IT (Intimidating Technology)

Solid State Drives (SSDs) offer several advantages over traditional hard disks, being lighter, quieter, less power-hungry and more robust because they contain no moving parts. Most of all, solid state drives are FAST. That is VERY FAST. Why is this?

Today's hard drives are advanced and theirin lies the problem. They are complex and can (as we all know) go wrong. This is because they use old electromechanical and magnetic technology. Inside a hard drive a disk (or plate) spins round by a servo motor and data is read from the magnetic tracks on the disk by a head. Sound familiar? Yes, this is how the almost extinct floppy drives of yesteryear worked.

Over time, the capacity of hard drives has increased (120 - 300Gb is standard and 500Gb - 1Tb is not uncommon now). At the same time, the rate at which data can be transferred to and from the drives has increased. After many years of slow advances with parallel ATA, data can now can be read from disks extremely quickly using the serial (SATA) standard(s). These higher transfer rates make is easier and quicker to load large files such as audio or video. But they are still not great for work such as editing or for running lots of applications at the same time on your computer (multitasking). This is because the read head has to be continuously repositioned to read data from different areas of the hard drive and moving between these can take a long time (in computer terms). Lost? Read on...

To put this in perspective, your computer (the microprocessor) only has to wait for a few microseconds (= millionths of a second) to read data from your memory (the RAM). To read some data from the hard drive typically takes milliseconds (= thousandths of a second) because a motor has to spin a physical disk round to get to the location where it can read data from the disk. The "seek time" is one technical term that relates to this delay, which is caused my the intertia of moving around mechanical parts (as opposed to "solid state" meaning nothing moves). SCSI drives used in servers and multimedia machines have been faster for some time, one reason for this is that they have a faster interface with the computer but the other reason is that they are designed to spin round faster than old IDE drives. That's why a 7,200 rpm drive beats a 5,400 rpm drive - it finds the data you want more quickly.

Finally! I hear you moan. Solid State Drive(SSD). Well, you could just call them "giant memorysticks". I have been waiting for decades (I know, it's pathetic) for these drives because I'm fed up waiting around for 1000 times longer than I have to and I am fed up of the death rattle from a dying electro-mechanical hard drive. Whilst it is not pointless spending your hard earned cash on DDR memory, dual core processors and the rest in an effort to increase performance - you are "wasting away" the dynamic performance of the system by plugging the kit into a "chug-chug" electro-mechanical drive!

This makes them an ideal upgrade for notebook manufacturers, but until recently they have been prohibitively expensive.

In the meanwhile, Dell are offering solid state drives with laptops. For example, you can get a 32Gb SSD drive to plug straight into you current laptop for