The hard disk drive

Although the Epia EN and even the case we chose can support normal 3.5” hard disk drives, there are situations that even 2.5” notebook drives are rendered useless. 3.5” drives are designed for desktop PCs and cannot withstand harsh treatment such as vibrations or excessive heat. 2.5” mechanical notebook drives are much better at this, since their low power consumption does not allow them to heat up a lot and they usually have basic vibration protection measures installed, but they are still dangerous for use inside a PC which will be susceptible to vibrations, such as a car PC. In order to find a proper solution for this, we had to look at other (very cool) alternatives. SuperTalent just recently released IDE SSDs (solid state disk) which consume negligible amounts of power and can work under insane environmental conditions. The best part is that they have not a single moving part; they are like a large SD card connected to your IDE channel and thus they are invulnerable to vibrations and do not generate any kind of noise like mechanical drives.

The 8GB SSD drive which we received from Super Talent for the purposes of this review came inside a small plastic package; more than enough protection for a drive which weights almost nothing and is rugged enough to install in a space shuttle and send to the moon. There are no other parts inside the package; none are needed anyway since this drive is exactly like any other 2.5” IDE HDD. You can simply install it in your laptop or system and it will instantly work like a mechanical 2.5” drive.

The look of the SSD drive is pretty simple; it is just a piece of black plastic the exact size of a 2.5” drive. Only the SuperTalent’s sticker on the top breaks the monotony. As far as durability is concerned, the drive is pretty solid and we feel we could run a car over it and it wouldn’t be damaged. We skipped that part of the testing however since we didn’t want to damage such a drive by accident because unfortunately SSD drives currently have only two drawbacks. First, their performance is not stellar (although their seek times are insanely low), and second, they are pretty expensive. Fortunately both of the issues are going to be dealt with soon, since SuperTalent already announced SATA SSDs which will cost much less per GB and perform at least twice as fast.