New Laptops May Boot Instantly

[Mr Lee]

Interesting article, so how many of us will wait for the new solid state hard drives to be the norm before buying a new computer, I know I will. Apple's newest MacBook Air laptop boots up in mere seconds, thanks to its use of advanced flash memory instead of a standard, slower hard drive. And that memory format, used in so-called solid-state drives, could soon become a standard in PCs, as manufacturers follow Apple's lead and warm to the benefits of flash storage.Increasingly used in smartphones, the chips used in flash storage are still expensive -- but market leaders Samsung Electronics, Toshiba, SanDisk and Intel are investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge facilities to boost production.That will help meet growing demand and make solid-state drives, which are made of flash memory chips instead of mechanical parts, more mainstream by 2012 as prices decline, analysts say. Game fans and other tech-savvy consumers are increasingly buying off-the-shelf solid-state drives, or SSDs, because they are quicker, more rugged and less prone to fail.The complete story HERE

[Mr Lee]

OK I have a question to all you computer tech kind of guys out there, would it work to buy an external solid state drive and clone our hard drive onto that and then run our computers off that?  I guess we would also have to change the boot info within the laptop? The reason I ask is 1 TB solid state external drives can be bought here for from $79 and up and I was thinking that might be a great idea to run a laptop off of because then if someone steals the laptop in a burglary, and we keep the hard drive separate, then all info would still be safe and available to plug into the next laptop. Anyone know if that would work and if so then would it make the laptop much faster?

[Art2ro]

Yeah, that would be nice to have an instant boot computer, instead of the present slow booting system! Do external hard drives have password protection? I only use a couple of flash drives for my important documents and info, but it has no password protection, I'd be in deep Kim Chee if I were to loose my flash drives because they're so small the size of a Cricket lighter!

[Old55]

I’m not computer savvy, is a “flash drive” the same as a thumb drive? My Lexar thumb drive is encrypted.

Yeah, that would be nice to have an instant boot computer, instead of the present slow booting system! Do external hard drives have password protection? I only use a couple of flash drives for my important documents and info, but it has no password protection, I'd be in deep Kim Chee if I were to loose my flash drives because they're so small the size of a Cricket lighter!

[Art2ro]

I’m not computer savvy, is a “flash drive” the same as a thumb drive? My Lexar thumb drive is encrypted.

Yeah, that would be nice to have an instant boot computer, instead of the present slow booting system! Do external hard drives have password protection? I only use a couple of flash drives for my important documents and info, but it has no password protection, I'd be in deep Kim Chee if I were to loose my flash drives because they're so small the size of a Cricket lighter!

Flash drives are also refereed to as memory sticks the size of a small Cricket cigarette ligher which mine only holds 3 to 5 gigs of memory and has no password capabilities, it just stores whatever one needs to save instead of on to your PC hard drive.

[Jake]

OK I have a question to all you computer tech kind of guys out there, would it work to buy an external solid state drive and clone our hard drive onto that and then run our computers off that? I guess we would also have to change the boot info within the laptop? The reason I ask is 1 TB solid state external drives can be bought here for from $79 and up and I was thinking that might be a great idea to run a laptop off of because then if someone steals the laptop in a burglary, and we keep the hard drive separate, then all info would still be safe and available to plug into the next laptop. Anyone know if that would work and if so then would it make the laptop much faster?

Hey Lee,I've been researching for external SSD's to run the system OS for laptops but only found internal SSD's where you physically replacethe original HDD. Hopefully, they will come out with more options as you suggested (a transferable external SSD) with prices that are becoming more reasonable and faster 3.0 USB or SATA connections. Respectfully -- Jake

[FlyAway]

OK I have a question to all you computer tech kind of guys out there, would it work to buy an external solid state drive and clone our hard drive onto that and then run our computers off that? I guess we would also have to change the boot info within the laptop? The reason I ask is 1 TB solid state external drives can be bought here for from $79 and up and I was thinking that might be a great idea to run a laptop off of because then if someone steals the laptop in a burglary, and we keep the hard drive separate, then all info would still be safe and available to plug into the next laptop. Anyone know if that would work and if so then would it make the laptop much faster?

Are you sure they are Solid State Drives (SSD)? I think it will be a while till a 1 TB SSD is $79. I recently purchased a 64GB Kingston SSD for one of my Netbooks for $99 on sale at Fry's Electronics. It is one of the lower end drives to.Newer laptops have eSATA ports on them, so you could set them up to do what you are talking about. Problem is, how often than not are you to leave the external hooked up to the laptop? The thief is going to grab it all anyway most of the time.I use a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive with Acronis True Image to back up all my PC's. If I loose a drive or the laptop then restore it on a new one. Acronis also has a cool feature that lets you save backups as Virtual Machines.