Stupid Flash Memory

Interesting. Part of the hype of solid-state drives (SSD - flash memory in a big enough quantity to replace a hard drive) was that it'd save power because there are no moving parts on the thing. And if they did save power that would be useful for laptops and other portable devices, of course. Turns out, however, that SSDs (not to be confused with STDs) consume MORE power than their backwoods cousins, the hard drives. Click here to go to Tom's Hardware to see some tests they did. Turns out that on paper, a hard drive should use more power, but that's only when it's running full throttle, which doesn't happen all the time (or all that often). But with SSDs, they're kinda ON the whole time, sucking at the power teat of your computer.

I remember the first hard drive I ever saw. It was in a clear case and was 8 or 10 inches in diameter (someone geekier than me could tell you (and me) just what diameter the hard drive would have really been). This was back in '84, I believe. And I'm pretty sure it was an astounding 20MB.