iBUYPOWER demonstrates the sturdiness of flash storage

Jun 16, 2010 12:28 GMT  ·  By

Back in the early ages of computing, mobility was a remote dream and men and women had a tendency of being overly delicate with any machine they came into contact with. Those years have come and gone, however, and technology is now expected to be able to withstand a significant deal of 'abuse.' Storage solutions have long been among the most susceptible to damage from impacts or other physical trauma, which is more than enough for developers of such solutions to show off any bit of progress in this field.

Hard disk drives have long been notorious for their tendency to be left with platter damage in case of drops. This is because such units are composed of many moving parts. Solid State Drives, on the other hand, do not have this weakness because they have no such moving parts. iBUYPOWER decided that proving this endurance was important enough for an innocent laptop to be sacrificed.

The test was quite straightforward. At first, the notebook was dropped from about waist height. This did not exactly incapacitate the laptop and definitely had no effect on the storage unit, which worked just fine when plugged into a desktop docking station.

After that, the notebook was taken to the top of a building and dropped, on its edge, from a single story up, on solid concrete. Needless to say, many laptop bits and pieces flew and scattered about.

Amusingly enough, the Intel SSD within was still perfectly fine when it was once again plugged into the docking station, as was proven by how there were no issues when a video started playing. Of course, consumers don't usually throw their laptops off buildings, but the point remains that, in addition to much higher speeds and power efficiency, an SSD has a higher endurance than any hard drive.