What Is a Solid-State Hard Drive?
Solid-state hard drives are drives that have no moving parts but rather use flash memory to store information. These drives aim to provide increased speed and stability, but they are currently expensive and limited in capacity.
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Features
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A solid-state hard drive (SSD) is a drive that has no moving parts and is therefore virtually silent in operation. SSDs can achieve this by using semiconductors to store memory instead of a magnetic surface like traditional hard drives. Although commonly recognizable as thumb drives or travel drives, there are also larger-capacity SSDs that can be used as main boot drives. Solid-state drives also allow for accelerated access to files and applications, allowing for increased overall performance for a computer.
Comparison to Hard Disk Drives
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Hard disk drives (HDD) are bulkier and slower than SSDs. This is because the HDDs have moving parts that need to start spinning to access information. Although the time it takes for access may not be long at all, a SSD provides nearly instant data access. The time difference can be especially notable during startup.
Hard disk drives are more prone to failure than SSDs. Dust can get into the drive, or the spinning part can become faulty. Because SSDs can be designed to be airtight and because there are no moving parts, SSDs are not prone to these problems.
As of 2009, the cost of solid-state drives was high. HDDs with 10 times the capacity of solid-state drives could be purchased for a fraction of the cost. -
Benefits to Laptops
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One of the main benefits for SSDs is its application in laptops. The physical size of SSDs is smaller than HDDs. Also, the SSD's faster memory access means faster overall performance. The result is a more portable, compact laptop that does not necessarily sacrifice performance.
Misconceptions
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Because of the SSD's nearly instant data access, there is a conception that the drive would cause the computer to be more efficient not only in terms of data access, but also in terms of energy consumption. Although the drive itself may be more efficient than a hard disk drive, the bottleneck that a computer experiences when pulling or writing to a HDD is removed with a SSD. The result is that the computer is able to process information quicker, causing other components such as the processor to be more active. Thus, although drive efficiency may improve in the future, in 2009, there is not a clear result as to whether the drives produce energy savings.
Speculation
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Although in 2009 solid-state drives are expensive and limited by capacity, as with other drives, that will change. Hard disk drives used to be about $1 for every gigabyte of capacity. Currently, there are some 1 terabyte drives for less than $100. In the same way, as production costs drop and sales rise, the cost of a SSD will start to fall. Likewise, as manufacturers make better drives, capacity will increase. In the future, most computers may be using SSDs.
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