Previous Findings

As I wrote in a previous post, you can save a surprising amount of time copying data from CD/DVDs by first creating an ISO image.  In my testing, it was three times faster! That is a real time savings and saving time - especially in litigation support - is saving money.

It made me think about other ways to save time - even building upon the time savings found by using the ISO trick.  That led me to drive speed.

Drive Speed

As a gross over simplification, you can think of hard drive speed in two ways: seek time and transfer rate.  Seek time is how long it takes a drive to locate a file on the drive.  Transfer rate is how fast a drive can read or write data from a file, once the file has been located.

Seek time is a pretty big deal in litigation support, since we are almost always dealing with large numbers of relatively small files.  If you have to copy a directory with 15,000 TIFFs, your drive needs to locate each TIFF before it copies it and that means more seek time.

Transfer rate is a more obvious concern.  If you have 15,000 75KB TIFFs, then you want a drive that can transfer those files from, say your server to your desktop, as fast as possible.

Most USB hard drives that you receive from a vendor are only 5400 RPM drives.  They have seek times of 15 ms and transfer rates of 480 Mbps max (200 Mbps in reality).  Let’s just say, they are really, really slow!

The SSD and eSATA Advantage

Can you imagine how much more efficient data loading would be if a drive’s seek time was non existent and transfer rates were x8 faster than normal?  Not only is it possible, but the technology is only a few clicks away on Amazon or CDW.  The trick is to use a Solid State Drive (SSD) with an eSATA connection.

SSD drives are storage devices that look like hard drives, but are based on flash memory, instead of spinning disks.  SSDs drive have such low seek times, that it is basically non existent.  Many SSD drives come with eSATA connections.  eSATA is substantially faster than USB 2.0.  The difference is 480 Mbps vs. 3.0 Gbps - which ends up being x8 faster an real-life testing.

When you combine SSDs with eSATA you have a data copying solution that is far superior to traditional external drives and will have you lots of time and money.  With some initial testing, I was able to create an ISO image on a SSD drive in 50% less time.  I was also able to copy data from SSD to the same old, slow network drives in 30% less time.

Even though SSD drives are more expensive, as an industry I think we should standardize on SSD drives with USB 2.0 and eSATA connectors (USB so that they are backwards compatible).  The gain in speed and performance is well worth the additional cost.

So the question is, will you start to ask for SSD drives from your vendors?