What is a Solid State Drive (SSD)?

If you are looking at a modern laptop, you will likely see some that come equipped with a solid state drive. 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. So, what exactly is a solid state drive (SSD) and how does it compared to a traditional hard drive?

What is a Solid State Drive?

Solid state is term that refers to electronic circuitry that is built entirely out of semiconductors. The term was originally used to define those electronics such as a transistor radio that used semiconductors rather than vacuum tubes in its construction. Most all electronics that we have today are built around semiconductors and chips. In terms of a SSD, it refers to the fact that the primary storage medium is through semiconductors rather than a magnetic media such as a hard drive.

Now, you might say that this type of storage already exists in the form of flash memory drives that plug into the USB port. This is partially true as solid state drives and USB flash drives both use the same type of non-volatile memory chips that retain their information even when they have no power. The difference is in the form factor and capacity of the drives. While a flash drive is designed to be external to the computer system, an SSD is designed to reside inside the computer in place of a more traditional hard drive.

So how exactly do they do this? Well, an SSD on the outside looks almost no different than a traditional hard drive. This design is to allow the SSD drive to put in a notebook or desktop computer in place of a hard drive. To do this, it needs to have the standard dimension as a 1.8, 2.5 or 3.5-inch hard drive. It also uses the common SATA interface so that it can easily be placed into any PC as a hard drive would.

Why Use a Solid State Drive?

Solid state drives have several advantages over the magnetic hard drives. The majority of this comes from the fact that the drive does not have any moving parts. While a traditional drive has drive motors to spin up the magnetic platters and the drive heads, all the storage on a solid state drive is handled by flash memory chips. This provides three distinct advantages:

• Less Power Usage
• Faster Data Access
• Higher Reliability

The power usage is a key role for the use of solid state drives in portable computers. Because there is no power draw for the motors, the drive uses far less energy than the regular hard drive. Now, the industry has taken steps to address this with drives spinning down and the development of hybrid hard drives, but both of these still use more power. The solid state drive will consistently draw less power then the traditional and hybrid hard drive.

Faster data access will make a number of people happy. Since the drive does not have to spin up the drive platter or move drive heads, the data can be read from the drive near instantly. Hybrid hard drives do tend to mitigate the speed aspect when it comes to frequently used drives. Similarly, Intel's newSmart Response Technology is a similar method of caching on a small solid state drive to produce similar results.

Reliability is also a key factor for portable drives. Hard drive platters are very fragile and sensitive materials. Even small jarring movements from an impact can cause the drive to be completely unreadable. Since the SSD stores all its data in memory chips, there are fewer moving parts to be damaged in any sort of impact. While mechanically SSD drives are better, they do have a limited life span. This comes from a fixed number of write cycles that can be done on a drive before the cells become unusable. For most consumers however, the write cycle limits tend to still allow the drives to last roughly five years or more which is longer than the average computer system.

Why Aren't SSDs Used For All PCs?

As with most computer technologies, the primary limiting factor of using the solid state drives in notebook and desktop computers is cost. These drives have actually been available for some time now and have come down dramatically in price. Drives are finally reaching below 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 factor in the adoption of solid state drives. The average notebook computer equipped with a SSD will have around 128 to 256GB of storage. This is roughly equivalent to what laptops of several years ago came equipped with. Today, most laptops feature 500GB or more of storage with a hard drive. Desktop systems have an even greater disparity between SSD and hard drives as the average desktop comes with 1TB or more of storage.

Even with the huge difference in capacity, many people are finding that most computers have far more storage capacity than they typically have. Only a large collection of raw digital photo files and high definition video files will likely fill up hard drives quickly. As a result, solid state drives will generally offer a sufficient level of storage for most laptop computers. Additionally, high performance external options thanks to USB 3.0, eSATA and even Thunderbolt make adding extra storage space with an external hard drive quick and easy for non-essential files.