Could this be the death knell for mechanical hard disk drives? Always somewhat of an aberrant part of computer systems, it's the only fixed component in a PC to have moving parts. As beautiful in their reflective perfection as disc platters are, there's no doubt that in a modern computer they're an unwanted bottleneck.
Despite data densities going through the roof, the fact that a little servo has to sweep a mighty read head across these platters as fast as its little actuators can manage, its simply no match for a silicon transistor gate in speed.
It's certainly not a new idea. Many years ago, Quantum offered solidstate hard drives. These were nothing more than banks of memory which had an ATA interface jury-rigged to them that cost tens of thousands of dollars and had a tiny capacity. While these devices are still available at far greater capacities, the future saviour from the spinning disc's performance dead-end is NAND flash memory.
This is being heralded and demonstrated by Intel as a way to accelerate drive performance by using NAND drives as a form of cache for existing hard drives. Even before this technology becomes available there are a number of flash based drives already on the market.
These come packaged in a standard 2.5in and 1.8in ATA drive casing and interface, meaning they can be used with any system that supports that standard. So the majority of laptops - and with the right adaptor cable, even some desktop systems - can take advantage.
So solid crew
For our review we have an 8GB version of the Transcend IDE Flash Drive. This isn't actually designed for consumer use - its primary market is for embedded industrial systems.
Because of the solid state nature of the drive, in operation it'll happily handle temperatures up to 70 degrees centigrade (about 160 degrees fahrenheit) and has the operating shock equivalent to a 5ft drop, while the drives themselves generate no heat. All of this makes it one sturdy device and it's down to the fact it lacks any moving parts, so it has no problems with vibration or shock while running.
The interface enclosure is identical to a standard 2.5in ATA drive. We're testing it on a desktop system so we've got a 44 to 40-pin adaptor. As you should have spotted, this means that it's instantly limited to ATA33 transfers.
