Making the case for a solid state drive (SSD) in your 1:1 Initiative

Let’s start this with a little game, name this sound…

OK… back the sound in a bit.

You have a lot of decisions to make when you are planning a 1:1 Learning Initiative, one of which has to do with the type of hardware you are going to use.

A little over 2 years ago we made the choice to go with 13″ Macbook Pro laptops.  We got them with 4 GB of RAM and a 256 GB hard drive.  So far they have been working very well, but when you buy over 1000 devices you’re bound to have some trouble.

We’ve had a number of user related issues, the biggest being damaged screens, but as far as warrantee related repairs they’ve fallen in two categories: logic boards and hard drives.

While there is little you can do to prepare for a malfunctioning logic board, a hard drive is now a different story. It’s important to note that the issues we’ve had with hard drives haven’t all been manufacture issues, there is user related issues that can cause failure.

The choice between a standard hard disk drive (HDD) and a solid state drive (SSD) can come down to many factors, price being the one of them, but durability should be another.

The biggest durability issue with a HDD is the number of different parts, all of which can fail or be damaged.  We’ve all heard the “click of death” or been faced with a blue or gray screen because the HDD has failed.

With solid state you eliminate the moving part and by doing so the number of parts that can go bad, therefore increasing durability.

Now I know what you might be thinking… “they cost too much and I have a budget”.  We’ll to that you might be right.  The speed is great and the durability is something you might be able to live with. I had drives that have gone bad and have sent them out to recovery services to retrieve data before, so why spend the money?

Well… back to the sound.  Have you figured it out? If you still guessing take a look at the video below.

Solid state is looking a lot better to me.