Solid State Drives
What are solid state drives?
The magnetic storage technology present in current external hard drives has been developed almost to its physical limits but don’t worry, a new solution has appeared on the horizon. It’s likely that over time magnetic disk storage will be replaced by electric storage, more specifically, Flash technology that you can find in almost all portable memories such as those used by digital cameras or USB sticks. The breakthrough technology is better known as Solid State Drive, or short, SSD. Inside, magnetic disks have been replaced by Flash memory chips, but PC connectivity interfaces have remained the same, generally either SATA or PATA. Hard disks store information on small segments of discs which can spin at up to 15,000 revolutions per minute, creating a significant problem with overheating and expansion. Through expansion, the information may be lost if it is kept on very small surface segments. As a result, increasing disk capacity is almost impossible beyond a certain limit. And as the most available and sufficiently developed alternative, Flash technology has been chosen as the heir apparent to magnetic storage.
SSD technology brings improvements to long-term storage, but also has drawbacks. The most disputed issue is speed. A normal hard drive, of 7200 rpm, provides a practical speed reading of even 70 MBs. SSD manufacturers boast that they have reached these speeds, but have only proven speeds up to 50 MBs. There are also limitations in capacity of current models, in that the best SSDs on the market today can only provide say 250 GB storage capacity compared to standard hard drive capacity of upto 1TB and beyond. SSD capacity can be developed beyond this, but would cost a small fortune for a 1TB drive.
No one can tell whether SSDs will become the future of external hard drive technology, and a lot will depend on whether manufacturers decide its in their best interest to use SSD as standard. Truth be told, the small size and lower power demands of SSD drives will probably prove an undeniable advantage as the technology becomes more prevalent.
HDD vs SSD
HDDs are electro-mechanical devices that store data or the non-volatile storage of digital data on magnetic disks (platters) which rotate at high speed (rpm 5.400/7.500/ 10.000/15.000). SSDs are persistent data storage devices of informatics data with the help of “solid state” memories. The “solid state” memory means those types of circuits built entirely of solid materials in which electrons are held entirely in solid material (as opposed to previous technologies that rely on vacuum tubes and gas discharge). “Solid state” memories are usually built from crystalline semiconductors and include transistors, microprocessor and DRAMs.
HDDs (Hard Disk Drive) were, until some years ago, the only component responsible for storing information in our computers long term, even when they were stopped (except for diskettes or CD / DVD). With the arrival of SSDs (Solid State Disk), this status has changed, many people hope that in the not too distant future they will completely replace the old HDDs (from a conceptual point of view).
Advantages of HDDs: relatively large storage capacity; low purchase price, excellent ratio GB / dollar and the durability of stored information in time (in decent storage conditions).
The advantages of SSDs: read / write performance superior to the fastest HDDs; no mechanical moving parts resulting in a low power consumption, do not emit heat, making them ideal for mobile devices – mp3 players, smartphones, netbooks, laptops; are silent when operating, they virtually make no noise; excellent resistance to mechanical shock (about 1500 G before submitting operational errors); wide range of operating in extreme conditions of temperature and humidity; occupies less space than the HDD with a similar capacity.
There are also disadvantages. For example HDD’s moving mechanical parts that increase the probability of failure occurrences; also high consumption of electricity and the fact that they produce heat; and last but not least poor resistance to small mechanical shocks (about 350-400 G in operating mode and 800-900 G in rest mode).
The only two disadvantages of SSDs are: yet there have a relatively small capacity (up to 256 GB) and the purchase price, which is a bit expensive.
