The Solid State Drive (SSD). For the future or the present?
You may have heard of this interesting piece of computer hardware. Many places claim it is far faster than the conventional hard drive that has mechanical movement and wear. The SSD utilizes the wonderful advantages of flash memory. In turn, bringing about a new excitement about future hard drives.
An SSD or Solid State Drive is a flash drive with a high capacity of memory storage. It is said that within five years we will see these drives replacing many of today's Hard Drives. Many places claim that SSD drives operate much faster than a conventional Hard Drive. Up to four times faster!
If you are among the rough and rugged people who travel a lot this would be a great buy. Largely because it sustains more shock than a mechanical Hard Drive. This is due to the fact that SSDs use flash memory. Which means there is no moving parts. Thus, when you move your laptop with a sudden jerk or drop it there will be very little if no damage to the data on it. Also if you feel uncomfortable having a hot laptop on your lap consider checking out the SSD. It puts out very little heat.
What does this mean for you? Faster startup times of Windows XP, Vista, Ubuntu, Linux etc. Ever get tired of that great game taking minutes to load? The SSD will load it up in a jiffy. Yes, there are other factors that determine load time such as RAM and CPU. But many people claim the Hard Drive is a bottle neck in computers. That may be true, but data is stored in a hard drive. This means that your first load of a program is the slowness you may experience. Considering you have a gigabyte or more RAM. Your applications should load instantly when reloading something.
After hearing all the great stuff about it I think its time to cover the downsides. The most obvious downside to this amazing hardware component is its price. The prices range from about $500 to $10,000 depending on the capacity. But many videos are available on www.youtube.com that contain reviews and benchmarks; check them out to see the real deal.
I had emailed Micrsoft to see their view on the SSD:
SSDs will overtake hard drives in capacity sometime in the next 5 years, and as semiconductor devices are on a steeper declining cost curve than magnetic storage, once they get close - the market - at the high performance end will switch fast. This competitive situation is made more difficult for hard disk OEMs because the main way they can reduce access time and increase IOPs is by making their disks smaller. But that also reduces the total amount of storage. Whether SSDs win at the 2.5" level or 1" level is hard to say. However hard disk makers won't suddenly go out of business, because in the same time frame that they get designed out of high end servers, the consumer market (which doesn't need the same level of performance) will already have replaced the IT market as the biggest home for disk drives.
