CA Investigates: Hard disks with no moving parts

Capacity issues
This may beg the question as to why all computers don’t come with these new storage devices because to operating systems such as Windows, Mac or Linux, they work in the same way.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that solid state disks offer relatively small capacity compared with a traditional hard disk. Capacities of ordinary hard disks are now up to 1TB, whereas few solid state disks are larger than 64 gigabytes (GB).

They are also much more expensive to buy. For example, the OCZ Technology 32GB solid state drive costs £112.85 from Dabs.com. The cheapest equivalent 120GB disk costs around £33.

The small capacity of solid state disks is not a problem for mini notebooks such as the Asus Eee PC. Office documents and emails take up very little space compared to multimedia such as music and video.

The increased resilience to knocks also makes the solid state disks better for educational computers such as the Fizzbook (watch our video review).

One way notebooks overcome the small hard disk size (the Fizzbook has just 4GB, about half of which is used by Windows) is to include a memory card slot on the side, normally for an SD card. This can be used to transfer files and can also double the amount of space for files.

It would seem logical to expect better battery life when using a disk with no moving parts. This expectation has sparked some debate on the internet, but the results of our labs testing is that while there is some benefit, it is a subtle one.

Don’t expect to get hours of extra life compared with a normal disk. Also, the reduced power consumption won’t save enough money to cover the premium over a traditional hard disk.