SSDs: Tomorrow’s Storage Today

In the future, SSDs will become the dominant storage media within computers and will last for many years. Already, companies are starting to integrate the drives into their computer models, especially in business and gaming PCs. The current dominant technology is Hard Disk Drive, or HDD. These drives are not only dominant in seek times but also in many aspects such as longer lifetime, lower heat production, and more. SSDs have dropped in price over the past year and will continue to become lower and lower in price. In addition, these drives will become more and more popular as people start to upgrade and more companies start to integrate them into their computer designs.

The Technology

Flash storage technology is becoming more and more popular in the coming years. Flash drives, camera and cell phone memory cards, and more are becoming more and more economical to make. The latest advancement in this technology is the Solid State Disk, or SSD.  Though the flash technology is becoming more and more popular, few users actually know how it works. Flash is a technology based off of transistor silicon memory. This can store information permanently by trapping electrons into transistors called floating-gate transistors. These cells are usually regulated for even usage to keep even wear within the storage media. There are two types of this technology called NOR and NAND. These SSDs use the more advanced NAND technology. NAND represents non-volatile flash.
Some advantages to this new technology include no spin-up, faster read, write and access times, lower weight and size, and easily determined performance. Another advantage is that SSDs do not have any mechanical parts which allows for lower power consumption and heat production, absolutely no noise, better reliability, and endurance of extreme shock, altitude, vibration, and temperatures.

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