What is a Solid State Drive (SSD)?


Solid State Drives are the newest kind of mass storage device for both desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks. Solid State Drives also known as SSD are made of memory chips. These are not RAM memory chips where they can not retain its memory without power, instead SSD uses non-volatile memory which can retain its state/memory without power. These type of memory are called flash memory known to be widely used in USB key drives. Despite the common misconception that flash memory is slow, SSDs are actually quite fast because they are a slightly different kind of memory and they utilize new read / write algorithm to locate, read and write data faster. Currently most SSD are capable of reading up to 150MB/second and write up to 80MB/second. SSD also has two significant advantages over conventional hard drives, SSD are very low power, SSD almost have no heat dissipation, zero noise, 100 times more shock tolerant, last longer and best of all the seek time is only 0.3ms.


Typical Solid State Drive features


Most Netbooks have the following standard features:

  1. Seek time of 0.3ms
  2. Noiseless
  3. Almost no heat
  4. Very shock tolerant
  5. Last much longer than hard drives
  6. Faster read and write speed.


What can you do with a Solid State Drive (SSD)?


Anything you can do with a convential hard drive you can do the same with Solid State Drives. SSD are designed to be the replacement for hard drives.



What you should not do with a Solid State Drive (SSD)


Because Solid State Drives are still very expensive, it is probably unwise to use SSD for mass storage solution. For example, SSD are not good to make a large file server.


We believe SSD will replace the conventional platter hard drive we all use today. It is just a matter of time when the mass production manufacturing process for Solid State Drives (SSD) volume will be high enough to bring the price of SSD comparable to conventional hard drive or even cheaper. When SSD become cheaper than hard drives obviously conventional platter based hard drive will be obsolete. Knowing this, it is strange to see the conventional hard drive manufacturers such as Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital are not moving to SSD. Instead we believe they are almost trying to go against the technology.