What Are The Benefits of a Solid State Drive (SSD)?

Contributed by: Denver Computer Services

Among the big items within the world of computers from the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas was the SSD or Solid State Drive. This technology has actually been around for many years, but only now is it actually set to become something that the consumer may really get to use inside the next year. This article takes a take a look at exactly what is a solid state drive and how it may benefit computer users, particularly with their portable computing.

What's a Solid State Drive?

Solid state is an electrical term that refers to electronic circuitry that is built entirely out of semiconductors. The term was originally utilized to define those electronics like a transistor radio that used semiconductors rather than vacuum tubes in its construction. Most all electronics that we have these days are built around semiconductors and chips. In terms of a SSD, it refers to the fact that the main storage medium is through semiconductors instead of a magnetic media like a hard drive.



Now, you might say that this type of storage already exists within the form of flash memory drives that plug into the USB port. This is partially true as solid state drives and USB flash drives both use the same kind of non-volatile memory chips that retain their information even when they've no power. The difference is within the form factor and capacity of the drives. While a flash drive is designed to be external to the pc system, an SSD is created to reside inside the pc in location of a much more conventional tough drive.

So how precisely do they do this? Well, an SSD on the outside looks almost no various than a conventional tough drive. This design is to allow the SSD drive to put in a notebook or desktop computer in place of a tough drive. To do this, it requirements to have the regular dimension as a 1.8, 2.5 or 3.5-inch hard drive. It also will use either the ATA or SATA drive interfaces to ensure that there is a compatible interface.

Why Use a Solid State Drive?

Solid state drives have several advantages over the magnetic hard drives. The majority of this comes from the fact that the drive does not have any moving parts. While a traditional drive has drive motors to spin up the magnetic platters and also the drive heads, all the storage on a solid state drive is handled by flash memory chips. This offers three distinct advantages:

• Much less Power Usage
• Quicker Data Access
• Higher Reliability

The power usage is really a key role for the use of solid state drives in portable computers. Simply because there's no power draw for the motors, the drive uses far much less energy than the regular hard drive. Now, the industry has taken steps to address this with drive spin downs and the development of hybrid hard drives, but both of these still use much more power. The solid state drive will consistently draw much less power then the traditional and hybrid hard drive.

Quicker information access will make numerous individuals pleased. Since the drive doesn't need to spin up the drive platter or move drive heads, the information can be read from the drive near instantly. In a recent demo of two similar equipped notebook computers, Fujitsu was able to demonstrate a roughly 20% speed improve within the booting of Windows XP on a SSD over a regular hard drive.

Reliability is also a key factor for portable drives. Hard drive platters are very fragile and sensitive supplies. Even small jarring movements from an impact can trigger the drive to be completely unreadable. Since the SSD stores all its data in memory chips, you will find fewer moving parts to be damaged in any sort of impact.

Why Aren't SSDs Used For All PCs?

As with most computer technologies, the main limiting factor of using the solid state drives in notebook and desktop computers is cost. These drives have really been available for some time now, but the price of the drives is roughly the exact same as the entire notebook they could be installed into. This is gradually changing as the number of businesses producing the drives and also the capacity for producing the flash memory chips grows. Drives announced at the 2007 CES had been priced at less than half of the drives of the exact same capacity from the previous year.

The other issue affecting the adoption of the solid state drives is capacity. Current hard drive technology can allow for over 200GB of data in a small 2.5-inch notebook tough drive. Most SSD drives announced at the 2007 CES show are of the 64GB capacity. This indicates that not only are the drives a lot more costly than a traditional hard drive, they only hold a fraction of the data.

All of this is set to alter soon although. Several companies that specialize in flash memory have announced upcoming products that look to push the capacities of the solid state drives to be closer to that of a regular hard drive but at even lower costs than the present SSDs. This may have a huge impact for notebook data storage.

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