what is Solid State Drive (SSD) ?

Buying a new modern laptop for our personal and professional work can sometimes be a menace and could freak you out owing to the fact that the choices are ever increasing and diversifying. Gone are the days when only thing an average buyer looked for was the processor and the size of RAM one gets with a new laptop. I forgot to mention many of us even considered Hard Drive capacity too. But now if you look at options available, you will realize that many of them now come equipped with a Solid State Drive or simply SSD. 

This form of computer storage has been on the market for some time but only recently has been embraced by the industry and consumers as a viable alternative to traditional hard drives. But why SSD’s? How does it fair when compared with traditional HDD?

Solid State as the name suggests, are the storage devices made entirely out of semiconductors. It has no movable parts unlike traditional HDD in which one or more rigid rotating disks arranged with a moving actuator arm performs the functions of read and write. The concept of using Solid State technology in the field of computing is not new, however it is swiftly catching up as far as storage is concerned. The success of flash drives and pendrives as viable option for carrying data is largely due to Solid State technology. But there is difference between the practical applications of flash drives  and SSD’s. Flash drives are meant to be external to the computer systems while SSD’s are meant to be used inside replacing traditional HDD.

SSD                                               HDD

PROS                                                                                                 

Since the SSD has no moving parts, a large number of shortcomings of traditional HDD are overcome. Distinct advantages of using SSD are- Less power consumption_faster data access_data reliability and reduced chances of data loss.

The advantage of using less power consumption directly improves the practicality of using SSD in Laptops, Notebooks or the much hyped Ultrabooks. The concept of ultrabooks and a huge chunk of its success will depend on SSD in the near future. Less power consumption improves feasibility and lighter weights of SSD improves mobility.

Faster data access is possible again because there are no moving parts and data can be read instantly. Data reliability is also a major concern with HDD as they are sensitive and fragile components. Small jerks and impact can make a traditional HDD completely unreadable.

CONS                                                                                                  

Although SSD’s are much talked about owing to the fact that per Gigabyte cost of SSD’s are going down but it is still expensive and costly. Drives are finally reaching the $1 per gigabyte price mark that makes them more feasible for consumer use. Mind you, this is still ten times the cost of a similar hard drive technology so it still has a high cost.

Capacity is also a major concern in SSD. Most of the Laptops equipped with SSD have around 64-256 GB of data which is very less when compared to traditional HDD as they are now easily available with capacities ranging from 500 GB- 2 TB.

Further, life span of a SSD is very less. Number of read/write cycles are fixed but for an average user it still lasts 4-5 years which usually covers lifetime of a computer. 

 T2C advice:

Those who are reluctant to buy their new computers with traditional technology may wait for a year as the SSD market is hot and dynamic nowadays. Prices of SSD will surely come down by mid-2013.