What is SSD?

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http://live.pirillo.com/ - N52 wants to know what SSD is, if it'll be the future of storage, and the advantages and disadvantages of this technology.

The term SSD means "Solid State Disk" and it's just that: solid. There are no moving parts whatsoever in a solid state device. Its main advantage is just that: no moving parts.

Since there are no moving parts, it means the device will consume less power (great for laptops) and be less susceptible to failure (there is no mechanical failure). Also, since there are no platters to spin up access to data is much faster.

SSD is the future, no doubt about it, but it does have some hurdles to overcome before it can ever replace disk drives on the desktop.

• SSD costs a lot more per Gigabyte than conventional disk drives
• These devices fail after a significantly lower number of writes than traditional drives.
• Storage is significantly lower on these devices than the 1TB behemoths we have on the desktop nowadays.

What does all of this mean? You're going to see SSD creep into your machines slowly: they're not going to dramatically take over the desktop in one fell swoop. Take Microsoft's ReadyDrive as a first step in this direction: it's a laptop drive that uses 128MB of flash to significantly reduce the amount of power a laptop uses to access data on a hard drive.

In the next decade we'll probably see SSD move toward the desktop. Eventually, when the technology becomes cheap enough, we'll probably see SSD overtake the antiquated hard drive.

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