CES 2009: New solid-state drives vanquish "boot lag"

Does it seem like your PC isn't booting up and loading programs as quickly as it used to? It may not be your imagination or have anything to do with the processor or graphics chips, the components usually associated with speed.

What's probably happening is that your hard drive is filling and fragmenting. (For more details on how and why that happens, see "For geeks only" below).

How to fix it? Get rid of the moving parts. That's what Solid-State Drives (SSDs) do, using the same technology as the flash-memory cards in digital cameras and USB drives. SSDs solve the speed-erosion problem and use less power, and their price is dropping.

SSDs are being shown at CES by hard-drive manufacturers like Samsung and Toshiba, memory makers like SanDisk, processor manufacturers like Intel, and companies you probably haven't heard of, like Mtron and Super Talent. Smaller in capacity, and priced considerably higher per gigabyte than hard drives, they're appearing either standard or as options in quite a few laptops: For example, the new MacBook Pro 17-inch Apple announced Tuesday at Macworld will have a gigantic 320GB SSD as a costly option. The 1.4 pound portable computer Sony announced here at CES, the Vaio P Series Lifestyle PC, also has SSDs up to 128 GB in capacity as options. And $400 netbooks from Dell and HP offer tiny 8 and 16GB SSDs.

What's the downside to SSDs? First, in the laptops we've seen thus far, they're not as speedy as a lightly-filled hard drive. We think that's because these early SSDs used an older type of computer connection (parallel ATA), limiting their data-transfer rate. This is changing, and we expect SSDs with the newer SATA (serial ATA) connections to become common. When that happens, SSDs should be faster than the fastest hard drives.

Also, there is a theoretical limit to the number of times an SSD memory "cell' can be written to before it "wears out" and must be electronically removed from service. SSDs use techniques to spread out the wear across the drive, and that, combined with advances in cell life, should allow current SSDs to greatly outlast hard drives in consumer PCs.

For geeks only

Here's why your hard drive may slow down over time: As it fills, new or changed data gets stored closer to the center hub of the hard drive's spinning platters, where reading and writing is slower, just as the horses on the inside of a carousel move over the ground more slowly than those on the outside. Fragmentation—in which large files get stored in many pieces located in different areas on drive's platters—builds up as the file system frees up the spaces used by smaller files for re-use. When the large, fragmented file is read, the drive’s heads must move successively to each piece of the file, which takes extra time. Defragmenting the hard drive occasionally with software helps, but it doesn't solve the problem completely or halt the process.

Because of these drive slow-downs, combined with the appetite of newer operating systems and programs for data files, the hard drive is often the main influence on how fast a computer boots and loads programs (the most storage-intensive operations).

—Dean Gallea