Solid State Drive

Solid State Drive (SSD) is a data storage device used to store large volumes of data. SSD has recently started being used in high-end laptops and desktops. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is a very popular and traditional mechanism to store large volume of data in a cost efficient manner and currently being used in most of the laptops and desktops as our traditional storage device.

SSD is technically different from HDD

• SSD uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently, while HDD uses magnetic disk and read-write head to store data.
• SSD contains no moving component unlike HDD which contains spinning disks and movable read/write heads.

Advantages of SSD over HDD

SSD is known for high performance storage device, as it provides lot of advantages over HDD; some of these are:

• More resistant to physical shock and vibration: Since SSDs contain no moving component, so it is more resistant to physical shock unlike with HDDs wherein a physical shock may damage the surface of the spinning disk and cause bad sectors and loss of data.
• Less noisy: SSDs have no moving parts and therefore are basically silent while rotational speed of disks inside HDDs range from 4200 to 15000 rpm; so they are noisy.
• Less power consumption: High performance flash-based SSDs generally require a half to a third of the power of HDDs.
• Lower access time: As data can be retrieved directly from various locations of the flash memory, SSDs require less access time and due to the need to move the heads and wait for the data to rotate under the read/write head, HDD is relatively slower.
• Less latency: Low in SSD because the data can be read directly from any location but unlike in HDD location of the data on the disk and the location of the read-head make a difference, hence read time is different for every different seek.

Even SSDs are having all the above advantages but as of now, they also have some limitations such as Storage capacity is less (max 2 TB) compared to HDD (max 8TB) and SSDs are more expensive per unit of storage than HDDs.

Compatibility

SSD technology uses electronic interfaces compatible with traditional block input/output (I/O) hard disk drives, thus permitting simple replacement in common applications and most of the system will accept SSD as its primary storage device without any major changes.

Future

Recently SanDisk has announced the release of 4TB SSD and is hoping to release 8TB next year. The price of solid-state drives (SSDs) have fallen dramatically over the past year and a half, but compared to regular spinning hard drives the cost of the storage remains about nine-times the price per gigabyte. Over time storage capacity is increasing and cost is also decreasing. Innovations will continue and as day-by-day new technologies are replacing old ones, I believe very soon SSD will totally replace HDD.

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