If you keep up with bleeding edge PC technology you may have heard a bit about Solid State Drives (SSD) which are now appearing more and more in the marketplace.

While the technology isn’t really that new, it’s only now that SSD drives are reaching a point where they are spacious enough, affordable and high enough performance.

Unlike traditional hard drives, SSD drives have no moving parts, but consist entirely of flash memory chips. You could think of them as somewhat like typical RAM, except when you power down your PC, the data remains intact.
SSD drives have numerous benefits over their mechanical counterparts.

Some of these benefits are:

No moving parts, no clunky mechanisms. SSD drives are a lot tougher and harder to break. Platter based hard drive technology has always had a reuptation as being one of - if not the - weakest links in PC technology from a reliability standpoint. Not so with SSD technology.

Lower power consumption: this one’s really only important for laptops or notebooks, and the reduced power consumption isn’t really enough to justify their price (yet). Still, it is the future of things to come. No moving parts means less electricity is required to operate the SSD.

Speed. Writing and reading from SSD is a lot faster. And I mean a lot faster. Initially SSD drives had a whole raft of speed issues, but the technology has improved a lot and now they are the undisputed speed kings. With no moving parts, SSD drives are able to access data almost instantly, and both read and write times are significantly faster than a traditional 7200 RPM hard drive, or even enterprise class 10 or 15k hard drives.

So there are some of the benefits… so what’s the downside? Well, solid state drives are still very expensive. At the time of writing you could pick up a few terabyte hard drives for the cost of one 128gb SSD. SSSD is going to stay a lot more expensive per gigabyte than normal hard drives in the foreseeable future.

SSD drives are also small. So if you’re a massive movie or music hoarder, they’re simply not a practical storage medium as yet.

Technology continues to march on, however, so as SSD drives drop in price and increase in storage space, you’ll start to see them in more and more mainstream laptops and desktops. SSD may be the tech for enthusiasts now, but there are much bigger markets instore for it… and fast!

Tags: drives, GB, hardware, PC, solid, SSD, state, storage