Today's Solid State Disks and Attributes of Solid State Drives

The technologies are changing day by day. Normally solid-state technology used in thumb drives or pen drives having low memory capacity for an instance use. Nowadays storage companies are concentrating more in that area, why we don’t use this SSD as a hard disk of a computer?

Solid State Drives or Solid State Disks are mainly represented by a short name SSD. SSD is a data storage device that uses Solid State memory to store data. It offers greater reliability and faster performance than traditional magnetic hard disks

The term used here Solid State represents the use of semi conductors as a storage device rather than magnetic and optical devices. 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 uses the same type of non-volatile memory. 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.

The outside look of an SSD is same as like a magnetic hard disk what we are currently using it now. The design of that SSD is to compatible for all computers and notebooks. 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 Disk Attributes:

Very low latency storage device

SSD is having very low latency compared to teh magnetic hard disk.

Superior Reliability

The continuous motion generated by moving parts of magnetic hard disks creates heat, which is a leading factor in hard drive failure. SSD does not have moving parts; heat dissipation and noise are reduced or eliminated, resulting in a very rugged and reliable offering compared to a mechanical hard drive.

Increased power efficiency

With no moving parts, SSDs require less power, improving battery-operating time in notebook PCs and portable electronic devices.

High data transfer rate

The latest SSDs offers a host data transfer rate of up to 3Gb/s.

Quiet Acoustics

With no spinning parts, SSDs provide for silent operation, rather than the constant, noisy humming of a mechanical hard drive.

Lightweight

Enjoy increased mobility with a lighter-weight SSD, which weighs less than a traditional mechanical disks.

Why can't SSD will be a Main HDD of PC:

By looking at the trend of annual improvement in the number of Megabytes purchasable per dollar for both hard disk and flash memory storage over the last two years, we can come to conclusion like Flash storage will cheaper than the magnetic hard disk storage in next 11 years.

Right now one dollar buys about 130 times more hard disk space than flash memory. In almost every year, a dollar buys more space than a last year. This improvement for hard disks in the last two years was measured at 44% per annum. The annualized improvement for flash storage over the same period was measured at 118%. By simply extrapolating these figures into the future until the megabytes per dollar figure for flash beats that of hard disks in just 11 years time.

Now concern about cost is no matter with in few years. There is a common misconception that because flash has (only) somewhere between 100,000 to 1,000,000 write cycles per block. A simple comparison with a hard disk of today shows this misconception to be just that. Taking a the example of a flash drive of 200GB with a write speed of 40 Megabytes per second and doing some basic calculations shows that it could be written to continuously for just over 15 years before every block passed the 100 000 write mark. The equivalent of today’s 200GB drive some 15 years ago was the 210MB disk. There is no machine running today with 210MB hard drives. Somebody will observe that it is possible to wear out an individual block much more quickly than 15 years with normal use, as they know work is not evenly distributed across the whole disk. Some parts will contain intensive use files like the swap space that achieve high rates of use. The solution to this problem, wear-leveling algorithms, that already exists. So surely flash occupies our PC and Notebooks very soon.

In this trend, some improvements flash needs to occur. To reduce the size of the disk and increase the capacity within that size, to have interface with all like SATA, SCSI and FC not only USB and companies come forward to develop internal flash based hard disks rather than external flash hard disks. Now palm size memory devices like mobile phone, ipod, Music players are all having SSD only. So very soon SSD fill our hard disk market.