Solid state tops in 2009
Aside from netbooks the other big hardware trend of 2008 was the emergence of solid state drives (SSDs) as mainstream. Although SSDs have been around for many years the rapidly increasing capacities over the past year has made them viable alternatives as traditional hard drive replacements.
This was particularly the case for the growing netbook market where SSDs offered reliable, fast storage for very little cost while keeping power consumption down.
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 a lot cooler. And with mobile devices the order of the day for 2009, SSDs are primed for large uptake.
SSDs do have disadvantages, however. For a start they are still only available in, relatively, limited capacities and are still expensive. Intel, for example, released an 80GB SSD for less than US$600 (around R6 000 at today’s exchange rate) in the final quarter of 2008. 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.
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