The Future with Solid State Drives

Solid state drives are quickly becoming main stream and that is great news for PC owners of all types. Whether you’re a gamer, graphic artist, or even just a casual user, the speed and reliability of these types of storage devices will soon increase your productivity and make your computer experience much more pleasant.

But just what is meant by “solid state”? Solid state simply means that there are no moving parts. A traditional hard drive, like the kind that is probably in the computer you are using right now, contains several magnetic platters and a moving head to read and write information on those platters. Compared to solid state drives, these mechanical hard drives tend to be slower because the head and platters must align to read information from a particular area on the hard drive. That means it is also necessary to defragment these types of drives periodically. Mechanical drives also tend to be less reliable since the moving parts inside can wear out over time or become damaged due to physical trauma (such as dropping your laptop or kicking over your desktop computer).

Solid state drives, on the other hand, use NAND flash microchips to store data, making them a cousin to your USB flash drive. They have a much lower seek time, meaning that having pieces of the same file written to different parts of the hard drive is negligible so defragmenting the drive is unnecessary and should actually be avoided since it increases the number of write operations to the drive. Solid state drives also benefit from being noiseless and having a higher tolerance for temperature and vibration or physical trauma. In the past, there were concerns about long-term reliability of solid state drives, as older models encouraged the wearing out of the cells that data is written to which promoted drive failure. Recent engineering and production methods have more or less put this fear to rest.

Some quick comparisons between standard hard disk drives and solid state drives:

Standard Hard Disk Drive, also known as an Electromechanical or Mechanical Hard Drive:
-Large storage capacity (up to 3 terabytes from some brands)
-Affordable price
-Can be noisy
-Runs hotter than solid state drives
-Slower than newer solid state drives
-Do not require additional software or specific operating system to gain full use

Solid State Drives:
-Smaller storage capacity
-Can be very expensive for price versus capacity
-Noiseless
-Lower operating temperature
-Very fast seek time and read and write speeds
-May require additional software or a specific operating system to gain full benefit of performance

The reason you won’t find solid state drives as an option for your Dell, HP or other brand name computers right now comes down to price. Thankfully, all we have to do is wait a few months, possibly a few years, for when solid state drives replace mechanical drives altogether. Of course, with a custom built PC or an upgrade you can enjoy the benefits of a solid state drive today. The typical setup involves a solid state drive holding the operating system itself and perhaps a few choice applications or games and a mechanical hard drive being used for storage.

Monitor GPU Settings With MSI Afterburner

Lately I have been using an application named “MSI Afterburner” for my video card temperature monitoring and fan speed settings. It’s a nifty little program based on Rivatuner code, but in my opinion it has a cleaner interface that is easier to use and cuts out a lot of the confusing stuff that Rivatuner seems to present in every tab.

My favorite feature is the ability to set your graphics card fan speed to increase incrementally along with each 1 degree celsius that your GPU takes on (Rivatuner can probably do this too but it’s probably more complicated). This way you won’t have your fan kicking back and forth between 25 and 50% when it hits a certain threshold and have to deal with the auditory assault of it swinging between two extremes constantly. You can also overclock your video card and monitor temperatures, fan speed, GPU usage, and clock speeds. Overall, it’s a pretty useful program and seems more intuitive than Rivatuner while using the same tech. Check it out at http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/.

Make a Custom Startup List

If you’re like me, you have a few applications that you want running every time you turn on your computer. Some of these programs make it easy for you to change their startup behavior, while others offer no capability whatsoever. Woes be gone! I’ll show you how to fire up any program when Windows boots up.

Make a shortcut of whatever program you want to launch by right clicking on the program’s icon and selecting “Create Shortcut.” You can now copy and paste or drag this shortcut into the appropriate folder.

In Windows 7, the folder you will be searching for is inside a hidden folder, so you will need to enable your ability to see hidden folders and files. To do this in Windows 7, open up any folder and click “Organize” at the top left of the folder, then choose “Folder and search options.” Select the “View” tab and select “Show Hidden Files, Folders, and Drives” and then click “Apply.”

For Windows 7 users, navigate to C:\Users\(User-Name)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and place your shortcut icon here.

For Windows XP users, navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and place your shortcut icon here. (Replace “All Users” with the appropriate username to make the program start up only with that specific user’s login)

After your shortcuts are in the appropriate folder, restart your computer and watch the magic happen.

Good luck and have fun!