The laptop I bought last fall has a Solid State Drive (SSD) – a hard drive made of solid state memory rather than a rotating disc. It’s quiet, very fast and energy efficient. Because my desktop drive is full, I’ve been investigating my desktop SSD options. SSD’s come in two flavours, the multi-level cell (MLC) and the faster, more reliable single-level cell (SLC) variants. I opted for the SLC variant on my Dell e4200.
There’s many announced products, but very few actually available in the stores to buy. Products from OCZ, Patriot and Super Talent seem to be the only ones available despite drives made by Intel, Samsung, Sandisk and Corsair. You have to do your research to find out which ones are MLC and SLC, but SLC are generally the higher priced ones.
The one that has gotten my attention is OCZ’s “Apex” line. It combines MLC technology in a RAID-0 configuration, making it able to get almost the same speed as an SLC design SSD, but at a lower cost. These don’t seem to be in stores yet, but I’ll keep an eye out.
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