Solid-State Drives the Hard Drive Replacement of the Future

Solid state drives, known as SSDs are amazingly fast, and silent. In fact they are good in so many ways that it is inconceivable that one day they will not eventually replace hard drives in everyone's computer.

At present there is only one thing which is preventing their widespread use, and that is the price, which is still too high for most people.

However, an SSD revolution is coming, and just about all the hard drive manufacturers are producing their own models.

For conventional hard drives there are limitations on improving their performance. They have still been improving, but not as rapidly as the other components in the average PC. That is because a real technical limit is being reached in how fast metal disks can be spun and read from, and still operate reliably for many years, in all temperatures and after being mishandled, dropped and bashed.

To read and write your data on one of several reading and writing heads in the hard drive, the heads must be able to very rapidly move (seek) a pre-selected position over the spinning disk, and hover over the surface for a split second while the information moves past the head, for the head to read it.

The technology that moves the head so accurately is amazing, but not only that, the heads have been getting smaller and seek times have been getting faster. In addition the rotational speed of the disk (or platter) has been increased numerous times over many years, so that now spinning a metal disk cannot be speeded up much further.

Size of storage/amount of data which a hard disk can hold has also increased massively. However, in this respect as well the developers have now reached a point where it is getting harder to squeeze more data onto the disks.

The hard disk has been around for a long while, and now the dominance of this technology is being challenged by the SSD.

As its name suggests, the technology used in an SSD is, entirely solid and without any moving parts. In fact, it is very much like the much smaller storage capacity USB flash or "pen" sticks which have been around for some years now. However, SSDs are much bigger in storage capacity, and faster.

Also, SSDs have the ability to transfer data much more quickly than hard drives, and they start up quicker too. They don't need to spin up in the way a hard drive must, before it can respond to queries for information.

A hard drive head has to move from one position to another to read a large file, as only a small amount of data can be read from any one platter position. It is this that normally slows down sustained large file transfers, and over time this gets worse as things get fragmented. Fragmentation means that the file storage areas on the hard drive become increasingly smaller as files are written and re-written to the hard drive.

By contrast, and due to the solid-state nature of SSDs, the sustained data transfer rate does not slow down after the first burst, so the impression, and reality, is one of lightning fast drive performance.

Other improvements which can be found in SSDs lie with the reduced energy consumption of an SSD when compared with a similar sized hard drive. They also have a longer long life in use, and run cooler. The manufacturers of SSDs are, in fact, so confident in the durability of their products that they are offering them with a longer guarantee than they would normally give for a hard drive.

Gradually reducing discount prices mean that before long SSDs will replace existing aging hard drive technology. In fact many enthusiasts have already started using the smaller SSD versions to speed up their PC's performance. They have not been slow to notice that it is only necessary to move the PC's operating system to an SSD, leaving all the rest of a computer's files on the old hard drive, to see a big improvement.