Fireproof, Waterproof External Hard Drives

[Phoenix]

http://iosafe.com/

[Glass]

interesting. have played with SSD. Hard drives need drivers to work just like any other devices. As yet the drivers are not in the BIOS of many motherboards.. I'll say most motherboards because I'm sure some are coming out somewhere that have the drivers in them now.

So if the motherboard does not have the drivers then they need to be injected into the BIOS or the system needs to boot far enough so that the drivers are loaded from another source.

With ATA the motherboard bios's eventually included the driver, however prior to that you had to get into windows somehow to load the driver. Windows still loads it's own driver once the boot is finished.

Sata was the same, especially if you had a daughter board on an ATA/IDE capable board. They usually came with BIOS modifying drivers to give you a sata boot up option otherwise you were booting off IDE and then running the windows drivers for the sata daughterboard.

So SSD drives are the same at this moment in time. This unit obvious runs itself with it's own mainboard but if it was in a PC, booting from the drive is problematic.

The other thing about SSD is a slightly different angle on wear and tear. The chips have a finite read/write life span. Each read/write degrades the chips and over time they will fail. Now normal disks, with spinning platters do have the same problem of a finite life due to reading and writing on the platters.

The interesting thing with SSD is that (I think) they can better control the wear or they can spread the wear out so that the whole of the drive degrades evenly over time, where as the traditional disks are more difficult to share the wear around. The normal drives tend to have data written to the closest empty sector. Often the sectors on the shortest path for the drive head get written to more often which wears them out faster resulting in bad sectors.

Bad sectors can sometimes be blocked out but I think that has become difficult in itself on sata drives. Eventually the drive becomes unsualble long before the majority of sectors are bad. The SSD's don't have moving parts and the process of bocking dead sectors could, in theory continue right down to the last sector.

I'm unsure about these drives yet. New technology and I think there are only 2 chip manufacturers at this time. Still it is a step in the right direction and I'm sure they will improve them greatly as time goes on.

[Saul Mine]

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500 GB external drives in exotic wood cases. Most are $164, and 1 TB drives are $244. (Prices vary)

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