Recording - June 2015 - 20

Interview by Mike Metlay

Solid State Drives are changing how we work-separate the truths from the myths
More and more, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are appearing in
our computers at work and play. Once fabulously expensive,
these drives are getting more affordable by the year, although
they're still far more costly per Gigabyte than conventional spinning-platter drives. They come as drop-in replacements for conventional drives, and built into many computers, including all
Apple MacBook Air models.
To learn more about SSDs, where they come from and how to
work with them, I interviewed Roman Rabitsch, CEO of Austrian
SSD maker Angelbird, whose SSDs I was in the process of
reviewing (the review appears at the end of this interview). We
were joined by Jason Davies, President and CEO of Eleven
Dimensions Media, North American distributor for Angelbird.
Our original, somewhat rambling chat took over an hour; the
high points and most important questions and answers are
here.-MM

What is a Solid State Drive?
Roman, I'd like to start with this: for someone who has
never used one of these things before, how does a Solid
State Drive differ from a conventional hard disk drive that
has spinning platters with data stored magnetically on
them, with heads to read and write the data?
Roman Rabitsch: No one hasn't used SSD technology before.
For ages, this technology has been present in every mobile
phone, in every TV, in everything which stores data. It's new to
the consumer market in large enough sizes to store a computer's
operating system and documents, but for fifteen years or more,
we've had flash drives, USB drives, SmartMedia and SD cards
for digital cameras...
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RECORDING June 2015

Before now, we were dealing with kilobytes or Megabytes
in these EPROMs or flash cards, holding the firmware for
devices or small bits of data. As the technology improved and
the manufacturing process got more mature, costs came down
to the point where you could make drives of 64 GB or 128
GB size, enough to run an operating system, and that was the
big start for SSD technology as we discuss it today.
So basically an SSD is a really large USB flash drive, an
array of memory cells storing ones and zeros. Is that why
it's so fast compared to a spinning-platter drive?
Exactly. Think of dropping a needle onto a turntable in front of
you. The data is on the vinyl and the needle plays it back. It has
to spin around to get to the part of the disk where your data is,
and that takes time. SSDs can read and write data far faster than
any spinning hard drive, so you have faster access to more data.
What about sturdiness over handling and temperature
changes?
SSDs are far more sturdy than hard disk drives. While people think that hard disks are safe when switched off, because
the heads are in a "parked" position away from the platters,
that's only half true. If you drop the drive, the heads will come
out of their lock and hit the platters and you'll have damage.
SSDs have no moving parts; you can drive over one with a
car and it won't be broken... well, one of ours won't be broken, but inexpensive SSDs will be, because their housings are
made of plastic.
SSDs are also more reliable with changes in temperature
and humidity, because hard disks can be damaged by condensation. If you put a hard disk near an unshielded speaker,
the magnetic field can harm your data; SSDs use capacitors
and are much harder to damage that way.
Jason Davies: There is one other thing that I don't think we
mentioned-power requirements.
RR: This is the next topic I would have mentioned! [laughs]
A hard drive must always have its motor running and its controller turned on; like a CPU, an SSD can have different power
states, some of which let it be almost completely powered
down, saving energy in the long run. The obvious consumer
application is longer battery life in a laptop, but for big data
enterprises, where there are hundreds of drives, one of the
biggest cost factors is the power needed to keep them cool!
Big data requirements are driving the technology to bigger
drives at prices that are manageable.
So over the next five to ten years, we'll see a significant
boost in market share for SSD technology?

Recording - June 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2015