After much testing and tweaking, we have now also got Windows 7 versions available for those with Microsoft’s latest operating system.  This has taken a significant amount of testing over the last couple of months.

What hasn’t helped has been the issues that have arisen with the Solid State Drives and the fact that Win7 creates a seperate hidden partition on the drive that it writes stuff to about installed software and updates.

After much research and testing, we have decided (at this stage – April 2010) to stay away from Solid State Drives (SSD’s) because they seem to have some very serious problems.

Some of these issues are:

	Static electricity sensitivity which causes drives to crash and lose data (this has happened to our test system several times due to a monitor switching off!)
	They can quickly become ’flaky’ due to dead and dying cells and cause data loss. Even if they have built in correction software, you still stand the chance of losing data.
	They can also slow down over time due to heavy fragmentation and data management multiplication. Various drive cleanup utilities are still to prove themselves.
	The mouse constantly freezes for short intervals, due to Win XP not being able to provide SSD’s with what they need and heavily overloading them with many unnecessary read/writes.
	Price might also be an issue for some but we are more concerned with the reliability issues at this point. We are convinced that SSD’s are the future and as soon as we find a drive which meets our rugged reliability requirements, we will offer it for sale.

In the mean time, the drives we are offering have been chosen because they have amongst the highest data transfer rates available. You may find this odd because they only have 5400 RPM spin speed but they manage to do this by having a super dense data packing system.

The Samsung 5400rpm high density drives even outstrip 7200rpm drives from competing manufacturers and have the additional advantage that their power usage is moderate (good for laptops).

To get enhanced speeds out of our drives, we format them in a way that places the important data is on the fastest tracks and the unimportant data on the slower tracks. This ensures fastest data flow rates and lowest seek times (which can sometimes be lower than 2ms) for boot sequences, program launches and ‘My Documents’ data. This results in boot and program launch times to be more similar to those of ‘burned in’ SSD’s.