Solid State Drives

Data Storage is a very crucial function for PCs and Laptops. The standard or conventional desktops and laptops managed data storage with the Hard Disk Drive or HDD. With the read/write head float on thin film of air on the rigid platters that are mounted on a motorized spindle, standard hard disk drives gathered popularity and over a period of time became smaller in size and more and more complex in functions.

Even today HDDs form an integral part of the computer systems, with their dependability and portability enhanced by the arrival of portable HDDS or Extended Memory, as they are called sometimes. The storage capacity of the HDDs has progressed from MBs and GBs into Terabytes. But the quest for more efficient and stable devices went on and on. The result is the arrival of the SSD or Solid State Drive.

A solid-state drive (SSD) is an alternate Storage Device that uses solid state memory instead of the persistent datastore with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. While HDDs are electromechanical devices, SSDs are employing microchips which retain data. Compared to electromechanical HDDs, SSDs are typically less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, have lower access time and latency but are at this point of time, expensive.

SSDs generally use NAND-based flash memory which retains memory even without power. SSDs using volatile RAM also exist for faster access. The hybrid drive combines the features of an HDD and an SSD in one unit, containing a large HDD, with a smaller SSD cache to improve performance of frequently accessed files.

Solid state drives have several advantages over the magnetic hard drives. The majority of this comes from the fact that the drive 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 like, Less Power Usage, Faster Data Access and Higher Reliability.

The power usage is a key role for the use of solid state drives in portable computers. The solid state drive will consistently draw less power than the traditional and hybrid hard drive.

Solid State Drives are here to stay and with the arrival of power-hungry, resource-hungry machines, the need for less power-consuming yet more efficient devices are much in demand.