Flash Storage Vs. Traditional Hard Drives

By Sean Bybee

Even before I began working for Mr. Wright, I was already well aware of the beating that our school laptops endured on a day to day basis. Every day, I see laptops dropped, crammed into backpacks with heavy textbooks, and hit by frustrated users. Last year, my little brothers laptop was taken and dropped from the gym’s second floor into a trash can fifteen feet below. When laptops are given to young students, there is very little guarantee that any care will be taken to ensure that it stays in good condition. That being said, while we cannot easily prevent students from ripping optical drives out or shattering displays, there is one step we can take (that I can think of) to minimize necessary repairs, and potentially even lower the total costs of laptop repairs.

With fewer moving parts, a solid state drive (or SSD) has a much lower chance of going bad as a result of dropping or being hit repeatedly by the user. To those not familiar with the internal operation of a traditional hard drive, it is important to know that the basic operation is dependent on an internal disk, most commonly spinning at 7200 rpm. This, in combination with a small arm that “reads” the disk, allows information to be stored on the disk magnetically. These constantly moving parts are always at risk of being jammed or otherwise damaged. An SSD operates similarly to flash drives in that they have absolutely no moving parts and operate on the concept of flash storage. While the initial investment of an SSD is slightly higher than that of a hard drive, the increased durability would likely allow it to pay for itself in the long run. It seems like it is a daily occurrence that someone’s hard drive has gone bad and needs replaced. With a lack of moving parts, I feel that replacing the traditional hard drives in our school laptops with SSDs would help to save Mr. Wright some hassle, and perhaps even save the school some money.

Lasting durability is not the only advantage of SSDs over hard drives. Because a solid state drive is not dependent on moving parts, access to the information stored on the drive is much quicker compared to that of a traditional hard drive. In a hard drive, in order to access information, the disk must spin to proper position, and then a mechanical arm must maneuver to the exact position at which that information is stored on the disk. Anyone that has ever seen the inside of a hard drive during operation will know that this all happens extremely quickly. However, regardless of how fast we are able to make the disk spin (10000 rpm drives currently exist), that hard drive could never be quite as fast as a solid state drive, because they do not have these physical limitations at all. This is relevant to Perry Central, because anyone that has used our laptops even once will be well aware of the time consuming process of booting them up. 

Overall, I think that SSDs for the school laptops would be a worthy investment. The increase in speed would hopefully increase the productivity of students, allowing them to spend more time working rather than trying to boot their computers. In addition despite the higher price per gigabyte of flash memory, the price is steadily dropping. This, in combination with the longer lifetime of the devices could potentially save the school money in the long run.