Your next drive will be solid
Solid state drives (SSD) are the next big thing in technology. The only question is how long it will be before they become the dominant form of disk drives.
In the early days of PCs storage was limited, unreliable and very expensive. In the 1980s hard disks that could store just a few megabytes of data would set you back thousands of rands. Walk into a PC shop today and you can easily walk out with a 500 gigabyte external drive for well under R1 000. Or even a 1TB drive for just over R1 000.
And while ever-increasing storage capacities for very little money are good news storage junkies, the face of disk drives are about to change, thanks to the growth in solid state drives, or SSDs.
SSD
In theory SSDs are almost the same as USB flash drives, just faster and with the potential to store a lot more data. Which is why they are very likely to become the disk drives of the future.
SSDs have a number of advantages over traditional mechanical drives. One of those reasons is that they are not mechanical. They don’t have mechanical parts that wear out over time as traditional drives do. And they are already quicker than traditional drives which have to spin their disks at thousands of revolutions per second to stay in the game.
The other advantage of SSDs is that they, typically, consume less power than mechanical drives and run lot cooler. Spinning disks at thousands of RPMs consumes significant power and generates a lot of heat. And as PC makers look to stretch out battery life and claim green points for being energy efficient, mechanical drives are starting to look decidedly unattractive.
Disadvantages
SSDs do have disadvantages, however. For a start they are still only available in, relatively, limited capacities and are still expensive. And storage is about capacity. So no matter how cool it runs, a netbook with a 4GB drive looks ridiculous when users have more than that in email alone to store.
SSDs are also still expensive. Intel, for example, released an 80GB SSD for less than US$600 (close on R6 000 at today’s exchange rate) this past month. Compare that with a 500GB external mechanical drive for less than R1 000 and SSD doesn’t look all that attractive.
But the good news is that SSD capacities are increasing rapidly. Just a short while ago a 4GB SSD was considered to be on the bleeding edge. This year alone the industry has seen significant capacity increases, with the likes of Intel launching its 80GB X-25M drive and Samsung releasing a 256GB drive that is less than 10mm thick. Or consider BitMicro Networks, which already has a number of drives available at more than 1 terabyte in size and is already planning a 1.6TB drive.
With capacities like that coming down the line, we can expect to start seeing solid state drives appearing in standard PCs and laptops as the default in the coming year.
Netbooks will undoubtedly be the first line of PCs that will benefit from SSDs as makers trim down own battery usage. But expect SSDs to be an option in your next desktop PC, and then on servers where power consumption, high speeds and reliability are all the more important.
Solid State Hard Drive discussion
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