If there is anything more important to your business than efficiency, it's reliability.

The hard drive is arguably the most critical component since it holds all the information you use. And what are computers used for in business if not the storage, retrieval, and processing of that information? Unfortunately, the hard drive is also the slowest part of the computer and the most unreliable. Not the best characteristics to follow the most important component. It's the internal moving parts that make it unreliable both in theory and in practice. Hopefully, you have an IT solutions company or consultant that can mitigate the risks for you. If not, here are some insights into the thought process regarding information storage decisions.

Solid State Hard Drives
The next step in computer design is to improve storage reliability by eliminating the hard disk altogether through use of new, still evolving, solid-state technology. Solid state drives have no moving parts, and are able to be swapped in place of any modern hard drive. Essentially it's the same technology that's used in flash memory chips for your camera or phone, just more of it, wrapped into a hard drive style case.

At this time, solid state devices are being integrated into laptops and desktops by manufacturers, but might be too pricey for small business IT budgets. HOWEVER, they are not too pricey to rule them out in some cases.

Solid State Drives in PCs
The following circumstances are usually worth the extra money for a solid state device upgrade:

• If you don't save your data to a server, instead saving directly to your computer

• If you are going to purchase a new laptop (more so if it will be under a lot of wear and tear)

• If you are lazy about backing up your data or don't have a backup plan in place

The other limitation at this time (other than price) is the size of solid state devices, which are much smaller than hard disk drives at the same price. Consequently if you download large amounts of music or videos, a solid state drive will not be an option for you at this time.

Keep watching though as prices of solid state drives will continue to fall, and competition from up and coming technologies (memristors and phase change memory) will take us to seemingly infinite storage space at lower prices (note that we've been saying for years we'll have seemingly infinite storage space, and we always find new ways to fill up space even though we say we'd "never be able to fill that up.")

Solid State Drives in Servers
Ironically, servers usually get the benefit of new technology first, but not in this case. At the current time, solid state devices in servers aren't usually recommended for the following reasons:

• Servers usually require much larger storage space for current limitations of solid state devices
• Current technology has a limited number of times you can write to the device, not usually an issue for desktops but can be for servers
• Many of the performance metrics of solid state drives are better but some can be worse, which can affect the overall performance of the server

RAIDs in Servers
How do you keep data reliable on the server? Instead of a solid state device in servers, we use the traditional RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) to help protect the data and also improve performance. RAID technology has been in servers for a long time and will stay that way. Even with solid state drives, a RAID is considered a necessity.

You should make sure that your server is equipped with a RAID. As always we'll provide a free consultation and analysis of your current setup to make sure you are protected.

For customers looking to purchase a server or PC, send us the specifications on the computer you're considering and we'll give you a free assessment.

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