 RPM rotating speeds. The RPM figure indicates the amount of complete rotations the platters of a drive make per minute. There is a directly proportional relationship between the RPM figure and the seek times you would get out of the drive. Common sense would then tell you to make a faster drive to increase performance, but those darn laws of physics tend to interfere with things as you accelerate them faster and faster. Ultimately you will hit the limit and that will be bottleneck of the drives.
SSDs on the other hand have no moving parts. They store information into arrays of transistors, much like your flash drive does. The difference is that the SSDs are not limited by the USB bus of 480 Mbps. SSDs also have wider arrays which allow more data to be transferred at the same time thus providing an even higher data rate.
If you are like myself then you can not wait to jump on the SSD bandwagon and get the performance boost that you have been waiting for so long. But also like me your pockets just aren’t deep enough to afford one then Kingston SSDNow 40 GB SSD might be just what you are looking for. This particular SSDs has been introduced not as a replacement for your computer HDD but rather as a drive just for your operating system strictly as a performance upgrade.
