A customer has a fairly modern budget laptop which has a failing hard disk drive. He wanted to know what the options were for replacing it. He is running Windows 7 Home 64-bit and has a reasonably large photo collection. He complains that his laptop is slow, perhaps party because of occasional disk read errors.
I thought about his requirements and came up with the following list of options:
1) a standard hard disk drive (5,400rpm, 500Gb) is just £60
2) a faster hard disk drive (7,200rpm, 500Gb) is £85
3) a super fast, lower capacity solid state drive (120Gb) is £110
4) a super fast, higher capacity solid state drive (240Gb) is £180
5) a super fast, high capacity solid state drive (500Gb) is £360
6) a hybrid SSHD (500Gb) for just £100
It is more of a compromise of performance versus capacity. The laptop that I use is option 3 which only contained selected pictures that I’ve taken in the last couple of years. The majority or ‘archive’ of my photos are available elsewhere and completely backed up and secured. That way I enjoy a fast laptop with a limited amount of recent photos that I would want to work with and show people without the burden of have to backup much greater quantities of data files and potentially loose it all if my laptop were to crash or be stolen, etc.
So it is trade-off, either: change your way of working and enjoy better performance; spend a lot of money to keep the performance and archives; or continue as you are and live with it. Obviously your budget is also a factor.
How many photos do you have? How big in Gb is your photo archive? How many do you intend to take in the future? Do you intend to change you camera to a better model? Do you delete the not so good photos? Many factors are involved and only the user can answer these questions.
Luckily the data storage options today are varied (SD-card, USB memory stick, USB mobile disk drive, hard disk drive, network attached storage, home server, cloud storage etc.) are relatively cheap. I work with them all to enable my photos to be removed from my camera, edited, stored and archived, distributed to various devices and made available for people to view, enjoy and comment.
The new technology is the SSD hybrid drive. Basically the access speed of an SSD with the storage of a hard disk drive. The SSD part holds the most recently used files with much faster response time. Windows boots quickly as do the commonly used software applications like your photo editor. However loading the actual photo (assuming it hasn’t been viewed recently) takes the usual time. As these are brand new devices there are no reliability figures, but the manufacturer (Seagate) had been in the hard disk drive business for ages. The PCpro article in my last post showed that the SSHD is a reasonable performance/capacity compromise.
I've ordered an SSHD for the customer, and it'll be the first one I've used. I'll post the results here soon.
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