Roy's musings

CircuitCity online is open for business again. They filed for bankruptcy in Nov 2008 and closed both online and stores.

I am in the process of assembling a PC for my friend. So I was gathering information on various components. I thought I must share what I learned about hard disks. The latest breed of hard disks in the PC segment are called Solid State Disks (SSD). Though the technology is not new, the price has become affordable in the recent few years. Due to their formidable high prices earlier, computers were usually shipped with the drum-based hard disks (I will refer to them as simply HDD). You can read about SSDs from wikipedia . These are the points I wanted to share: 1) The transfer speed of SSD is faster compared to HDD. A good 7200 RPM hard disk usually has a transfer rate around 70 MBytes/sec. Where as SSD has a transfer speed around 200 MBytes/sec. Remember I am giving an approximate figure and speeds vary for read and write. One of the recent additions to the hard disks is 10000 RPM hard disks. I found them to be faster than SSD. For e.g. Western Digital's Velociraptor has a peak tr