ECN Electrical Forum
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I guess I should not have been talking about this. I have a W/D drive that is getting flaky on me as we speak. It won't start sometimes and it is not in a RAID set. I am copying it off as we speak. It is going slow because I am copying over the network but I am afraid if I power it down to move it or put another drive into this machine it won't start again.
This is a machine I normally never powered down but I moved my weather station to another 24/7 machine so I could and this showed up.

"I never have prob--"

(BSOD)

I finally got all 200 gig copied over to another drive. It took forever on the network and Bill Gates deciding he needed to give me an update in the middle of the night and rebooting my machine didn't help. I guess I really need to clean up these files. My hard drives are starting to look like my garage.
I just have a habit of copying over everything on my old drives to my new drive and then adding to it. I noticed I have lots of copies of the same thing on one drive now.

The solid state drives look interesting.

http://my.opera.com/portalnews/blog/2010/08/13/why-your-next-computer-upgrade-should-be-an-ssd

I am not sure if flash is getting better but I have heard they are only good for around 10,000 write operations.
If this is a drive that is mostly read and not being overwritten, that is not a huge problem but if it is a paging area like the swap file it might go bad pretty fast.

Most SSDs use flash memory that's good for around 100,000 write operations and that number increases all the time. They are incredibly fast, rugged drives that are finding their way into netbooks and laptops, and also desktops where people are looking for performance. It will probably be a few years before cost is comparable to standard mechanical drives, but I think eventually mechanical drives will probably become less prominent, except for large storage devices.

If you haven't seen an SSD boot a computer, you're really missing out. There are plenty of videos on YouTube making comparisons with SSDs and mechanical drives. There are also quite a few of people throwing the drives on concrete floors, and then booting a computer with it. I would imagine that manufacturers like Panasonic will be an early convert to SSDs, for use in their Toughbook products.

Even though they are less prone to physical shock damage, they're probably less reliable over the long-term. I've said for some time, that if the drive in my laptop goes I'll be switching it over to an SSD; unfortunately I no longer have a laptop due to our (un)friendly local thief.

My granddaughter has an SSD drive in her Disney laptop.
(actually a pretty nice and tough machine)
I have a little software ap that makes thumb drives bootable .
I do have a windoze 98 system and a DOS system on thumb drives but I haven't really done much with them.