What's a SSD?

Hard Drive Reign

The hard drive has been around for many years. But in the early '80s, the only way you could run a program in your computer was to load it from a floppy diskette (or from a stack of them) because hard drives didn't exist in personal computers. When they finally arrived from the business world they enabled one to store and run many programs in a PC.

Over the years hard drives got bigger, faster and cheaper. The first HD for a PC was made by Seagate that held 5 megabytes and cost around $1000. Today a typical desktop HD might store up to 500 Gigabytes for $50-$75. Compare that to the first GB-capacity HD made by IBM in 1980 that was the size of a refrigerator and cost $40,000.

Hard Drive Morbidity

The problem with present hard drives is they have moving parts and moving parts fail. Hard disk failure is a common occurrence in desktops and notebooks. A lot of horror stories have been told, passed around and published about how valuable data was lost and the agony of trying to retrieve at least a portion of the crashed hard drive.

The reason is simple - wear and tear. Just like any good old machine with mechanical components, HDs tend to deteriorate over time. HDs consist of rotating, magnetically coated disks, known as platters, that are used to store data. This rotating motion of the mechanical arms results in much wear and tear after long periods of use. The operational lifespan of a computer HD is debatable, but since many come with a 5-year warranty, you can probably count on 5 years.

Enter the SSD

A solid state disk (SSD) is electrically, mechanically and software compatible with a conventional hard disk. The difference is that the storage medium is not magnetic (like a hard disk) or optical (like a CD) but solid state semiconductor. They look like and are made to replace hard drives using the same connectors. Like hard drives, data is non-volatile, which means that data is retained when power is turned off, unlike RAM memory data that is volatile.

Advantages/Disadvantages of SSD

In terms of reliability, conventional HDs pale when compared to SSDs because of the absence of mechanical arms and spinning platters. Unlike a HD, a SSD can withstand shock and vibration making them especially good for mobile PCs. Another great advantage is speed. A flash-based SSD's access time is approximately 100 times faster than a HD. Since it's always been the HD that slowed down overall PC performance, the SSD will change that and we'll all have super fast PCs. See a video comparing boot-up time of a laptop with an SSD vs. a HD at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt6VbOY3xE0

But we're not quite there yet. Cost is the main factor holding back SSDs. A price war appears to be in the making and some laptops have appeared with SSDs replacing the hard drives but they're pricey. I think the handwriting is on the wall. Mechanical hard drives have got to go.