Solid State Drives Are Going To Take Over The World!

The world of drives that is! That's what you'd expect with a large blob of solid state memory mimicking the lumbering HDDs with their rotational latencies and seek time and so on ! That's what many an expert would lead you to believe too. But here are two opinions, actually a hands on test and a studied opinion that says that ain't so!

First, some testing results. Bill O'Brien does some testing and is not impressed at all by the performance to two SSD against two old world hard drives. He took 32 GB drives from Advanced Media Inc and Crucial Technologies .

So drive1 was Crucial's internal 2.5" SSD
drive 2 was RiData's 2.5 " SSD
drive 3 was Seagate's Barracuda 3.5" HDD
drive 4 was Seagate's Momentus 2.5 "

Test results came up as follows.

Dr1 Dr2 Dr3 Dr4

Burst Speed 137.3 71.2 135 214.3 MB/sec
Boot Speed 40 32 40 40 Sec
Restart time 78.6 54.8 59.9 55.6 Sec
Data copying 243 264.5 185 185 Sec*

* for 4666 files totaling 8.05 GB of data, copied to/fro. because at the end of the day the SSD drive data may have to be sync'ed to the main system. Conclusion: no significant gain in any department.

On the other hand the HDD's keep growing in size. 1 TB or a 1000 GB drives are mainstream. That's quite a lead over the SSD's of 60 GB may be! I am sure both are going to be in use for a long time to come!

PSLV launches 10 satellites In One Go!

PSLV's thirteenth flight on Apr 28th successfully deployed the payload of 10 satellites that it carried. The main one was the the Cartosat 2A, Indian mini satellite IMS-1. The mini satellite is going to be a test vehicle of future technologies. Cartosat , of course, is the mapping vehicle of the dept of space. These two were the heavyweights. Cartosat is 690 kg, the minisat is 83 kg respectively.

The other eight were micro satellites from universities and research institutes in Canada and Germany. Sapce technology surely has come a long way since the late seventies and early eighties when I had first contacts with the ISRO ( Indian Space Research Organization) ever!!