The Cloud: SSD's Perfect Match

In terms of capacity alone, today's solid-state drives can't compete with their hard disk drive counterparts. But now that some schools have moved applications and storage to the cloud, the limitation is no longer a deal-breaker.

Dan Froelich, an instructor and technology fellow of the North Carolina Teacher Academy in Research Triangle Park, chose SSD-based netbooks for a “train-the-trainer” classroom assessment program. All 150 netbooks feature an 8-gigabyte internal SSD and a 16GB SD card.

“The assessment program is Internet-based, so a 250GB hard disk drive was unnecessary,” Froelich explains. “We have a single application and require all storage and other supplementary resources to be centralized in the cloud.”

What he did need, however, was a device that wouldn't need a lot of repairs. With no moving parts, he says the SSD netbooks fit the bill.