ESP Projects Ltd: IT Support - Sheffield

Whilst figures are hard to come by, ESP’s ‘parts’ shelves are awash with broken or dying hard drives. Despite being the repository of all of that important data in your computer, and supposedly with Mean Time Before Failure ratings of 500,000 hours, we find that IDE and SATA hard drives (the main disk technologies used in PC’s as opposed to servers) seem to ‘go wrong’ at an alarming rate. When was the last time you saw a USB flash drive go corrupt or fail because of moving parts? Exactly!

That’s why we are quite excited at the news of Samsungs 32GB solid state disk. With no moving parts, it should be lighter, more reliable, faster and more energy efficient than current hard drives, which use technologies which are virtually unchanged since the early 1980’s. At £350 the solid disk is currently quite expensive and only available in select notebooks, but with prices in these markets plummeting all the time, we might – finally - be seeing the advent of a genuine alternative to the spinning metal plates of yore! For more on this development, see here.