Solid State Drives (SSD) are the next stage in data storage evolution.   The arrival of SSD in PC’s  and Servers has been mooted as the next big thing for the last 3-4 years.   Finally this looks to have become a reality with SSD appearing in a number of laptops.

SSD are aimed at replacing traditional hard drives.  Current hard drives are, along with cooling fans, the only mechanical components left in most new computers. Physics places constraints on traditional hard drives.  The amount of data capacity, speed of transfer and size are all restricted.  Being mechanical they are also more sensitive to impacts and more inclined to fail.

Hard drives are to a certain extent a very sophisticated floppy disk.  Basically it’s a bunch of floppy disks stacked on top of each other and housed inside a sealed chamber.  The mechanical tolerances are so fine that a particle of smoke can get trapped between the reading head and the disk.  A SSD drive is more like a flash or thumb drive.  It’s a purely electronic device. 

Because SSD drives do away with the moving parts found in hard drives, it’s no surprise that they are appearing in laptops.  Laptops are portable and are more inclined to hard drive failure resulting from impact.  

The concept of SSD has been around for a long time.  They have taken a while to get into the consumer market because of cost.  Developments in the last couple of years have brought the cost down.  However a SSD laptop will currently cost twice that of a standard (traditonal) laptop.   It’s also possible that some cheaper SSD devices may lack features of more expensive ones, features that protect data and extend the SSD life.

Windows 7 understands SSD disks and will write to them in a random manner.  That overcomes one SSD issue - some types of SSD memory can only support a given number of read/write cycles before failing.   So unlike traditional hard disks you want to spread the data around.  Data reads are much faster than on hard disks, but some SSD may have much slower write speeds.

SSD is still new to the market.  So we expect to see a lot of changes and adaptations appear in them over the next year or two.  However there is no doubt that they will continue to become more common.  The reason is simple.  One of Kinetics clients recently put a SSD drive into an old XP machine.   He reported that the boot time went from “unbearably long” down to 20 seconds.  That sort of performance boost will drive SSD into more and more devices.