Your Daily Computer Security Tips

We occasionally talk about backing up your data. You should do this on a regular schedule, to avoid having yourself a bad day if disaster strikes. My favorite media for backups are thumb (USB) drives, or an external hard drive. Between uses, both should be stored far from your PC.

Now Intel has announced that it is about to bring out a line of solid-state drives (SSD). They use flash-based memory to store data, and are smaller and faster than traditional drives.

Flash memory is non-volatile, meaning that no power is required to maintain the data. It is fast and durable, and can be electrically erased with new data written at any time.

Two SATA drives are coming. The 80GB model should be available in a month, with a 160GB drive coming a few months later. They will use less power than a hard drive and have no moving parts, so they should be very reliable. For now, however, they are somewhat expensive. Look for prices to drop over time.

We may soon see monster-sized SSDs, as we now have with regular hard disks. If not, a smaller SSD could readily complement a desktop’s hard drive, and give the PC a big speed boost. Your hard disk can store applications and data that you use less often, while the SSD handles more current tasks.