Solid state drive or SSD-what it is?

Well Solid State is the way to go for several reasons. First and formost is speed of access over the convenional hard drive which relies on moving parts. Second is the breakdown factor if you drop a computer with a solid state drive there is less chance of a hard drive failing over a mechanical hard drive. Right now the only problem with a solid state Hard Drive is the cost.

it is quite a load of information that i got over here about the SSD. i knew that they are better as they were very fast and also the data transfer rates were higher. but they are costlier than the conventional mechanical drives. but until now the smaller capacity ones are available .... may be the larger capacity ones will catch up soon.

hello parthajena, Solid state is an electrical term that refers to electronic circuitry that is built entirely out of semiconductors. The term was originally used to define those electronics such as a transistor radio that used semiconductors rather than vacuum tubes in its construction. Most all electronics that we have today are built around semiconductors and chips. In terms of a SSD, it refers to the fact that the primary storage medium is through semiconductors rather than a magnetic media such as a hard drive. Now, you might say that this type of storage already exists in the form of flash memory drives that plug into the USB port. This is partially true as solid state drives and USB flash drives both use the same type of non-volatile memory chips that retain their information even when they have no power. The difference is in the form factor and capacity of the drives. While a flash drive is designed to be external to the computer system, an SSD is designed to reside inside the computer in place of a more traditional hard drive. So how exactly do they do this? Well, an SSD on the outside looks almost no different than a traditional hard drive. This design is to allow the SSD drive to put in a notebook or desktop computer in place of a hard drive. To do this, it needs to have the standard dimension as a 1.8, 2.5 or 3.5-inch hard drive. It also will use either the ATA or SATA drive interfaces so that there is a compatible interface. 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. The power usage is a key role for the use of solid state drives in portable computers. Because there is no power draw for the motors, the drive uses far less energy than the regular hard drive. Now, the industry has taken steps to address this with drive spin downs and the development of hybrid hard drives, but both of these still use more power. The solid state drive will consistently draw less power then the traditional and hybrid hard drive. Faster data access will make a number of people happy. Since the drive doesn't have to spin up the drive platter or move drive heads, the data can be read from the drive near instantly. In a recent demo of two similar equipped notebook computers, Fujitsu was able to demonstrate a roughly 20% speed increase in the booting of Windows XP on a SSD over a standard hard drive. Reliability is also a key factor for portable drives. Hard drive platters are very fragile and sensitive materials. Even small jarring movements from an impact can cause the drive to be completely unreadable. Since the SSD stores all its data in memory chips, there are fewer moving parts to be damaged in any sort of impact.

So this is what it is called. I was thinking with the price of flash drives dropping and getting bigger in capacity I thought they would replace the conventional hard disk eventually. I did some searching and flash drive is one type of SSD (NAND flash non-volatile memory) slower than the DRAM volatile memory but faster than a conventional hard disk. Our CPU's for sure will be smaller in size in the future. Thanks for sharing Parthajena.