SSD -- the future is here

There was a time, long long ago, when simple-minded apes didn't know much about storing information. The best they could do was take magnetized platters, stack them up, spin them around an axis and pick up or deposit charges by moving an actuator arm precariously close to the delicate spinning surface of these platters. There is no good reason for storing information like that. But you see, the people who invented the spinning platter lived on a relatively recently colonized continent. The continent was originally inhabited by primates who were, it is agreed, every bit as intelligent as the newcomers who succeeded them, with one major difference: they had not invented the wheel. Because they had not discovered the Great Benefits Of Rotation, their technological development was stunted, and as a result they simply could not compete. It was thus obvious to everyone, given this historical precedent, that Wheel Is Good.

But all technological cycles come to an end. And last weekend, finally, I took off the feathers, laid down the quiver, and picked up night goggles and a bazooka. I mean, I upgraded my home computer to an SSD drive. It was just a little bit painful, not too much. First, I tried all the cloning utilities I had used previously, including the ultimate boot CD and seagate's Disk Wizard, but they all failed to recognize the SSD as a valid disk. I don't know why, but I didn't care to figure out, because the closer you are to hardware, the more dumb things become. Thus, when dealing with hardware directly, you are dealing with the dumbest software, and the dumbest code. So it wasn't surprising to me at all, that even though the new disk (OCZ 120GB, $284) was SATA-compliant, it was perceived differently from other disks. Perhaps the cloning software was stunned to discover that the new disk had no tracks or cylinders. It's just a guess. I ended up using XXClone, which has a convenient 30-day trial mode. Good thing cloning a hard drive takes less than 30 days. XXclone is fundamentally different from other disk cloners in that it copies one file at a time, using Windows' Volume Snapshot Service. After this is done, you press a button in XXClone that makes the new disk bootable, and you're done. There was only one problem during this process. It had to do with junction points. You see, I use two terabyte-sized RAID disks for storing data. Since I hate drive letters, I access these disks using NTFS hard links (see a tool called junction by Mark Russinovich). c:\work leads to one of these 1TB disks, and c:\photo to another. XXClone, after checking that the amount of space taken up by C: was less than the capacity of the new drive, proceeded to naively recurse into these monstrously large directories and attempt to stuff them into the new disk. Fail. Using "junction *" I found all the reparse points on c: (all my reparse points are top-level), and removed them with junction -d. XXClone was even kind enough to swap disk letters, so that when I booted from the new drive, it was C:, and not G: or something. For this, I am grateful. Windows stores a mapping of volume serial numbers to drive letters somewhere in registry; this prevents drive letters from randomly reassigning themselves at boot time. But it also prevents disc cloning operations from working smoothly.

So, just like the wheel was a killer app five hundred years ago, solid state is the killer app today.