PC General - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 13:52 - 0 Comments

Benefits of a solid state hard drive

Benefits Of Using Solid State Drive Technology

Before we go very far into this, we need to understand that SSD Technology is not the same thing as the typical flash drive.  A typical SSD drive is the same size and shape as a hard drive, they even fit the hard drive bays, and connect through conventional cabling.  Other than using flash memory for data storage, there’s not that a USB-style drive and an SSD drive have in common.

A Solid State Drive, as noted, compares better against a hard drive, and beats them without a fight in many ways.  Hard drives have a lot of moving parts, and that relates to heat being generated.  The very definition of an SSD drive indicates that it has fewer parts.  A hard drive has to seek information on a circular disk, while the SSD uses what equates to direct memory access.  They also use much less power than a conventional hard drive.  The benefits are numerous.

There are two drawbacks, and both of them are prohibitive.  The first is cost, because a typical SSD costs almost as much as the system it is installed in.  But as chip technologies improve, the cost is dropping quickly, so this will improve in the future.  The second problem is that disk size is only beginning to be compatible with haard drives in the 200GB range.  Until recently, the upper storage limit was only 64GB, but BiTMICRO is touting a new 1.6 Terabyte drive in mid-2008.  Being able to break the storage capacity barrier would definitely poise SSD to be the dominant player in the market.

Article written by MyComputerAid.com