Solid-State Disks and Server 2008, Part 4

The Law of Unintended Benefits

The Law of Unintended Consequences sometimes works against us but on happier occasions it works in our favor. We’ve been looking at Solid-State Disks recently, and it turns out that they have some unintended benefits beyond the main virtue of being fast. (Although maybe I shouldn’t say “unintended” because I don’t know what the inventors and designers actually intended!)

For one example, solid state disks are fast enough that you may be able to disable indexing on an SSD volume, simplifying both server and client configurations. They’re also fast enough that you may not need to worry about running scheduled tasks to perform defragmentation. (In fact, some SSD manufacturers actively discourage the use of defraggers, which can increase disk writes and thereby reduce an SSD device’s useful life.)

Lower levels of generated heat (and of consumed power, which are at least partly cause-and-effect) turn out to have a “domino effect” of benefits. You don’t need to have as large a power supply with SSDs, and you also don’t need to have as large a cooling fan. Smaller cooling fans, in turn, consume less power, meaning that the power supply size can be reduced still further. When you reduce the power supply size, you reduce the required size of ITS cooling fan.

It’s nice when a big improvement in one area also produces side benefits in other areas. That seems to be the case with SSD’s, so I’ll make a prediction: Within a year, one-fourth of the people reading this blog will have had some experience with at least one SSD device. (I love making predictions that nobody will be able to disprove!)

Recent posts:

Solid-State Disks: A Different Animal

Quick-Cloning a Hard Drive

Solid-State Disks and Server 2008, Part II

• Microsoft
• flash drive
• Hard Drive
• Server 2008
• solid-state disk
• SSD