Assignment 4 – Technology Article

I chose to do my subject on SSD drives or Solid State Drives.

Solid State Drives are These are a fairly new idea, or at least newer to the consumer market in the ability to use them in your personal computer. SSD’s are a new type of hard drive for your computer, or according to Wikipedia are…

A solid-state drive (SSD) or an electronic disk is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. SSDs are distinguished from traditional magnetic disks such as hard disk drives (HDDs) or floppy disk, which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads. In contrast, SSDs use microchips which retain data in non-volatile memory chips^[1] and contain no moving parts.^[1] Compared to electromechanical HDDs, SSDs are typically less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, have lower access time and latency, but are more expensive per gigabyte (GB) and typically support a limited number of writes over the life of the device. SSDs use the same interface as hard disk drives, thus easily replacing them in most applications.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive)

Considering SSD’s are such a newer technology to the consumer market, you can assume that, of course, they will be more expensive in comparison to older style HDD’s. Average pricing for SSD’s, or at least quality SSD’s, will range from cheapest (and slowest) SSD’s costing 2.5$ per GB, the fastest consumer HDDs cost less than 20 cents a GB, while standard versions cost < 10cents/GB). This is an insanely high price for most users. Because of this, you can gather that SSD’s are very mainstream quite yet, but are expected to reach or more standard and mainstream price-point in 2012.

For a real and genuine comparison between SSD’s and HDD’s I’ve attached a youtube video below which includes; weight measurements, boot-up times, read speeds, shutdown times and vibration testing.