What is a Solid state drive ?

The term Solid State Drive is used to describe a storage instrument that uses solid state memory to store data permanently. Solid States Drives generally use NAND Flash Memory, however some Solid State Drives use SRAM or DRAM are also known as Ram Drives.

Benefits of a Solid State Drive over conventional spinning Hard Drive

Solid State Drives have no moving parts, this gives them a myriad of advantages over traditional, disk based, hard drives:

• faster start up of Solid State Drive
• faster access
• faster application launch time
• more energy efficient
• more reliable
• more robust under extreme conditions
• lighter

Why do Traditional Hard Drives Still Exist when we could use a Solid State Drive?

Given all the advantages that a Solid State Drive has over traditional hard discs, it maybe surprising that mechanical hard drives are still used at all. The main reason for this is the price of Flash Memory. NAND Flash prices are far higher per gigabyte than that of traditional hard drives. However, the price of Flash Memory has been falling consistently in recent times leading to much cheaper Solid State Drives. Apart from price another obstacle to the of emergence Solid State Drives over traditional hard drives has been capacity, although capacity is far lower than traditional hard drives, the capacity of Solid State Drives has been growing exponentially in recent years leading to the emergence of relatively low priced high capacity Solid State Drives. Typical capacities of solid state drives are currently 32Gb, 64GB and 128GB. By the end of 2009 it is expected that Solid State Drives of over a terra-byte will available to every day home users - albeit at a premium price. With such large Solid State Drives coming into existence, the traditional mechanical hard drive has some stiff competition in many niche markets.

What Technologies Currently Use a Solid State Drive?

Many Laptops and tablet PCs now contain Solid State Drive, for instance the Apple Macbook Air contains an 80GB Solid State Drive.

The History of Solid State Drives

The First Solid State Drive was developed in 1978 by StorageTek. By the Mid 1980s Santa Clara Systems had produced BatRam, which consisted of 1mb DIP Ram Chips, a controller that emulated a hard disk and a rechargeable battery that preserved the state of the chips when the drive was unpowered. These early versions of Solid State Drives would, of course, be virtually unrecognisable to the solid state drives you see today.