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I’m totally finished with spinning drives on my ThinkPads. At least if I have anything to say about it.

I was fortunate enough to be able to swap to a solid state hard disk drive in my ThinkPad this week. I had always derided the 64GB capacity as too small, but when the opportunity presented itself, it was too good to pass up.

I have always been a fan of 7200 rpm HDDs in notebooks, long ago having rejected 5400 rpm as being way too slow for use in any system that does more than surf the Web. Thus, a 7200 rpm HDD has been a basic requirement for me in my last three notebooks.

Let’s look at the requirements of a PC running three years ago vs. today. Both may be running Windows XP, but today’s PC has to contend with more personal firewalls, security scanners, management agents, and system utilities all running constantly in the background. Over the next 1 -2 years, plan on adding virtualization to this list. This is before you have even launched your first application. Worse, they all require care and feeding (i.e. processor cycles) in order to keep themselves up to date.

In short, though your application load hasn’t changed much in the last several years, your background computing load most certainly has – and not for the better. All of this activity is heavily disk bound, and I didn’t realize just how much until I switched two days ago.

An interesting article illustrating the benefits of a solid state disk, not only is it set to be more power efficient they should be more reliable long term – though we’ll have to see. Do check it out, if you’ve been wondering about the solid state disk in your laptop.

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