Hybrid Drive the New Kid on the Block

In previous BLOG articles I have written that SSD (Solid State Drives) are a recommended replacement for traditional mechanical drives. Despite their smaller size and increased costs, SSDs so profoundly improve overall system performance. If you can live with less capacity SSDs should be your first choice in a mobile product. Now to spice things up a bit, there is a third player in town, Hybrid drive technology. Like SSD this has been around for a while, but is finally starting to show some momentum.

Have You Changed Your RAID Batteries?

You’ve done all the right things in your server configs; great RAID level for the server role, RAID Battery Backup (BBU), and installed a correct sized UPS to give the server plenty of time to run while everything shuts down.  After a year or two, do you make a regularly scheduled maintenance visit to change the RAID BBU? Yes sadly it is true; the RAID BBU needs to be replaced periodically. Leaving an uncharged battery on the RAID card leaves the cache exposed in the rare case of a power outage.. In my 20 plus years in the business I can confidently say that this has happened exactly twice to two different customers.  In both cases the customers attempted to re-build the array and both had the same outcome; the RAID array failed to recover, leaving both clients stuck without their systems for multiple days. What can be done to protect your clients and your reputation?

Need a Custom Built PC for Gaming?

Have you been selling mostly plain Jane vanilla mini-tower desktop PC’s to business clients? If a customer asked you about a gaming machine, and what you could build for him, would the first game that comes to mind be: a.) Falcon 3.0 , b.) Spider Solitaire or c.) Battlefield 3? Ok if you chose Falcon 3.0 you get points for being in the industry for a long time, but if Spider Solitaire is what your idea of a “game” is you might need some assistance in selecting a good system to start with as a gaming rig. If you chose Battlefield, you probably already know what my recommendation will be.

Providing a fast and still reasonably priced notebook is a real challenge in today’s value conscious market. Solid State Drives (SSD) are proven to increase general PC performance radically over traditional hard drives, but their high cost in large capacities typically prevents them from being used as a standard drive. A great way to get SSD performance and large hard drive space is to combine a traditional HD with an mSATA (Mini SATA) SSD.

SSDs eliminate bottlenecks

Workers who rely on their computer for more than normal office work, such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), Graphic Design or Scientific Computation, a very fast CPU, GPU and sufficient RAM are important.  However, an often overlooked piece of the performance puzzle is your primary hard drive.  SSD (Solid State Drives) can eliminate the bottleneck created by traditional platter based drives and thoroughly optimize system performance.

You probably have thought about offering Solid State Drives (SSD) in your mainstream configurations, but perhaps you balked at the price per gigabyte ratio and stayed with your regular desktop platter based drives.  We all face the challenge of trying to keep costs down in order to make our custom configured systems attractive compared to pre-built systems from big box stores and e-tailors. SSDs offer a chance for you to really make your systems stand out from your competition.