Solid State Drives:
Are They In The Future Of Your Laptop or Tower?

For years, computer users have used mechanical hard drives. They have limited the data storage capabilities of personal computers, created heat and used lots of power. Ultimately, they fail. Along with the fans in a computer, they are one of the mechanical pieces that fall victim to wear and tear. When they fail though, you have the potential of losing valuable data. So, in this day and age there is a solution, right? There sure is!

Solid State Drives
Now you can replace that hard drive with an SSD, or solid-state drive. SSDs are data storage devices that use solid-state memory to store data in a persistent state. Those of you who are over fifty will remember that the original use of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics) refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than vacuum tubes. Note the wall of vacuum tube memory pictured at right. The power consumption, heat and reliability (or lack thereof) of this memory filled the floors of buildings so that the early computers could have almost as much storage as your current cell phone! With no moving parts, solid-state drives are inherently less fragile than hard disks and therefore also silent (unless a cooling fan is used); as there are no mechanical delays, they usually enjoy low access time and latency. SSD devices emulate conventional hard disk drive interfaces, thereby allowing them to easily replace the older mechanical drives in most applications.

New Technology?
Surprisingly, no, SSD is not necessarily new technology. It has its roots in the beginning of the computer age. Just as cell phone technology was developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, SSD has been around for a while, but the climate was not “right” for it until now. First, a bit of history about the predecessors of this “latest” technology. The first ferrite memory SSD devices, or auxiliary memory units as they were called at the time, emerged during the era of vacuum tube computers. Often referred to as core memory (pictured at right), it was still used for computer memory cards until the 1970s when integrated circuit based RAM (Random Access Memory) became available. For persistent data storage, the introduction of cheaper drum storage units, signaled the early end of auxiliary memory units. . They made a return in the late 1970s and 1980s when SSD devices were implemented in semiconductor memory for early supercomputers of IBM, Amdahl and Cray, but the prohibitively high price of the built-to-order SSDs made them a quite seldom used product. The first modern solid-state drive was developed in 1978 by StorageTek and ultimately gave way to Santa Clara Systems BatRam custom controller cards in the mid 1980s followed by Sharp’s Bubble Memory. RAMDisks were then used in the 1980s to solve the problem of faster access for slow or expensive hard drives. M-System introduced flash-based solid-state drives in 1995 and was acquired by SanDisk. So the technology is not new, but the capacity has grown by leaps and bounds.

Why SSD ‘Hard’ Drives?
SSDs have been used successfully as hard disk drive replacements by the military and aerospace industries, as well as other mission-critical applications and have given rise to improvements and lowered costs. Their ability to withstand extreme shock, vibration and temperature ranges and exceptional MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) rates make these devices well suited for computers, particularly laptops and notebooks. While they are still, at present, substantially more expensive per megabyte that the mechanical disks they replace, SSDs have begun to appear in laptops. There is still a long way for their price to make them truly competitive. A laptop 64 GB SSD can range in the $1000 to $1600 range while 128GB versions are $2500 and up. As with any developing technology, the only way prices will drop is for the units to be adopted by the public at large. Remember how expensive LCD and Plasma HDTV was only a few years ago? Remember too that SSD is more than just Flash RAM chips, it also includes an ATA interface so the memory chips appear to the computer just like a hard drive. SSD Devices are designed as a package to be functionally identical to a standard hard drive and act as a drop-in replacement. Pricing today limits the use of these devices to highly specialized applications and those intrepid early adopters who must be on the bleeding edge and have the latest, greatest technology. Still, with the advantages in speed, power savings and reliability even some mainstream uses can offset its current price and capacity limitations.

How can I get more information on this subject?
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