Munich - At first glance, the EeePC and the MacBook Air do not seem to have much in common. But on closer inspection, both portable computers use solid state drives (SSD) or one that has no moving parts and significant advantages over traditional drives. 

Solid state drives are becoming common in personal computers. While the EeePC uses an SSD as its standard hard drive, the Apple offers users an SSD option to upgrade traditional drives. 

The EeePC from Asus is a stripped down notebook selling for 399 euros (635 dollars). Its SSD has a 12 GB capacity, enough for e-mails, some music and loads of photos. 

Meanwhile, the MacBook Air is a mobile, but fully-fledged, computer. Customers pay 1,699 euros for a standard model with an ordinary 80 GB hard drive. But some customers are tempted to pay 680 euros more to have a smaller 64 GB SSD instead. Apple says customers are attracted by the fact that the SSD drive has no moving parts, which makes it silent and more durable. 

Case in point: dropping a memory card packed with photos is no longer detrimental as it has no moving parts. The same applies to SSDs. A computer with an SSD drive is much more resistant to bumps. Traditional hard drives require special metal plates, written upon and read using special magnetized heads. A good jolt can sometimes lead to a complete loss of data. 

"Additionally, under normal conditions, SSDs can access data faster than a standard hard drive," says Philippe Schaeffer of the Secure IT division of TUEV Rheinland, a technical services provider based in Cologne. Traditional hard drives often have linked data stored in smaller packages all over the disc. Searching for the individual pieces of data slows things down. SSDs don't have that problem, meaning all data can be accessed immediately. 

Schaeffer says there are exceptions in which traditional hard drives work faster, such as when large, sequential data blocks are called up such as when copying a stored film. 

The extra speed of the SSD drives is noticeable from the start as it halves a computer's start-up time, says Schaeffer. 

But the question remains whether the additional speed is worth the extra cost. Apart from that, customers should consider the SSDs reduced storage capacity. Dell Notebooks using SSD have an upper limit of 64 GB, a limit common to other brands. However, Samsung has promised to release a 256 GB capacity version this year. 

There's no reason for SSDs not to have more capacity, says Schaeffer. However, sufficient demand would bring the price down to an affordable level for consumers, he added. Yet, the price of an ordinary drive is also falling, making their cost per gigabyte more attractive. That means SSDs will likely be limited to ultramobile machines for the time being. 

Schaeffer also says the SSD's speed at retrieving data comes with a downside. An SSD's controller ensures that data is spread evenly over the drive. Thus, if a user saves changes to a program, the old version will not be physically overwritten and will remain on the drive. That makes it harder to delete data by overwriting. So security would be worth considering when disposing of an old drive. (dpa)