Solid State Drives

Without physical limitations ?

Solid state drives are storage devices used for storage of persistent data using solid state technology. After the hard drive (hard disk era) the physical problems limitations of rotating parts of conventional drive it’s time from a new era in data storage.
The solution is called SSD (Solid State Drives) and it uses no moving parts in storage technology. A classic hard disk it uses rotating disks and electromagnetic technology for data storage. A conventional hard disk is susceptible to damage at a shock because the moving parts are very sensible. Instead electromagnetic technology, the Solid State Drives (SSD) uses microchips for data storage. The advantage is more visible because the SSD drives are not very sensible at the mechanical shocks and the writing / reading / access speed is better than in the hard disks.

The technology behind

However, the connection interface is the same like in the case of the classic hard drives (SATA etc.) and these devices are able to replace the existing storage technologies. The SSD’s can be used as internal or external hard drives. Nowadays most Solid State Drives uses NAND based flash memory (called RAM in some situations), able to store the information when the power disappear. This is very interesting information because SSD devices can be used in mobile gadgets. In the same time, the device is able to keep the information in the memory when is disconnected. The most Solid State Drives are using RAM memory (Random Access Memory) and this is a real advantage if you compare a classic hard drive with a SSD device.

Hybrid hard drives

However, on the market you can find hybrid devices too. These hard disks use the both technologies in the same time. However, we recommend you to use the 100% technology hard disks: the classic solution (spinning hard drive) or the SSD solution instead the hybrid technology.

The price of SSD technology

Because it’s relatively new, the Solid State Drives are still not very cheap. However, the accentuate developing of these new storage solutions will replace in short time the classic hard drives because the advantage is very visible. The capacity of SSD is very lower comparing with the classic hard disks. The Solid State Drives are not always in advantage. For example at a SSD vs. hard drive disk comparison you can see that the first solution is not always a good solution. The security of SSD is not very powerful, the defragmentation is not able to offer the best performance so on…