Solid State Drive: Replacing the Hard Drive?

A new technology for computer drives, the Solid State Drive (SSD), may be replacing the Hard Drive in a computer near you. According to a fascinating article in SMART COMPUTING MAGAZINE, A Solid Future: SSDs Are Making Life Hard For Hard Drives, by Marty Sems, this new technology has significant benefits over the conventional Hard Drive, and is already available in some laptops. Some of its advantages include no moving parts, faster read capabilities and lower power usage. Drawbacks include higher cost and slower write speed. Below, Mr. Sems enumerates the SSD's advantages:

Because SSDs don’t have any moving parts, they’re silent, and they can survive more abuse than a hard drive without losing data or failing outright. Hard drives are especially vulnerable when they’re operating because their read/write heads are floating just a tiny fraction of an inch above their spinning disks. A good knock while a hard drive is running can cause the heads to slap the disks, scraping off parts of the magnetic data recording layers and destroying the data stored there. In comparison, SSDs are just as resistant to physical shocks when they’re turned on as when they’re powered down. That makes solid-state drives very attractive to notebook users, not to mention military and industrial users.

A side effect of an SSD’s solid-state nature is the fact that it takes less power to run one than it does to turn a hard drive’s motor and wave its read/write heads to and fro. This potentially translates into longer battery life for laptops, as well as markedly lower electricity bills for data centers and server farms. SSDs also emit less heat than most hard drives, saving laptops even more power on fan usage and data centers big bucks on air conditioning.

Another boon of the SSD boom is performance, at least in certain cases. You won’t notice a solid-state drive’s incredible random-access speed when you’re using an SSD-based laptop or desktop, although it can make things much faster for a large group of users all accessing a database or Web server at the same time. Still, a select few SSDs have read speeds twice as fast as the best hard drives. Flash’s weakness is its relatively slow write speeds, but even these can be competitive with laptop and sometimes desktop hard drives.

Hard drives have a limited range of temperatures in which they’re designed to work; this is another liability of their moving parts. What’s more, you’re not supposed to use a hard drive for an hour or more after bringing it into a warm room from the cold outdoors. The trouble is that the water vapor in the warm room’s air might condense on the frigid disks inside the drive. If the drive hasn’t dried out before it’s turned on, the droplets of water could spell disaster for the read/write heads. SSDs not only have a broader range of operating temperatures, but they also don’t care about sudden environmental changes, either.

There’s one more benefit to SSDs that might interest you: You don’t need to defragment them. A hard drive stores files in contiguous chunks when it can, but scatters pieces of files here and there when there isn’t a big stretch of free space to be found. This fragmentation slows down data throughput, as the drive must move its heads to locate every bit of a file while its disks spin around and around. In an SSD’s case, the drive reads scattered file fragments from unmoving memory chips at the same speed as it reads contiguously stored data.

According to Mr. Sems, the Hard Drive is not going away just yet. But we will, likely, be seeing more of the SSD as time goes on.

Check out the full article by clicking the link, below:

A Solid Future: SSDs Are Making Life Hard For Hard Drives