Within the next 5 years we will see the sun set on hard drive technology in digital bus video systems, and a new dawn of 100% Solid State Drive (SSD) will provide the school bus video market the extreme durability and uncompromising data integrity those districts deserve for their tax dollars. When that sun sets on hard drives and the dawns on the Solid State Drives will your district be "in the dark" or "enjoying the sunrise" of true data integrity and reliability?


100% Solid State Drive Memory (SSD)
Hard drive disk failure is a common occurrence in this age of desktop computers but when you move the same technology to a mobile application the incidence of failure and damage to the fragile drive mechanism of a conventional hard drive can increase exponentially.
The frequency of drive failure, crashed drives and lost data are well known in the PC markets. Entire industries and sub markets have arisen to help safeguard business entities from the all too common problems with hard drives offering back up, archival, off site storage and data recovery services.
Risking your districts bus video liability protection to a fragile recording mechanism that could fail when you need it most, does not make sense when the most dependable, 100% Solid State Drive (SSD) is now available.

Once the decision is made to move forward to limit risk and enhance child safety on the bus by investing in a digital bus video system, accept nothing less than a 100% Solid State Drive (SSD)


Hard Drive Problems & Life Span
The main problem with hard drives is they are fragile mechanical mechanism with moving parts susceptible to wear and tear. Even under the best of circumstances within an ideal operation environment of an air conditioned office, they are wearing themselves out over time simply from normal wear and tear on the moving recording mechanism each time it is turned on, and required to read from the disk or write to the disk.

HDDs mechanism will deteriorate over time. HDDs consist of rotating, magnetically coated disks, known as platters, which are used to store data. This rotating motion of the mechanical arms results in considerable wear and tear after long periods of use. The operational life span of a computer HDD is typically over three years under controlled conditions, but your bus lifespan can be up to 20 years and it does not spend that time sitting still in an air conditioned office.
No matter how much cushioning a manufacturer provides the conventional hard drive, no matter how buffered the case is from shock and vibration, none of that addresses the primary flaw in the design of the system; that the unit begins wearing out the day it is first turned on and with each hour of video it records it gets that much closer to failure due to natural wear and tear.


100% Solid State Drive (SSD) Life Span
“CF” Compact Flash-based SSD are uniquely suited for mobile applications like school buses. They have no moving parts to wear out, no fragile mechanism to be damaged by pot holes, hitting curbs, impacting other vehicles plus their temperature operating range far exceeds what conventional PC hard drives.

“CF” Compact Flash cards are rated at around 300,000 write cycles, the best Flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block. This is the only rating I can find to determine the expected life of the CF card.
As the only measure I can find for expected life of a SSD is “Write Cycles”, if you multiple the number of days a year most buses operate (180) by the number of trips per day (2) you will get an average trips per year of 360, then double that for good measure and you have 720 trips per year per bus on average. Divide the expected life (write cycles) 300,000 by the number of trips expected each year and you get about 4,166 years worth of write cycles. This is not meant to imply they will work that long, but it does seem to indicate the are capable of lasting the life of the bus or longer. This 100% Solid State Disk (SDD) is the only memory device I am aware of that seems capable of lasting the life of the digital bus in a bus video application.


Hidden Costs Of Hard Drives
The trade off of massive storage capacity in a hard drive, is a poor substitute for dependable data integrity when everything that can go wrong in the mobile video environment is calculated into the equation.
Assuming your bus lasts 20 years, it could require up to 6 hard drive replacements over the life of the bus costing your district to bleed budget funds far into the future. This 3 year life expectancy of the hard drives is based on the longest warranty coverage of a hard drive by the manufacturer of a bus video system I am aware of, currently at 3 years. The fact they will warranty its function for 3 years leads one to believe it will last 3 years.
Given this same deductive reasoning of the expected life of the drive, many CF Flash cards manufacturers (CF Flash cards are 100% Solid State Drives SDD) offer Limited lifetime warranties based on their belief that with no moving parts and extreme durability the CF flash cards (SSD) will outlast their user. For the first time in school bus video, the system memory storage is capable of outlasting the bus life of 20 years of daily use.


Reliability
In terms of reliability, the conventional HDDs pale when compared to SSDs. The absence of mechanical arms and spinning platters to wear out or crash is the reason behind its reliability. In demanding environments, SSDs provide the type of ruggedness required for mobile applications. Unlike the HDD, SSD's can withstand extreme shock and vibration with data integrity and without any danger of data loss.
This feature is very important in school bus applications as there may come a time when the district is facing a $40,000,000.00 liability lawsuit resulting from a school bus related incident and the only thing standing between your district and a damaging court ruling or costly damages settlement may be the bus video system you invested in to protect yourself from this very situation.
That is not the time to remember reading about the extreme durability and dependability of a SSD based system while you try to explain why you chose the fragile hard drive based system that failed, because it offered more storage capacity or saved a few bucks.
The US Armed Forces are the best equipped fighting force in history. They demand the highest quality standards from their equipment and set extreme specifications that can survive the most abuse, in every extreme environment and situation they can anticipate.
The SSDs ability to deliver unnerving performance in extreme conditions also makes SSD play a vital role in military operations, be it in defense, aerospace or aviation applications. Military applications require, in most cases, an operating temperature range of -60°C to +95°C (Fahrenheit -76 to +194).


Heat Dissipation
Along with the lower power consumption, there is also much lesser heat dissipation for systems using Flash-based SSDs as their data storage solution. This is due to the absence of heat generated from the rotating/disk and mechanism. This proves to be the one of the main advantages of Flash-based SSDs relative to that of a traditional HDD. With less heat dissipation, it serves as the ideal data storage solution for mobile bus video systems along with PDAs, notebooks, etc. Users can do away with large cooling fans, internal power supply and batteries for large storage arrays in storage area networks.

Bus video systems with SSD memory do not need cooling fans or heaters