Old hard drives start to kick the bucket

2006 MAY BE the year that will mark the slow start of slaughtering the old bastard electro-magnetic dinosaurs, replaced by a flashy answer. Hard drives will pretty much kick the bucket - it's no long slot - soon.

After Samsung launched Q30Plus-SSD with a 32GB solid state drive, it was only the matter of time before the other vendors claimed their share of the pie.

And so Transcend is coming out with two solid-state hard drives, having a capacity from two to eight gigs.

While this of course, isn't big enough for real what the vendors call in their strange pidgeon English "usability", a lot of notebook vendors are already taking note, since 8GB is pretty much enough for an installation of Windows+Office+Photoshop.

The drives use a 44-pin IDE connector known to the wonderful world of notebooks, and an ECC function keeps the data safe from corruption, reckons Transcend.

But, things won't stop at 8GB. There are 16GB models being slated. If you don't need gigabytes of storage data and can live with a longer battery life, solid state drives just might be a ticket to ride. Sort of why not risk it for a friskit. We suspect that SSDs will first destroy the 4300rpm and even slower spinning hard drives. µ