Solid State Drives.

A Solid State Drive is comparable to and will work with a conventional hard drive that consists platten and magnets. The difference is that the storage medium is a Solid State Semiconductor as opposed to being magnetic. Unlike the conventional hard drive, the Solid State Drive (SSD) doesn’t have any moving parts. The Solid State Drive stores data like a USB thumb drive does, i.e., electronically. This means that retrieving the data is much faster than a on a conventional disk drive, because it doesn’t rely on a read/write interface head synchronising with a rotating disk. Solid sate drives are much more resistant to vibration, shock and can tolerate temperature variations both cold and hot temperatures.

Because an SSD has its own CPU (processor) to manage the data storage, it can work much faster than a conventional hard drive that requires spin up time, seek time etc. An SSD produces the highest possible input/ouput (I/O) rates making them much more efficient especially in time critical applications. This can be vastly improves Servers with databases, swap files, libraries, etc. Therein lies the benefit of using an SSD, i.e., speed. The usual access time for a Flash based SSD is about 35 - 100 micro-seconds, whereas for a rotating hard disk drive it is around 5,000 - 10,000 micro-seconds. Simply put the access time of an SSD close to 100 times faster, which is really significant.

The biggest downside of the SSD option is the price, when the volume of space required by current software is taken into consideration the SSD option is much more expensive than conventional hard drive option. However the SSD will utilise the space it has much more efficiently.

Hard drive failure is not uncommon in computers, those who work in the field can attest to that. Backing up is crucial in order to protect your critical data, that is why operating systems such as Apple’s OSX and Microsoft’s Windows 7 have a back facility built in, to help protect your data. The main reason for hard drive failure is wear and tear, conventional hard drives have moving parts that eventually wear out through deterioration. Conventional hard drives have magnetic disks (platters) that constantly spin with mechanical arms that read across them, understandably these will wear out eventually. The SSD does not have any moving parts and therefore has greater endurance. An SSD is flash based, so it works like a memory chip or a thumb drive, nothing moving at all. Some manufacturers even use a balancing algorithm to number of times each particular disk block has been written in order to optimise the life of the drive. The very architecture of the SSD optimises their lifespan and capabilities. The lack of moving parts, high vibration & temperature variation tolerance makes the SSD much more reliable, especially for mobile and rough applications such as in the military.

Solid state drives consume much less power than traditional hard disk drives, because extra power is required to activate the platters or the mechanical arms as in the case with conventional hard disk drives. The power consumption of the SSD is only a fraction of that of a hard disk drive. The same is true for the heat factor, solid state drive do not heat up like conventional hard disk drives because there are no moving parts.

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