Solid-State-Drive
Why Use a Solid-State-Drive(SSD)?
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Solid State -Notebook |
Solid State-Desktop |
Solid State-External |
A Solid-State-Drive has several advantages over the magnetic hard drive. The majority of this comes from the fact that the SSD does not have any moving parts. While a traditional drive has drive motors to spin up the magnetic platters and the drive heads, all the storage on a solid state drive is handled by flash memory chips. This provides three distinct advantages:
- Less Power Usage
- Faster Data Access
- Higher Reliability
Power usage is a key role for the use of solid state drives in portable computers.These are commonly found in tablets, such as the iPad. Because there is no power draw for the motors, the drive uses far less energy than the regular hard drive. Now, the industry has taken steps to address this with drive spin downs and the development of hybrid hard drives, but both of these still use more power. The solid state drive will consistently draw less power then the traditional and hybrid hard drive.
Faster data access will make a number of people happy. Since the drive doesn't have to spin up the drive platter or move drive heads, the data can be read from the drive near instantly. In a recent demo of two similar equipped notebook computers, Fujitsu was able to demonstrate a roughly 20% speed increase in the booting of Windows XP on a SSD over a standard hard drive. Windows 7 does even better.
Reliability is also a key factor for portable drives. Hard drive platters are very fragile and sensitive materials. Even small jarring movements from an impact can cause the drive to be completely unreadable. Since the SSD stores all its data in memory chips, there are fewer moving parts to be damaged in any sort of impact.
Reports of SSD failures have caused some people to hesitate making the change, but that can be dealt with, by good data backup, and good research into reliability.
Why Aren't SSDs Used For All PCs?
As with most computer technologies, the primary limiting factor of using the solid state drives in notebook and desktop computers is cost. These drives have been available for awhile now, but the cost of the drives is roughly the same as the entire notebook they could be installed into. This is gradually changing as the number of companies producing the drives and the capacity for producing the flash memory chips grows.
The other problem affecting the adoption of the solid state drives is capacity. Current hard drive technology can allow for over 200GB of data in a small 2.5-inch notebook hard drive. SSD drives are typically 64GB-128GB capacity. This means that not only are the drives much more expensive than a traditional hard drive, they only hold a fraction of the data.
This is changing now! Several companies that specialize in flash memory have announced upcoming products that look to push the capacities of the solid state drives to be closer to that of a normal hard drive but at even lower prices than the current SSDs. This will have a huge impact for notebook data storage.
Video on replacing Laptop Hard Drive with SSD
Solid State Drives from Amazon
Checking the prices here, I see they have come down, to almost reasonable.
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