It may sound like one of those things you’d go to the free clinic for, but actually SSD stands for solid state drive. And right about the time I am writing this, they are starting to make their way into computers everywhere. They are the future in terms of computer storage, as in replacing your hard drive. In theory, it sounds good. They are small, require little power, aren’t subject to bangs and bumps like regular hard drives and are super duper fast. (Although some are faster than others and are subject to other conditions of your computer).
But, there are two problems. The first is that they are by nature not able to be written to as many times as a regular hard drive. So that probably will mean that a few days after your new computer goes out of warranty, the SSD will crap out and you will be up the proverbial creek with a $4.95 per minute customer service option, if you are lucky.
Backing up isn’t an option, it’s a necessity. And even then, when the poop hits the fan, depending upon the programs you have installed, it can take you a very, very, very long time to get back up and running. Yeah, I know that you run this risk no matter what hard drive you have installed, but it seems that most of today’s hard drives, even the cheap ones seem to take a licking and keep on ticking.
Now, there’s one more problem you probably will encounter. The system I bought from Toshiba said it had a 64 GB SSD drive. I thought this would be plenty of space. But when I got it home, I could only find a 48 gig SSD drive, and not the 64 gig that Toshiba promised me, both on the box and from the lips of the smiling salesperson. And then to make matters worse, that 48 gig drive already had about 15 gigs worth of “stuff” on it. I feared for my precious remaining 30 gigs of ram.
So, here’s a few things you’ll need to be vigilant about. Most software will allow you to go in and change the location where you store the file. In my case, I also have a nice, fast 500 gig drive in here as the E: drive. So, whenever I might install something, I’d need to go in and change the place I put it. Here’s the rub. Microsoft sends me more and more data every day and apparently they are only happy with it living on my C drive. But there’s also a bunch of other companies who don’t seem to offer an option and install everything onto the C: drive as well. There’s also something called AppData, which grows bigger by the second. I’ve visited some sites that talk about relocating AppData and other files and it would seem that even the ubergeeks are afraid of this procedure and are often left spending months having to retype their config files. Even then, it seems that despite the best efforts of some of the brightest, data tends to go missing and programs start to act wonky.
They say you can often tell the pioneers by the arrows in their back, and in this case it might just be true. If I had it to do all over again, I’d ditch the SSD drive. Yeah, sure it impresses your friends and family for around 2 weeks, until it starts getting clogged up and then it just slows down your computer, like trying to run a race after consuming 5 plates of Thansgiving dinner. The good news is that the computer still looks very cool, with a bit of a Star Wars meets Le Mans look. It just is now working about the same as a computer you could buy for 1/4th the price.
Forget the SSD drives for now and you’ll be happier. In the meantime, I’m simply going to have to figure out some sort of solution that doesn’t either involve me shelling out another thousand bucks or that will take me to the next millenium to implement.
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