Goodbye Hard drives but I won’t miss you

I just read an article where experts said price of SSD will continue to fall. Sincerely that’s the most stupid statement I have read in months. It’s like saying the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
SSD, which is an acronym for Solid State Drive, is basically a bigger USB drive shoehorned into the size of hard disks so they can fit into the same compartment. It’s a means of deceiving computers that they are HDDs but just magically faster. You can read more about SSD here.
I use a Dell Latitude E6540 and a MacBook Pro (which has refused to leave its original packing, tear nylon!). The Dell is one dog of a laptop. It’s big, ugly, heavy and very slow. I was almost gearing to use it as a self-defense tool when I finally got an epiphany that maybe the hard drive may be begging to retire. So I got a Samsung (or was it San Disk) SSD and plopped it in. Whoa, never seen such a transformation. Oh, yes, it’s still big, ugly as sin and very heavy but slow isn’t a word to describe it. After all, a pig with a lipstick is still a pig, albeit a pretty one.
Enough of my katzenjammer!
I have become an unrepentant evangelist of SSDs. I now approve it as replacement drives for my colleagues because, ding dong, it’s affordable. At the last check, a 240GB SSD cost around N35K.
Now for those who have some interest in electronics, trended over a period of time, the price of devices is always inversely proportional to the performance. If this law holds true, SSD will get cheaper and cheaper until it finally supplants hard drives. I have watched this trend for a while and if things go at the rate it’s going, then by 2018, hard drives may become what people do – drive hard!
However other schools of thought think that SSD may never catch up with HDDs in performance but I know that as long as the price is reasonable, the performance of SSD will always bitch slap HDDs any day or time.
So far the consumer SSDs have been coming in the HDD form factor but why should it? New computers are going on sale with SSDs soldered directly on the motherboards which is giving rise to skinnier and sexier laptops.
And it doesn’t stop there.
The IDE and SATA interfaces are hogs, slow and annoying. A prehistoric interface protocol. So guys at FusionIO turned everything on its head – they started putting storage on the PCIe bus, right within server innards. The benefit is that the processor can reach the drive as fast as it could reach the memory. The devices are not for small children though – a typical 2.4Tb bundle will set you back about $28,000. With that kind of price, I will rather save my documents within 2B exercise books.
Back to saner shores.
SSD can transform performance of anyone. It could mean the difference between a good day or a bad one. So let’s do it!

Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.