[ Thanks to Amy
Bennett for this link. ]
“The first time I was briefed on developments that
would lead to solid-state hard drives for laptops I thought it was
such a great idea I couldn’t wait to get one. Improve speed, extend
battery life and eliminate all that complaining when I close the
lid and sling the laptop around before the disk stops spinning? Oh
yeah.“Unfortunately former colleague Galen Gruman was in the same
meeting, and managed to shoot the idea into my “maybe someday” file
before I got back to my desk. (Galen is wildly enthusiastic about
technology himself, but has annoyingly accurate reasons for it when
his enthusiasms conflict with mine.)“In this case the reasons were that the mean time between
failure on flash memory was far shorter than for disk, making a
solid-state drive (SSD) a good risk for data loss.”