SSDs — short for “solid state drives” — are the future of storage. And they’re available now, in capacities that are sufficient and at prices that are within reach.
So what’s stopping their widespread adoption? The main problem is that their price relative to standard magnetic platter hard drives is still high.
But another stumbling block is that many computer users are simply unfamiliar with the technology and unsure about how the drives fit in to their current computing needs. Read on for some answers.
Q: How do SSDs work? Are they a direct replacement for hard drives?
Instead of the spinning magnetic platters found in traditional hard drives, SSDs contain a type of nonvolatile flash memory. Unlike traditional computer memory, this flash memory does not lose its contents when the power is turned off. Hence is can be used to store large amounts of data, just like a standard hard disk.
A: The challenges in creating a solid state drive that could compete with conventional spinning platter disks have been creating units with enough capacity at a price point that consumers found attractive. SSD makers are moving ever closer to being competitive with the Seagates and Western Digitals of the world on both fronts.
And there are several reasons for consumers to be excited about this development. First of all, hard drive speed has long been the primary bottleneck in modern computers. CPU speed, memory speed, and the power of your graphics card could only go so far when the entire system had to wait for data to be read from standard hard drives.
SSDs significantly outpace the data reading and writing abilities of the hard drives we’ve been using for years. Add to that the fact that SSDs are sturdier, use less power and generate less heat, and you have a storage solution that can match the prowess of today’s high-end computers. Those who have adopted SSDs typically report significantly faster boot times, application load times and file read and write scores.
And yes, SSDs are a direct drop-in replacement for today’s traditional hard drives in the sense that most modern computers will recognize them as standard hard drives.
Q: I’ve heard that SSDs wear out if a lot of data is written to them. Is this true? What is their life expectancy?
A: The original SSDs were said to be susceptible to uneven wear — or premature failure — if programs such as disk defragmenters were run on them repeatedly over a significant period of time.
Most of the current generation of SSD drives, however, employ some type of write balance or “wear leveling,” as Intel calls it, which ensures that data writing is spread relatively evenly over the NAND chips that are inside of SSDs.
With wear leveling, the life expectancy of today’s SSDs is truly remarkable. It’s not uncommon to see MTBF (minimum time before failure) ratings of 1,000,000 hours for current SSDs. That’s over 114 years. That’s on a par with the MTBF ratings of traditional spinning platter hard drives.
But because there are no moving parts in a solid state drive — no motor to wear out, no read/write head to crash into internal platters — one could justifiably expect SSDs to in fact come close to actually living up to those life expectancy ratings. Anyone who has lived for a significant period of time with traditional hard drives knows that they do die, and their death can be hastened by shocks, overheating or improper handling. If an SSD is going to fail due to some mechanical flaw, the issue will probably surface early on in the service of the drive.
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