How to Copy a 8GB File in 1 Second

Sounds impossible. But it is. That’s if you have about US$60K to spend on a PC. Yup, just one PC. Patriot built a PC with 40 TorqX SSDs and demonstrated copying a Blu-ray rip in 0.9 seconds. That’s really super fast. This is probably the year that SSD is going to come of age in consumer devices. It has been around, first becoming quite well known with its introduction as an option to the MacBook Air. It was too costly. The price has come down a lot. Perhaps by the end of this year, it might become competitively priced against a traditional rotating hard disk.

Then, rotating hard disks are going to get demoted in the storage hierarchy, to be used for backups, offline storage, external drives, etc. It’s like how hard disks have become so cheap that they are already replacing tape backups in data centres.

SSDs will have the important benefit of being more robust and shock resistant, important features for components used in a mobile device. It should also consume less power, although real world results are somewhat varied at this time. But when they do sort out the power efficiency matters, it will mean longer run time for mobile devices too, without having to be tethered to a power supply. Notebooks, netbooks and whatever-pads are going to get a lot more useful than it has ever been.

The last problem with mobile devices will be power. When will we get wireless power?