Alternative high performance storage solutions from Impulse
Friday 27 January 2012
Due to the flooding last year in Thailand, a number of the key hard drive manufacturers have been unable to meet the current world demand for their products. Reports suggest that manufacturers will be roughly 35% short of full demand throughout the upcoming months. Unfortunately this has caused the price of hard drives to rise quite drastically.
Although the price for hard drives has increased in recent months, we would like to assure you that we are still able to source hard drives and meet the demands for future system builds and all our ongoing projects.
Jim Goetzee, Purchasing Manager at Impulse commented on the recent hard drive availability concerns.
”Hard drive availability is still on the decline as the major manufacturers are struggling to keep up with the global demand; however we are still able to source products due to our extensive supplier database, although the flooding has had a major impact on pricing.
Solid State Drives on the other hand are widely available and pricing has continued to fall for the past six months. Bearing this in mind I would strongly suggest you use Solid State Drives unless you have a specific requirement for large volumes of storage.”
We are constantly adopting new technologies to ensure you remain at the forefront of your industry. Over the past 12 months, the adoption of higher performance storage in the commercial computing industry has brought the price of Solid State Drives down to be a viable alternative to traditional hard drives.
Fortunately the manufacturing of Solid State Drives has not been affected by recent events and the availability has never been greater. There are a number of benefits you can experience using a Solid State Drive.
Solid State Drives by their nature have no moving mechanical parts. Instead of the traditional motor, magnetic platters and reading arms found in hard drives, solid state drives use flash memory. Flash memory can be found in a wide range of consumer products such as smart phones, digital cameras and USB memory sticks.
There are a number of advantages to using Solid State Drives over mechanical hard drive. The main benefit being that Solid State Drives have no moving parts. With no moving parts, Solid State Drives are not affected by jolts, drops and vibrations. In addition, Solid State Drives are not affected by magnetic fields and produce very little heat. These kinds of features are desirable in the industrial market where electromagnetic interference and high environmental temperatures are common.
On top of the physical reliabilities, Solid State Drives offer a number of real-world benefits for operating systems and software. Because Solid State Drives do not need to rely on mechanical parts to ‘spin-up’ or synchronise, data can be read almost instantaneously. Read and write performance on Solid State Drives is on average 50% faster than mechanical hard drives. Operating systems find this boost in speed advantageous with substantially quicker boot-up times and applications being loaded within seconds.
Many of our customers are now taking advantage of Solid State Drives as a reliable and high performance alternative to traditional hard drives. Although per gigabyte Solid State Drives cost slightly more than hard drives, the real-world benefits obviously justify the switchover. Our technical team have years of experience with solid state technology and developed a number of Microsoft Windows Embedded operating systems optimised for solid state storage.
If you are concerned about the availability of hard drives or would like to learn more about Solid State Drives, then contact our technical account team on +44 (0)1782 337 800 or email sales@impulse-corp.co.uk. We are available to answer any questions you may have.
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