iTechNote

Long gone the history of having microprocessor, memory or graphics card as the bottlenecks of PC performance. It is now the hard drive, the only mechanical device left inside a PC. The traditional way of improving a hard drive includes making the disks rotate faster, increasing storage density per platter as well as putting a much large buffer for cache miss.

As software gets larger in size such improvements are marginal at best. The room for improvements is bounded by the physical characteristic of mechanical drive. Hard drive makers have to look beyond mechanical and jump to electronics drive.

With the proliferation of USB thumb drive, the NAND flash memory drops price quick enough to make it worthwhile to build a flash hard drives (essentially a bigger thumb drives in tens of gigabytes). SanDisk is going to unveil a 32 GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive (SSD) as an alternative to the magnetic hard disk on next week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

The 32GB drive is priced at $600, making it out of reach for average PC users. Unlike conventional hard drives, which need to spin into action to seek files, flash memory based drives contain no moving parts. The new drive also consumes much less power, a noticeable advantage on portables.

The SanDisk SSD can reach a sustained read rate of 62MB/sec and average file access rates of 0.12 milliseconds. Boot time for Windows Vista can be as short as 35 seconds, which is not as fast as I expect. A video a while ago shows an unbelievable 14 seconds Vista boot time with ReadyBoost. The boot time without ReadyBoost is 43 seconds in the video. A difference of 8 seconds does not really justify paying a whopping $600.

There are certainly more rooms for improvement on the speed and price per gigabytes. Wait longer.